It would be inarticulate to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of CPE Bach without the music of J.S. Bach and Joseph Haydn, both his origins and in some sense his destiny. Let’s not kid ourselves, these anchors have more weight than the ship we are launching. But CPE’s virtues are made clearest by posing his cheeky, mischievous, iconoclastic imagination against the stabilizing, normative, and finally more clear-minded music of his father precursor and his successor “heir.” It could be said that CPE’s task was to dismantle some of his father’s synthesis, and Haydn’s was to reassemble, balance, and clarify the brilliant musical vistas glimpsed by CPE.

Songs America Loves to Sing proposes to adapt J.S. Bach’s chorale prelude principle, his inclusion of familiar melodies as tugboats through unfamiliar musical waters, into a modern setting, the tune supposedly widely and currently familiar, the compositional terrain complicated by canons, re-harmonizations, and diversions.