One Hundred and Eighty Years of Waiting. Now History Has Been Made.

On Dudamel, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, and the music that was always already American

The New York Times ran a piece last week about Gustavo Dudamel and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra sharing a stage at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights. People danced. The Lincoln Center crowd clapped to salsa rhythms. Two orchestras that had never met — one 184 years old, one 25 — drew their figure together in the air and let it land. It was, the paper noted, just about time.

I would go further. It was overdue by roughly a century and a half.

At the end of my film Life and Music on the Age of George Frederick Bristow, I cut to Bad Bunny walking into the frame during the last Super Bowl. That decision raised eyebrows. It generated discussion. Several advocates of the position that American musical identity was forged — fixed, sealed, completed — sometime in the nineteenth century wanted to know what a Puerto Rican artist had to do with a mid-Victorian composer who played violin in the New York Philharmonic and spent his career arguing that American music deserved to be taken seriously on American stages.

Everything, I wanted to say. Everything!

The argument that American musical identity was ever forged is the argument of people who want the story to have ended before they arrived. It did not end. It has not ended. It has never been a monument. It has always been a river — moving, absorbing, changing course, occasionally flooding its banks and redrawing the map entirely.

Bristow understood this, even if he could not have predicted the specific forms it would take. He fought for American composers to be heard at a time when the Philharmonic programmed almost exclusively European repertoire. His quarrel was not with European music. It was with the assumption that American music had nothing to say.

Then came Dvořák.

In Joseph Horowitz's essential Dvořák's Prophecy the argument is clear: Dvořák did not stop at the New World Symphony. He looked at what was already here — African American spirituals, the rhythms and grief and joy carried across the Atlantic in the holds of ships — and said: this is your music. Build from this.

The Philharmonic was not ready to hear it. Neither was most of America. But the prophecy did not expire. It simply waited — through jazz, through Gershwin, through decades of argument about what counted as serious and what did not, about who got to stand at the front of the stage and who was relegated to the pit. Then we have the academics, Lord have mercy on us!

Horowitz understood that this was a dialectical process. You never arrive at American music, there are no cultural docks, just a vast ocean.

Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl is not a rupture in that story. He is a chapter in it — as legitimate as any other, as rooted in the complexity of what this country actually is. The island of Puerto Rico is not foreign to New York. It is, in many ways, New York. Washington Heights knows this. The United Palace Theater, 110 blocks north of Lincoln Center, knows this.

What happened on that stage last week — Dudamel counting in Spanish, the bongos and congas positioned where the violins and cellos usually stand, Rubén Blades singing "Las Calles," Oscar Dudamel on trombone in the audience, two-thirds of the crowd having never attended a Philharmonic concert before — was not a departure from the tradition. It was the tradition finally catching up with the city it lives in.

The Times quoted Patrick Castillo, the Philharmonic's vice president for artistic planning, describing the alliance as an effort to "expand our footprint throughout New York City, to really invite a larger community into what we're doing."

A larger community. Into what we're doing.

Castillo may want to consider — and perhaps he already has — that it works the other way around too. The larger community was not waiting to be invited. It was already there, already making music, already in full possession of the city. If anything, the Philharmonic is the guest in Washington Heights. And the welcome it received was more generous than a hundred and eighty years of absence deserved.

What took so long is the question. Was it not evident? The community was always there. It was always making music. It was always in New York. The Philharmonic simply had not crossed the distance — 110 blocks, a world away in the imagination of Lincoln Center — to listen.

The New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842. Manhattan has always been an island where multiple worlds coexist at very close range, separated by geography and economics and the invisible borders that cities draw and redraw across decades. It took the institution a hundred and eighty years to cross those blocks.

That is not a small thing to have taken so long. But it is a necessary thing to have finally happened.

We continue to mold it. We continue to shape American music at every step. The river does not stop. It never stopped. We just don't always have seats close enough to the water to hear it moving.