"Despite what you may have heard, there is no definitive version of the song America the Beautiful.
Katharine Lee Bates wrote its lyrics as a poem in 1893, inspired by an ecstatic road trip from the Massachusetts house she shared with her longtime companion Katharine Coman to a teaching gig in Colorado. Over the next few decades, dozens of musicians set it to music, including a tune by New Jersey’s Samuel A Ward. The uniting of the text to a hymn Ward had previously composed in 1882 became, in time, a standard. In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance of it. But everyone from Pete Seeger to Tammy Faye Messner have tried their hand at Bates’s ode to equality between peoples and equanimity with nature. At Joe Biden’s inauguration, Jennifer Lopez belted it into a medley, while Carrie Underwood struggled through it at Donald Trump’s second one.
The Korean-born, New Jersey-based pianist Min Kwon has spent her career thinking of ways to build communities through interpretation. As professor of piano at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, she curated concerts featuring university pianists at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall – like a 2015 performance of 50 variations on a waltz the Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli commissioned in the 1820s from composers including Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. After that challenge, she says: “I wanted to create a kind of new American Diabelli.” She just needed to find the right theme."
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