So what is the proper way to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s 200th Birthday? That is seriously a tough question that probably causes indie rockers to dust off The Presidents Of The United States album that you swore you threw away. Don’t do that, because I have an alternative for you that you are really going to enjoy.

It’s from the multi-talented Bryce Dessner of Cincinnati, The National, MusicNOW and most recently, the excellent Dark Was The Night compilation. Bryce has been busy and today offers up a very cool project he is a part of, celebrating Abe Lincoln.

The project is titled “21st Century Abe”.

Bryce offers up “The Lincoln Shuffle,” a series of short compositions featuring different acoustic instruments. You can download an original Lincoln playlist, and mix it around to make your own Lincoln song. If you are familiar with any sound editing software, such as Garageband, or the freeware Audacity, then you can have even more fun, since he designed the songs to be layered and manipulated. Bryce wants his work to be “the seed of an archive that starts to grow,” so we invite you to remix his music or create your own, and share it on 21st-Century Abe.

Lincoln was born two hundred years ago. Happy birthday Abe! But why are we in the 21st century still obsessed with this 19th-century man? We find Abe everywhere from advertising to political punditry. What does this popular Abe have to do with the historical Abe? 21st-Century Abe has six months to tackle these questions—starting February 12, 2009—and we need your answers. We’ve asked scholars and artists to get the ball rolling, but your responses will define 21st-Century Abe.

Have a listen to one of the compositions Bryce contributed.

Bryce Dessner – The Rose Of Lincoln

Bryce had this to say about the piece…

The Rose of Lincoln is a short brass fanfare inspired by a Civil War era composition, Hunters’ Chorus from the Rose of Erin, by Julius Benedict. I have long been fascinated by early-American brass music and this particular piece has a very strange melody in its first 16 Bars which modulates twice over a static harmony. I decided to repeat this introduction and then build a quasi-minimalist fanfare around the pulsing trombones of the original work.

Wow! Pretty impressive eh?

I’ll leave you with a great tribute video I found on 21st Century Abe. Don’t forget to visit the site, its a really great one!