Proms season starting up. American programming prominent in the first night. The German orchestras also seem to have been doing a fair amount of Gershwin recently.
I'm still trying to fathom how American music seems to Europeans. I was walking through a Christmas fair in Transylvania a year or two ago, and all of the carols playing over the loudspeakers were in English. Beyond the notion that St. Nick (relics at the trading center of Bari) might have been overwhelmed by Jolly Ol' Nick of the U.S.A., there's also the distance between my hearing of the carols and their hearing. What is it to hear a song from America at Christmastime? Or a jazz-classical piece by Gershwin? And what are the outer limits of that idea -- when does it begin to ring false for them? It rings false for us because of over-familiarity and easy sentiment. Perhaps the outer boundary for American music is different overseas; perhaps it rings false when they suspect that it might be some distance from the thing itself.