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Through Music, NPR Host Lara Downes Explores What It Means To Be an American Today
She traveled the nation for 2 years, probing 'our present reality and the future we still have to build together'
What does it mean to be American today? That’s the question at the heart of “The Declaration Project.”
Lara Downes, a pianist, NPR host and curator, spent two years working on this non-partisan endeavor, which has yielded the album Hold These Truths, a multimedia concert at Lincoln Center, an NPR America in Pursuit audio postcard series and a digital archive, with more to come.
“‘The Declaration Project’ began as a way to think about America’s 250th anniversary through music,” Downes tells Muse. “I started with these familiar words: ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ We hear them all the time, but I wanted to know what they mean now, in this particular moment, to real people living real lives across this country.”
Initially, Downes thought she would create a performance and recording project. “But the more I thought about the anniversary, the more I felt that it couldn’t be approached from a stage or a studio alone. This is such a complicated time to be asking what America is and what it might become,” she says.
Realizing she needed to meet with Americans face-to-face, Downes spent the two years leading up to America’s 250th anniversary traveling across the country “asking questions, playing music, listening and collecting responses. The project became a way to open a conversation about our history, our present reality and the future we still have to build together.”
Here, Downes talks about her experiences on the road and how music can be used to bring people closer and start conversations:
MUSE: Tell me about some of the places you visited and the people you met.
Lara Downes: It was a journey through so many different versions of America. I traveled from Northern California to Brooklyn, from Brattleboro, Vt., to Tuskegee, Ala., and a lot of places in between. I was in major concert halls, but also in classrooms, community centers, radio stations, rehearsal studios, senior centers and even a 200-year-old barn. Sometimes I was playing for people who had come specifically to hear music. And sometimes I was walking into a room full of young students who didn’t know exactly why this pianist had shown up with questions about America.
Those encounters were often the most powerful. I spent time with middle school students, college students, elders, artists, teachers, composers, community leaders and people who simply showed up and were willing to share something honest. Some people responded with spoken reflections. Some wrote poetry or prose. Some children drew pictures. Some of the voices on the album belong to the composers whose music is heard there, and others come from people whose words helped shape the emotional landscape of the project.
What stayed with me was the generosity. I was asking people to think about very big, vulnerable questions: What does it mean to be American today? How do you define life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What do you hope for the American future? People answered with so much courage and openness.
Why is music a valuable way of exploring what it means to be American?
Music has always been one of the deepest ways we tell the truth about who we are. It carries memory, grief, faith, resistance, joy, longing and possibility. Especially in American music, you can hear the whole history of the country: its beauty, its contradictions, its violence, its resilience, its dreams.
For me, music is also a way into a room. It allows me to meet people in a place that is not argumentative or ideological. I can sit down at the piano and share something of myself before I ask anyone else to share anything with me. That changes the conversation. Music creates trust. It gives people permission to feel before they speak.
And American music is never one thing. It is spirituals and folk songs, jazz and hymns, protest songs and concert music, immigrant stories and Indigenous echoes and Black American genius and Broadway and gospel and so much else. That makes it a powerful lens for asking what America means, because it already contains so many of our stories.
Did you have personal revelations while you were on the road?
Yes, constantly. I don’t think I could have taken this journey and remained unchanged.
One thing I learned is that hope is not the same as optimism. Hope is not a cheerful denial of what is happening. It can be fragile, and it can live right alongside fear, anger, exhaustion and grief. But everywhere I went, I found people still carrying it. Sometimes it appeared in a very small way: a child talking about a dream, a student insisting that their identity should not need permission to exist, an elder reminding me that previous generations lived through terrible times and still kept going.
I was also struck by how differently people understand the pursuit of happiness. It was rarely about comfort or success in the most obvious sense. People talked about purpose, family, safety, community, authenticity, service and the freedom to become fully themselves. For many young people, especially, happiness was connected to the ability to do meaningful work in the world, to continue what their families and ancestors had struggled toward and to imagine a life with more dignity and possibility.
I came away with a deeper sense of responsibility. If we are going to tell the story of this country, it has to be true. It has to include the devastating parts, but also the beautiful and unfinished parts. And it has to leave room for the next generation to imagine something better.
On July 1, you and a collective of artists will take the stage at Lincoln Center. What makes this event special?
The Lincoln Center event is called “Declaration: Songs of Democracy, Voices of Hope,” and it feels like a gathering of everything this project has been moving toward. It brings together live performance, storytelling, video portraits from the road and new music created around the words “life,” “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness.”
There are three world premieres by extraordinary composers: Valerie Coleman, Arturo O’Farrill and Christopher Tin. Each of them is engaging with one of those founding ideals in a very personal and contemporary way. I’ll be there as piano soloist and curator, joined by the American Composers Orchestra under Eric Jacobsen and an incredible group of artists including Christian McBride, Ekep Nkwelle, Aoife O’Donovan, Carrie Rodriguez, Wyatt Ellis, Migguel Anggelo, Louis Cato, the Tuskegee University Golden Voices Concert Choir and others.
What makes it special to me is that the voices I gathered on the road are not separate from the music. They are part of the performance. The event is not a patriotic pageant. It is more like a living conversation between artists, communities, history and the present moment. It asks how we can stand inside all the complexity of this anniversary and still make something together.
What inspired you to dedicate so much of your creative energy and time to this endeavor?
We are living through a time when truth feels vulnerable, history is contested and people are exhausted by division. But I do not believe artists are powerless in that kind of moment. We can create spaces where people remember how to listen, how to feel, how to tell the truth and how to hope without pretending everything is fine. That is what I wanted to give my energy to.
