“I’m trying mainly to be American in the feeling of my music,” George Gershwin explained in 1936, a year before he fell into a fatal coma caused by a brain tumor. Nailing our national sound is tricky: American culture has always been a hodgepodge. Gershwin’s style was a potent elixir of jazz, blues, art song, sacred Hebrew laments, Eastern-European hoedowns and Broadway balladeering. The Great American Songbook was still under construction, still unnamed, and Gershwin, who had no way of knowing it at the time, would be one of its main authors.

Aunque George no empezó a tocar el piano hasta los 12 años, su don era evidente. A mediados de la adolescencia, ganaba $15 a la semana escribiendo canciones en Tin Pan Alley. Tras unos años como pianista de ensayo en Broadway, consiguió un trabajo escribiendo melodías para una editorial musical. En 1919 consiguió su primer gran éxito, "Swanee", con letra de Irving Caesar. En colaboración con Ira, un talentoso letrista, siguió escribiendo una serie de éxitos en Broadway.

After being wowed by the first Carnegie Hall performance of Rhapsody in Blue, the conductor Walter Damrosch commissioned from Gershwin a concerto for piano and orchestra. Gershwin composed the Piano Concerto in F between July 22 and November 10, 1925.

The first thing Gershwin did after accepting Damrosch’s commission was to buy a book about composition. Despite several years of formal training in harmony and orchestration, he wasn’t prepared to wing it. He intended to write a legitimate concerto, consistent with the conventions of sonata form. He did all that and more with his Piano Concerto, a heady cocktail of European classicism and American chutzpah.

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Structurally speaking, Gershwin follows most of the old rules, but his ultra-contemporary sound world would have alarmed Brahms and his circle. Zesty brass and tempestuous percussion dominate the opening moments of the Allegro, and then the soloist conjures up a maelstrom of variations, ranging from delirious to demonic. Here Gershwin lays out most of the musical ideas that will animate the next two movements. A microcosm of the entire concerto, this Allegro contains multitudes.

En el bluesy Adagio, el piano añil y la trompeta silenciada dan paso al hipnótico ajetreo del Andante con moto, que cierra el movimiento central. El Allegro agitato final, una agitada repetición del material temático anterior, aporta un poco de fanfarronería de Broadway a su "grandioso" replanteamiento del tema principal.

The second of Bartók’s three works for the stage, The Wooden Prince is a ballet-pantomime. The Hungarian composer began writing it in 1914, at the suggestion of his fellow countryman, the Jewish film critic, aesthetician, writer and poet Béla Balázs, who later described his friend’s “gloomy and hopeless state of mind” and his incessant talk of “emigration, or of suicide.” Bartók believed that he was being stonewalled by the leadership of the Hungarian Royal Opera, who offered tepid and contradictory excuses for not staging his first opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Although Bartók hadn’t composed in months when Balazs proposed the new project, he felt inspired and energized by the scenario, which he interpreted through an autobiographical lens.

The plot involves a lonely young prince who falls in love at first sight with a princess. After witnessing her playful antics in the forest, he pursues her tirelessly but is thwarted at every turn. A jealous forest fairy marshals the trees of the forest (Dance No. 2) and the waves of the sea (Dance No. 3) to hinder their romance. Over and over, the prince struggles to make the princess notice him, but the fairy ensures that the girl remains oblivious in her high tower.

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, the prince rigs up a stick man—the wooden prince of the title—and adorns it with a lock of his hair, his sword and his crown. At last, the princess takes notice, drops her needlework and rushes outside to meet the intriguing stranger. When the forest fairy animates the prince’s dummy, the princess is instantly smitten. She dances lasciviously with the fake prince while the real one despairs, unnoticed and supplanted. The forest fairy tries to sell him on the pleasures of a solitary life in nature, even promising him a forest kingdom, but he remains glum. When the fairy’s magic wears off and the wooden prince reverts to inanimate object, the princess cuts off all her hair and approaches the human prince as a penitent. He accepts her apology, gazing into her eyes as the curtain falls.

Bartók considered The Wooden Prince not so much a ballet score as “a symphonic poem to be danced to,” a distinction that suggests its potential as an independent concert piece. The puppet proxy that the prince fashions out of a stick “symbolizes the creative work of the artist, who puts all of himself into his work until he has made something complete, shining and perfect. The artist himself, however, is left robbed and poor. I was thinking of that very common and profound tragedy when the creation becomes the rival of the creator, and the pain and glory of the situation in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the picture to the painter.”

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The instrumentation for The Wooden Prince approaches Wagnerian in scope and splendor, the largest orchestra Bartók had thus far deployed, yet somehow, despite its opulence, the score never feels excessive.

Comparisons to the beginnings of Das Rheingold and Also sprach Zarathustra are inevitable, but Bartók’s five-minute Introduction is more than a late-Romantic mash-up. It opens in fertile C major, spinning matter out of nothingness, building order from the cosmic chaos in deliciously attenuated increments. If the music gestures wistfully backward in the direction of Richards Wagner and Strauss, it also peers a century or so into the future, anticipating the Holy Minimalism of Arvo Pärt and the energetic eclecticism of John Zorn. Bartók also pays tribute to Claude Debussy’s La Mer in the silken, shimmering Third Dance (“Dance of the Waves”), which culminates in a monumental sax-fueled climax. Meanwhile, the clattering, lewdly frenetic courtship dance of the princess and wooden prince evokes the Stravinsky of Petrushka and Pulcinella.

But it’s the anonymous influences that mark the score most indelibly. Bartók’s uncanny melodies and springy, syncopated rhythms reflect his decades-long devotion to ethnomusicology. Often accompanied by his friend and colleague Zoltán Kodály, he scoured the Eastern European countryside in search of ancient folk songs and dance, transcribing them on staff paper or recording them on wax cylinders to preserve them indefinitely. Aside from the joy he derived from the source material and his field research, the music yielded new compositional strategies and solutions, new harmonic possibilities.

Bartók also kept the folk tunes alive by adapting and incorporating them in his original music. Throughout the ballet, the princess is mostly depicted by a frisky, sinuous clarinet, an instrument that Bartók seemed to associate with women and the folk vernacular. When the couple come together at the very end, Bartók blesses the union with a snippet of the folk tune “Fly, Peacock,” which he had previously used in his First String Quartet.

Born to a Swiss father and a Basque mother in the French Pyrenees, near the Spanish border, Ravel embraced eclecticism and voracious multi-culturalism. When he was a young student at the Paris Conservatory, he aligned himself with the avant-garde “Apaches”—the punk rockers of fin-de-siècle France. As another member of their countercultural clique put it, “Ravel shared our preference, weakness or mania, respectively, for Chinese art, Mallarmé and Verlaine, Rimbaud, Cézanne and Van Gogh, Rameau and Chopin, Whistler and Valéry, the Russians and Debussy.”

Completed nine years before Ravel’s death and among his final compositions, Boléro might be the most recognizable concert showpiece in the repertoire. Starting with its 1928 premiere during the Paris Opera’s ballet season, the work caused a sensation, which quickly spread across the globe. Its opulent score boasts three saxophones (sopranino, soprano, and tenor). Set in the key of C major, in 3/4 time, Boléro has a vaguely jazzy, syncopated feel. Although this miracle of orchestration contains the fewest dynamic and expression markings in the canon, Boléro creates an inexorable tension without relying on a single crescendo symbol. Its hypnotic theme, introduced by a soft flute over a snare-drum ostinato, gradually accumulates color and volume before reaching a cathartic climax.

Boléro was commissioned by the ballerina Ida Rubinstein, who asked Ravel to orchestrate six pieces by Isaac Albéniz. Another composer held the copyright, however, so Ravel opted for something new. While vacationing, he came up with a simple, one-finger melody on the piano. “Don’t you think this theme has an insistent quality?” he asked a friend. “I am going to try to repeat it a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can.”

Ravel never thought much of his most famous composition, his so-called “danse lascive” (lascivious dance). Boléro, he later wrote, was “an experiment in a very special and limited direction and should not be suspected of aiming to achieve anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. I have carried out exactly what I intended, and it is up to the listener to take it or leave it.”

Almost 100 years after its debut, it still ranks as the ultimate earworm. You no doubt recognized the melody before you knew the first thing about Ravel. Like a folk song, it has achieved the immortality of anonymity: so famous that we can’t imagine anyone authoring it, because it seems like it has always existed, the aural equivalent of a primal drive or instinct.