The New York Philharmonic has released another of its "special editions," this one a boxed set of ten compact discs devoted to American music. It is entitled, plainly enough, An American Celebration, and it includes 49 works by 39 composers, interpreted by 21 conductors. It is not only a survey of one nation's orchestral music, but a record of the life of an orchestra, and a treasury of some of the century's greatest conductors. It also comes with two fat booklets, stuffed with essays, biographies, and interviews, along with photos so unfamiliar and heartwarming that they alone are almost worth the price ($185) of the set.

All in all, one cannot imagine a finer "salute" (as the Philharmonic also calls it) to American music, or at least to American orchestral music. Sedgwick Clark, producer of the set, has acquitted himself with his usual excellence. But the key and barely utterable question is: Does American music deserve it?

We have now set off a powder keg. In music, as in other areas of life, there is affirmative action — in the case of music, most often national affirmative action. Americans, with their traditional insecurity vis-à-vis Europe, are worse than others in this regard. They tend nervously to favor their own; or rather, they feel an obligation to perform and champion those of their countrymen who happen to compose. This is accepted simply as a fact of life, and an unquestionable good. No one has ever objected when a conductor (it is usually a conductor, rather than a singer or instrumentalist) says, "I pledge to search out and advocate American music."

Thus, when Leonard Slatkin was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra several years ago, it was very heavily emphasized that he was an American conductor who went out of his way — way out of it — to showcase American music. That this was a desirable practice and impulse — particularly for an orchestra that bills itself as "National" — went, of course, entirely unquestioned. The merits of the music (or, for that matter, of the conductor) were, at best, secondary. What mattered was nationality, and a peculiar form of nationalism. Even the present director of the New York Philharmonic, the German Kurt Masur, takes care to note, in a letter written for An American Celebration, that the Philharmonic has always felt a "strong responsibility" to the homegrown composer. Masur, inevitably — this was a little insurance — placed contemporary American works on his inaugural program with the Philharmonic, in 1991. (One of them was John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, a fun piece, included in the just-issued set.)

The tug of national pride — or of a sense of national duty, or entitlement — is, of course, far from new. In one of his sprightly essays for the set's booklets, the critic Alan Rich cites the case of one George Frederick Bristow, a "violinist, composer, and new-music activist." In 1854 (that early), Bristow fired off an angry letter to the New York Philharmonic Society, which at the time was dominated by Germans. He accused the Society of "a systematized effort for the extinction of American music"! (This despite the fact that the orchestra had by then programmed a concert overture of Bristow's, a piece now lost to time, probably without great injury to our souls.) "Is there a Philharmonic in Germany," he thundered, "for the encouragement of American music?"

Elsewhere in the booklets, however, we learn of a contrary case, that of Edward MacDowell, who understood full well the affirmative-action mentality of some in organized music, and resented it. He once refused to allow a work of his to be included in an all-American program. He wanted his music to be judged solely for itself, performed because it was worthy, or not at all. (This tidbit comes from that stalwart critic of yesteryear, Irving Kolodin. Another of the delights of this package is that it offers a parade of critics and annotators, down through the decades. One suspects, though, that a little Bowdlerizing has gone on: Chances are that Irving Kolodin did not employ the term "African-American.")

Composers, needless to say, have always groused that performers ignore the new and nearby (which is to say, them). In truth, however, to be new and nearby is to have a leg up — is to be able to play on the guilt and ethical presumptions of performers. Some portion of what our orchestras program today is programmed only because it is a) American and b) new. This is a way, goes the thinking, of tending and extending the national heritage. But what is that heritage, exactly? Is it a heritage of greatness, or is it one of mediocrity, propped up by the patriotic, moral, and professional notions of a large segment of the musical establishment? This is a question that the Philharmonic's ten discs can help to answer.

Disc 1 opens with Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, regarded as one of our national anthems. It does not, frankly, wear well. It is a little pompous, a little overblown, with its crashing cymbals and blustering drums. Then there is George Chadwick's Melpomene, a Dramatic Overture. It is dramatic indeed, not to say melodramatic, mostly a series of Romantic outpourings, held together by their dull sameness. The work is included here, one may guess, only because it is a handy example of late-19th-century American music. Then there is MacDowell's Indian Suite (spiritedly conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who gets the lion's share of the baton time in this set). It is a dated and hokey piece, though not without a certain charm and ingenuity. Then we have a classic — the classic, really — of American Impressionism, The White Peacock by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, in a lovely performance by another composer, Howard Hanson. Following that is Ernest Schelling's Victory Ball, a Fantasy for Orchestra, once a rather big deal in American music, now no more than an historical oddity.

Along with Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, those pieces constitute the first of the discs. As we can see here, there is a lot of "program music" — which is to say, music meant to depict a story, or event, or thing — in this collection, as against "absolute" or "pure" music (such as any Beethoven symphony, except the "Pastoral," which is an example, if an exceptionally high one, of program music). Many of the compositions are decidedly second-rate, even student-like, hardly cause for much patriotic chest-thumping (or even, perhaps, a Celebration).

More Copland comes with his Music for the Theatre, an engaging work. (When Copland's fellow composer Roy Harris first heard it, we learn from a note by Phillip Ramey, he "jumped up excitedly, threw out his hands, and exclaimed with delight: 'But that's whorehouse music!'" This was 1925, and Europe was seeming farther and farther away.) There is a great deal of Copland in this set, arguably too much, given the ground to be covered and the space available. His Lincoln Portrait — here conducted by Bernstein and narrated by William Warfield — is an amazingly shallow, bombastic, and stupid work, incapable of impressing anyone over the age of, say, 12. His Salón México, on the other hand, manages to survive — though barely — the ethnomusicological earnestness that prompted it.

The French-born Edgard Varèse is represented by his Intégrales, performed in his memory not long after his death. Indeed, many of these performances took place for ceremonial reasons, rather than for what might be considered normal, or everyday, ones: It was this one's 75th birthday; it was the 50th anniversary of that one's death. It is possible that this says something not entirely reassuring or flattering about the quality of the music. Ned Rorem (represented in the set by his superb Third Symphony) once said that the highest compliment that had ever been paid him was when Leopold Stokowski programmed a piece of his without telling him about it. Stoki simply went ahead and scheduled it, as though Rorem were a regular composer, not needing to be present, not needing to stand and acknowledge applause, and so on. He was just a composer, a grown-up, like, oh . . . Haydn.

A few of the pieces assembled here are so poor as to be laughable. Consider Old California by William Grant Still (conducted by the august Frenchman Pierre Monteux, who was something of an old Californian himself, given his association with the San Francisco Symphony). It is shot through with hokum, attempting to recreate tribal chants, Spanish yelps, and the like, all for the glory of the City of Los Angeles's 160th anniversary (for which the piece was commissioned). It could serve as the accompaniment to a particularly campy film: Where are Bing, Bob, and Dorothy Lamour? William Grant Still was a better composer than revealed in this piece, an oddity that he, if he could, would probably be glad to bury.

Other works in the set, however, deserve to be more widely known than they are. Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 is an intelligent piece, bowing to a form of the past while incorporating the modern. Henry Cowell's Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 displays a similar keenness, here beautifully rendered by another French conductor, Paul Paray. Carl Ruggles's Sun-treader is a complicated work, brilliant in a way, not one to clutch to the heart, but featuring an uncanny orchestral architecture, not unreminiscent of Bruckner. George Crumb's Star-Child is a similarly strange and wonderful creation. And Peter Mennin's Concertato is no less than a rediscovery, taut and driving.

When all is said and done — and listened to — this anthology is both hugely rewarding and hugely irritating. We may draw from it a few broad lessons. If there is any doubt, for example, that there is an American school — a distinctive style of American classical music — it is dispelled by these discs. To begin with, many of these composers were educated by the same teachers. They also borrowed from one another like mad. They socialized together, performed together, and, in some cases, slept together. The gang's all here, almost. Every listener will note certain omissions about which he will be tempted to sniff — I, for instance, might cry, "What, no Gian Carlo Menotti? No Vincent Persichetti? No John Corigliano? No Walter Piston!" — but Sedgwick Clark has done a skillful job of mining what has come to be a vast musical heritage.

Still, the question nags: What about that heritage? Is it . . . worth it? Most striking about An American Celebration is its relative paucity of great music: music that will endure, that can stand on its own, without the ministrations of special tenders. Musical folk, curiously enough, are not known for being especially patriotic, but they get all blood-and-soil crazy when it comes to the concert life. These discs are, in part, the product of sheer dwill, of an eat-your-peas sense of what is good for us. The missionary and proselytizing spirit abounds ("Are you listening, conductors around the world?" demands Clark in one of the booklets.)

This is our heritage, yes, in a way; and orchestral music in America has been as good as that in most countries during this century. Furthermore, not every piece of music that is performed and "celebrated" need be great; otherwise, the repertory available to concerts and recordings would shrink intolerably. But Americanness is not nearly enough; it is a woefully insufficient credential.

All the more reason, then, to rejoice that our musical heritage, like our larger national one, flows from every nation, and certainly from Europe. Those Germans who so agitated George Frederick Bristow — Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms — are our kin, just as much as Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Music, as has long been observed, is a nation unto itself. And if there is pride to be taken, why not take it in that?