What Makes American Music American

The history of American music is the history of America itself.

Its sounds are slave songs, the feet of soldiers marching to war, the rolling of wagon wheels across the prairie, and the clanging of railroad spikes.

It harmonizes the joy, pain, bloodshed and hope of a country around a gumbo of cultures. It's John Phillip Souza, Louis Armstrong, Aaron Copeland and Elvis Presley.

We have embraced certain songs and musics as American , but is there an American sound, and what makes American Music... American?

Guests:

Matt Glazer, Chair of the strings department at Berklee College of Music

Charles Shadle, Classical composer and Lecturer of Music at MIT.