Berkeley Talks

It was the morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and pianist Lara Downes was catching a flight from California to Kentucky, where she was set to perform later in the evening. “It was a very weird day to be anywhere,” she recalls.That night, she performed songs from her album America Again in Louisville, a city that mirrored the country's own jagged political divide. Coming from California, Downes expected Louisville to feel tense after the election.Instead, she found that the music — curated to explore the “American Dream” through the lens of diverse composers like Florence Price and Morton Gould — created a shared space of mourning and hope that transcended the maps on the news. As she played pieces like Price’s “Fantasie Nègre” and Gould's “American Caprice,” Downes had a profound realization."I think I learned in that moment how much all of the emotions that we feel about being American — the affection and the nostalgia and the confusion and the sadness and the anger — all of it really is expr