Pianist Lara Downes describes her artistic journey as one of discovery and inclusion, of widening our view of classical music to reveal connections between people and genres and history. “I do find this sense of recognition when you express that in a musical form. Music is a very powerful tool to let people coexist,” she says.
Downes wants her projects to bring these powerful cultural connections to light so that they become real and active. And that idea is very much the impetus behind her Nov. 23 concert for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, part of the ensemble’s Current series. Downes, the orchestra’s inaugural creative partner, has titled the performance “Routes,” and fittingly, the venue is the Autry Museum of the American West.
As Downes tells it, the concert is a journey through American music, conveying “the energy that happens because of migrations and road trips and just a sense of curiosity that is part of the American condition — that’s probably the best part of it.”
Her starting point for the program was Aaron Copland’s ballet score Billy the Kid, which famously draws from cowboy songs that the composer researched at the Library of Congress. Investigating that drew her unexpectedly to her co-star for this concert, Dom Flemons, “The American Songster,” whose research shows that some of those songs, like “Git Along Little Dogies” and “Old Chisholm Trail,” came from Black cowboys. Flemons has recorded the fruits of his research on two albums, Black Cowboys (2018) and Traveling Wildfire (2023), both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.
Grateful for that discovery, Downes says that “this is an example of how we’re all in our little spaces doing our work and then you realize that someone else’s work is touching your work. And that feels really good, so you want to build something together.”
That overlap has inspired some of the program, Downes explains. “We’re doing this back-and-forth thing between Dom and me where [for example] I’ll play a treatment of an old American folk song by Roy Harris and then Dom plays his version of that. I keep saying this over and over, but it’s always true — I just want to show the places where all this stuff connects.”
The concert also explores the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the Southern U.S. and into Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. The program opens with a short piece by William Grant Still and another by the recently rediscovered composer and pianist Margaret Bonds, who spent much of her life and career in Los Angeles.
Carlos Simon’s Warmth From Other Suns, titled after author Isabel Wilkerson’s comprehensive history of the Great Migration, is set to feature a string quartet of LACO musicians. And then there’s John Adams’s Road Movies, which showcases the American mixing of musical streams with its evocation of 1930s swing. As Downes points out, without the Great Migration, swing would not have been a thing.
The pianist is highly complimentary of LACO for creating the Current series. “There’s a really strong creative energy in that team and a genuine desire to stretch, to do what they always have done beautifully and do more and grow audiences and bring people together. I’m enjoying this collaboration.”
If it seems like “Routes” was made for the current moment, Downes assures us this was not intentional, except in the larger sense of responding to the divisions of the past decade. “It’s the current that you find yourself in. Musicians do respond to the time they live in, whether they know it or not. When I put this program together, was I thinking about the fact that it was going to be a couple of weeks after the election? No. It’s just how you feel, and so you choose to express that in the musical terms that feel right. It’s a strange thing to live.”
