By Marilyn Lester***Just ahead of the official start of activities celebrating the 250th founding of The United States of America, Declaration: Songs of Democracy, Voices of Hope led the way with a rousing concert at the Wu Tsai Theater in David Geffen Hall. Although headliner, Kurt Elliing encountered travel snafus and was thus absent, 
the rest of a fulsome and astounding cast delivered a production that made hearts swell with pride and affirmation.
To answer the question, what does it mean to be an American today? pianist, and producer Lara Downes curated a multi-part evening with mostly new material, standards and perhaps most effectively, video interviews she conducted posing the question. These were shown throughout the presentation on 21 large screens of varying sizes. Participants were diverse, mirroring the peoples of our nation in gender, age, ethnicity and so on, making for a stirring testament of a nation founded on the principles of the rights of its peoples—the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that all 
(men) are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Hosted by WQXR’s Terrance McKnight , the evening began with Downes at the piano, kicking off Act One, with “Life” by Valerie Coleman, which flowed from Paul Simon’s “America.” The American Composers Orchestra, under the direction of conductor Eric Jacobsen, performed a suite entitled Liberty by Arturo O’Farrill, composed of several styles of American music and ending with a robust Afro-Cuban segment, a foundational genre of Latin-inflected music with historic roots.
The Declaration Collective of diverse artists, including Ekep Nwelle, Aoife O’Donovan, bassist Christian McBride, singer-songwriter Carrie Rodriguez, bluegrass musician Wyatt Ellis, cabaret performer Migguel Anggelo and bandleader Louis Cato, alongside the Golden Voices Concert Choir from Tuskegee University contributed to the final portion of part one, with an evocative “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” 
written by Dr. Billy Taylor as an instrumental, with lyrics added later by Dick Dallas, and made famous by Nina Simone.
Act Two featured the newly-commissioned work by Christopher Tin, The Pursuit of Happiness, performed by the orchestra. To end the concert, the Declaration Collective was back with American standards, including the yearning and iconic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg) and Leonard Bernstein’s balladic promise of “a place for us” in West Side Story’s “Somewhere,” with lyrics written by the young and brilliant Stephen Sondheim.
Declaration: Songs of Democracy, Voices of Hope, was spurred by the current reality and mood of conflict and chaos, distrust and disillusionment in today’s America—no platform to honor 250 years of freedom. The concert was an antidote and a beacon of hope, a plea to imagine something better as we move forward in what has been called “the American experiment.”
Photos by Lawrence Sumulong
