In his thoughtful new book Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal, Nebraska senator Ben Sasse writes: “More Republicans and Democrats are placing politics at the center of their lives. Both sides seem to believe that a grand solution to our political dysfunction can be found inside politics. . . . But nothing that happens in Washington is going to fix what’s wrong with America. . . . The problem is that our ever more ferocious political tribalism and mutual hatred don’t originate in politics, so politics isn’t going to heal them.”

Amen to that.

What needs to heal, Sasse continues, is the nation’s torn fabric. The agents of destruction he adduces include the digital age, which undermines “any sense of place by allowing us to mentally ‘escape’ our homes and neighborhoods.” He observes the diminishing pertinence of friends, church, and community. He cites studies documenting an epidemic of “loneliness.” In Fremont, his hometown, immigrants are moving in and wealthier Nebraskans moving out. The senator and his wife are vigorously engaged in social service—“one person-to-person relationship and one local institution at a time.”

That all sounds laudable and feasible for rural Nebraska. But as a secular American living in Manhattan, I’m a stranger to the senator’s world of church and picnics. I worry that religion may be as much divisive as binding in America’s map of red versus blue. My professional world is one of orchestras (with which I work) and cultural history (about which I write). My perspective suggests another opportunity for healing—regaining a lost “sense of place” and shared American identity via our history and culture. And, yes, I mean high culture.

Our colleges don’t teach much history any longer. Many cultural institutions seem increasingly adrift. And yet I have stumbled upon an unlikely alliance that works: orchestras in partnership with universities.

This may sound risible. But there was a time when the symphony orchestra was a civic bulwark. Before World War I, it was already a certified and admired American specialty, distinct from the pit orchestras of European opera and theater. Over a period of mere decades, orchestras of consequence proliferated throughout the northeast and Midwest: Every self-respecting city established one.

Theodore Thomas is the Johnny Appleseed in this story. His itinerant orchestra rode the “Thomas Highway” coast to coast. “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community” was his credo. Americans believed him.

Many musically inclined Americans were European immigrants for whom Beethoven and Schubert were already a necessity. But there was also widespread anticipation of an American canon; it was assumed that by the 21st century American orchestras would mainly perform American music. And this cause, peaking with a tidal wave of “American Composers Concerts” at the turn of the 20th century, was popular and exciting. It possessed urgency.

An ignition point was the U.S. sojourn (1892-95) of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. His Ninth Symphony, written in 1893 and subtitled “From the New World,” provoked a fierce national debate over American identity. Keying on Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and on the “Negro melodies” he adored, Dvorak enshrined in his symphony the notion that African Americans and Native Americans were self-evidently representative Americans. In New York, his idea was taken to heart. In Boston, he was denounced as a “negrophile.”

This symphony, a pivotal part of the early history of classical music in the United States, illuminates the countless ways in which cultural expression can powerfully foster personal and national identity. So does Longfellow’s poem. And so do the canvases of Frederic Church; the elegiac majesty of his iconic New World landscapes forecast the sublime Largo of Dvorak’s symphony. For good measure, the Czech composer’s American sojourn also furnishes a complex and timely study in cultural appropriation.

According to stereotype, the orchestra is an elitist institution. But look at its early history in the United States. Henry Higginson, who created the Boston Symphony in 1881, insisted on reserving blocks of 25-cent tickets for nonsubscribers. Leopold Stokowski, who made the Philadelphia Orchestra matter, produced the American premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1916 partly because he knew it would require many hundreds of amateur singers. The performance was an epochal community event. Remember that symphonic conductors once stayed put—there were no airplanes to fly them from one musical capital to another. In Chicago, Frederick Stock was not an international celebrity. He was, instead, something of greater civic consequence: a local celebrity, a popular favorite who in summertime led his orchestra in outdoor concerts at which multitudes sang along.

But over the course of the 20th century, American classical music disappointed expectations and remained a Eurocentric import. Orchestras succumbed to formula. They sacrificed local identity based in community for itinerant star power. They squandered their potential to instill a sense of place.

Today, the marginalization of the orchestra in American culture is a pressing cause for concern within the shrinking classical-music milieu. Emergency measures are afoot. The latest remedies of choice are “inclusion” and “diversity.” Women composers are belatedly being programmed and celebrated. Both the League of American Orchestras and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the lone survivor of a national philanthropic community once dedicated to sustaining orchestral performance) are funding a “pipeline” to propel young musicians of color into the ranks of major orchestras. These are important initiatives. But they attack symptoms, not causes. And they risk exciting the same divisive energies that afflict identity politics more generally.

If orchestras are ever to regain their role as agents of national unity, they will need to undertake a larger mission and curate the American past. Dvorak, in 1893, prophesied a “great and noble” school of American concert music: a foundation for the future. It’s too late to revive that. But our orchestras can nevertheless engage in a mission of American self-understanding. And that’s where universities come in.

Eight years ago, I launched Music Unwound, a national consortium of orchestras supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The idea was to remake orchestras as humanities institutions. They would curate our musical past in the form of multimedia concerts exploring key components of the American experience. Scholars would take part. So, I hoped, would museums and universities. The result would be immersion experiences lasting days and even weeks.

Music Unwound has explored four topics: “Dvorak and America,” “Copland and Mexico,” “Charles Ives’s America,” and “Kurt Weill’s America.” Issues of American identity are ambitiously investigated. The Dvorak program is intended to connect to African-American and Native American audiences, and also to Longfellow and to the painters of the Hudson River School. The Copland program links to the Depression and to the composers and muralists of the Mexican Revolution: political art. The Ives program links to the Transcendentalists that the Connecticut composer cherished, Emerson above all. The Weill program, about a German-Jewish opera composer who became a leading creator of Broadway musicals, probes immigration.

We’ve enjoyed successes and suffered disappointments. But there has been a central surprise—that universities are more eager to participate than orchestras. And where the two have collaborated, the results have been transformational.

It must be understood that orchestras in the United States have evolved very differently from museums. There are no scholarly curators on staff. The American musical past is little known or exhumed, nor is any cultural context outside of classical music. With the exception of Aaron Copland, the composers we feature via Music Unwound are little played—the American Dvorak (how is it possible that we don’t regularly hear his vividly observed American Suite of 1894?), George Chadwick, Arthur Farwell, Silvestre Revueltas, Weill, Ives. But they form a vital narrative of New World cultural development. It is the intellectual heft of this programming that opens the door to the university classroom.

Joseph Horowitz, center, with students during Music Unwound’s February 2017 program with the El Paso Symphony Orchestra and the University of Texas at El Paso Armando Trull

The synergies have been obvious in El Paso, Texas—a city of immigrants, 80 percent Hispanic, at the crossroads of today’s immigration debate. Here the quarterback for Music Unwound has been Lorenzo Candelaria, a music historian who was until recently associate provost at the University of Texas at El Paso. There have been three El Paso Music Unwound festivals, beginning with “Dvorak and America” in 2016—which so penetrated the graduate and undergraduate classrooms of UTEP that hundreds of young Hispanics attended their first symphonic concerts thanks to the partnering El Paso Symphony. Many brought their families. (Music Unwound furnishes free tickets to participating students.)

Their keen appreciation of what they heard—including the full New World Symphony with a visual presentation extrapolating its American accent—had been honed by campus talks and concerts. The festival pervaded the curriculum. Brian Yothers, a specialist in 19th-century American literature at UTEP, explored the significance of Longfellow to Dvorak in a variety of music classes. Kevin Deas, a leading African-American concert singer, arrived with Music Unwound both to sing with the symphony and to teach and perform at UTEP. When Deas signed CDs during the intermission of two El Paso Symphony subscription concerts, the line both nights trailed down the lobby and around a corner. Most of the people waiting were under 25 years old.

“Copland and Mexico,” celebrating a decade of Mexican cultural efflorescence wholly unknown to El Paso’s young Mexican-Americans, followed in 2017. But it was the 2018 Weill festival—about a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who “felt American” from the day he landed in Manhattan—that seemed to most strike home. It lasted seven days and included five concerts, three master classes, seven classroom presentations, and a trip to a local high school. The first class I visited was Selfa Chew’s Afro-Mexican history at UTEP. The immediacy of Weill’s story for Chew’s students was electrifying. One asked with a trembling voice: How was Weill able to do it? She missed Mexico intensely. Another wanted to know if Weill ever composed music in America that alluded to his German past. The students had me thinking about Weill in new ways.

All Music Unwound events incorporate discussion. At one of the symphony concerts, a Jewish El Pasoan remembered her childhood in South Dakota, where her father sold automobiles in Sioux Falls and supported the local NAACP. Her family housed Harry Belafonte because no hotel would take him. Black workers were resented as outsiders. Anti-Semitism was virulent. Her father’s favorite recordings included Weill’s anti-apartheid musical Lost in the Stars. Only now, she told us, did she understand why.

Toni Torres, a UTEP undergraduate, wrote that the festival “gave me a new perspective on my citizenship: I need to be doing way more for my country and its music. I have no excuse, because Weill, an immigrant, devoted his life to it, and what he left is breathtakingly beautiful.” Candelaria said: “I found a real hunger for Kurt Weill here in El Paso. Its intensity (even among high school students) surprised me. I was very moved by audience reactions. Even though I grew up here, I wasn’t prepared for the surge of patriotic feeling. It was a unique experience for me—I’ll never forget it.”

Another orchestra-university partnership initiated by Music Unwound is in Las Vegas, where the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas are about to undertake their second festival. Here the key players are the orchestra’s music director, Donato Cabrera, and Nancy Uscher, the dean of the university’s College of Fine Arts. For “Dvorak and America” this coming April, the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the UNLV orchestra will give linked concerts—both scripted and with visual accompaniment. In Sioux Falls, the South Dakota Symphony’s Music Unwound festivals have connected with Augustana University, South Dakota State University, and the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation. In Buffalo, the philharmonic’s Music Unwound festivals have included the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the University at Buffalo.

If Music Unwound receives funding for its next cycle, an expanded consortium will also include the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, in partnership with the Tucson Symphony, and the State University of New York at Purchase. The latter institution will join thanks to Lorenzo Candelaria, who is the incoming dean of the School of the Arts. He is intent on building on his experiences in El Paso and refashioning SUNY Purchase’s music conservatory as a humanities laboratory. He wrote to me:

We’re in a “now or never” moment in the arts and I’m feeling a sense of urgency. The pressures of research agendas fueled by antiquated tenure systems have created siloed mindsets in higher education for a long time now. Social media have isolated us even further. The performing arts offer a necessary counterbalance because the success or failure of a project depends on how well people can set aside personal and creative differences and work together to create something new—in front of other people, and in real time. Orchestras, bands, and choirs create priceless opportunities for this type of community-building in our K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. But these resources are typically dismissed as entertaining or ornamental. As budget pressures increase, they become regarded as expensive, extravagant, and expendable. That’s a big mistake. Relevant arts programming—thematic, planned in close consultation with humanities faculty, and strategically engaging students across campus—has the power to transform individuals and the communities they serve. I’ve seen this first-hand. But this type of transformative work requires something that humans are getting worse at with every text or tweet—informed, earnest, and extended conversation. This doesn’t bode well for the arts or for society as a whole. I’m of the radical mindset that orchestras, bands, and choirs can do something about this and should.

The most fortifying aspect of Music Unwound has been the intensity of the public discussion it engenders. When the Las Vegas Philharmonic undertook “Copland and Mexico,” everyone knew it would be controversial. Copland traveled far to the left in the 1930s—and paid for it when he was subpoenaed in 1953 by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The philharmonic concert told the story of Copland’s politicization (“Mexico turned out to be even grander than I expected—and I expected pretty grand things. The best is the people—there’s nothing remotely like them in Europe. They are really ‘the people’—nothing in them is striving to be bourgeois,” he wrote in 1932). The centerpiece was the film Redes (1936), a tale of fishermen uniting to overthrow an unjust system. The galvanizing musical score (performed live) was composed by Silvestre Revueltas. The cinematographer was Paul Strand. Both were restless artists bent on igniting social and political change.

When the concert was over and we gathered onstage to talk with the audience, a woman in the front row was eager to speak. “I hated it!” she announced. Our presentation had failed to “entertain.” We all answered as best we could. An hour later, when the hall began to clear, she ventured to the lip of the stage to talk some more with Roberto Kolb, Mexico’s leading Revueltas scholar, who had joined us from Mexico City. Their conversation settled nothing, but it all felt terribly worthwhile. It was red; it was blue; it was thoughtful and sincere. A divide was bridged.

Ben Sasse, in his new book, writes of “an almost permanent state of dissociation, punctuated only by the most urgent demands of life, to which we tend halfheartedly”—“a growing vacuum at the heart of our shared (or increasingly, not so shared) everyday lives.” Theodore Thomas took his orchestra throughout the American West. And readers of Willa Cather know of the importance of prairie opera houses. I have no idea to what degree these efforts at cultural infusion (which were not perceived as elitist) fed a Nebraska hunger for Beethoven or Gounod. But I’m certain that they fed a hunger for community. With some fresh thinking, they still can.

To sample the South Dakota Symphony's Music Unwound presentation of "Copland and Mexico," scripted by Joseph Horowitz with visuals by Peter Bogdanoff, click here.