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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Staging the Folk: New York City’s Friends of Old Time Music by Ray Allen Celebrating Randy Weston by Jeff Taylor and Hank Williams Music and Identity in Mel Brooks’s The Producers by Katherine Baber American Opera: Reviews by Jeff Taylor and Bruce MacIntyre |
In Search of Aaron Copland by Wayne Schneider
Aaron Copland, 1933 Photograph by
Ralph Steiner Not that Copland is missing; his music seems to be everywhere these days. College students in my introduction-to-classical-music classes, shifting with the sands of popular culture, actually recognize some Copland. In addition to the classic “Simple Gifts” variations from Appalachian Spring, pieces like Fanfare for the Common Man and “Hoedown” from Rodeo are now on their musical radar, thanks to television commercials by the U. S. Navy Recruitment Office and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, respectively. Without prodding from me, students agree that Copland is the classical composer whose music sounds most American. Copland’s death in 1990 and the centennial of his birth in 2000 prompted glowing festivals, remembrances, and documentaries, but also encouraged a scholarly Copland literature. Copland’s autobiography, with Vivian Perlis (1984, 1989), Howard Pollock’s superb biography of the composer (1999), and the housing of the Aaron Copland Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress have established a new baseline of research. To these fine efforts must be added Aaron Copland and His World, edited by Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick (Princeton University Press, 2005; $22.95). Oja and Tick’s reader is the latest in a remarkable series of composer-and-world books dating back to Walter Frisch’s 1990 edited volume, Brahms and His World, published by Princeton and connected with the Bard Music Festival. The reader seeks Copland—famously private, graciously accommodating—in different contexts, even on different stages, each discussed in one of the book’s seven sections: nuanced biographical sketches (“Scanning a Life”), cultural studies (“Copland’s Greater Cultural World”), correspondence with Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Berger (“Copland’s Inner Circle”), analysis (“Analytic Perspectives”), Copland’s brushes with politics (“Political Edges”), Copland as musical spokesman (“Copland and His Public”), and finally, a wise appraisal of Copland’s legacy (“Reconfiguring Copland’s World”) by Leon Botstein, the guiding force behind the Bard Festivals. One might expect the most direct way to Copland, “a careful person with a reticence about overt displays of emotion or speaking about himself” as Perlis writes (156), would be through biography and letters. Howard Pollack’s essay, “Copland and the Prophetic Voice,” suggests that Copland’s “voice” was not so much Jewish as one with Old Testament “prophetic resonance,” the musical consequences of which fall into five characters: declamatory, idyllic, agitated, sardonic, and visionary. Pollack hears Copland’s music channeling “Hebraic” ideas into a bigger, all-encompassing Americanism. Martin Brody, in “Founding Sons: Copland, Sessions, and Berger on Genealogy and Hybridity,” compares Copland’s autobiographical sketch “Composer from Brooklyn” (1939) to passages from the composer’s Music and Imagination (1952) and the Perlis chronicles. Brody suggests Copland chose his musical heritage and created his own musical past. Moreover, Brody compares the “national” voice of Copland and Roy Harris (“immigrant” cosmopolitanism) to the “universal” voice of Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Samuel Barber (“exile” cosmopolitanism) (24). Embedded in Brody’s search and comparison is a brief and insightful discussion of Copland’s chord-spacing and his use of the triad as a molecular building block, often released from its past tonal hierarchy. Wayne Shirley presents with deft commentary the entire Copland-Berger correspondence.1 Berger seems to have written more to Copland than the reverse, and Copland’s correspondence is carefully measured. The same may be said for his letters in the Copland-Bernstein correspondence, selections of which are printed with commentary by Perlis. Bernstein, grabbing the center of attention, seems to overwhelm the older composer.2 Other essays follow different search tactics. Emily Abrams prints a catalogue of Copland’s appearances on television—in interviews and documentaries—beginning in 1958. She also transcribes a television show, “Aaron Copland Meets the Soviet Composers” (WGBH, Boston, 1959), in which moderators Copland and Nicolas Slonimsky politely discuss American and Soviet music with a group that included composers Dmitry Kabalevsky and Dmitry Shostakovich and musicologist Boris Yarustovsky. The Russians seemed most concerned about the “twin evils” of jazz and serialism (381). Melissa de Graaf’s edited transcript (by Gisella R. Silverman) of a post-concert discussion between Copland and the audience at a New York City Composers’ Forum concert in 1937 shows the composer fending off questions on jazz, music and society, modernism and dissonance, Gershwin, and politics. Two excellent essays in the reader analyze Copland’s music, perhaps the best place to find the composer: Larry Starr’s strong prose analysis (“War Drums, Tolling Bells”) of the Piano Sonata (1939-1941), and Elliott Antokoletz’s discussion of Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid (“Copland’s Gift to Be Simple within the Cumulative Mosaic Complexities of His Ballets”). Antokoletz compares Copland to Bartók and Stravinsky, all three absorbing folk tunes into a contemporary musical language: tune cell curlicues, off-center ostinatos, and “varied cyclic repetition” (the-same-but-different), subjecting folk tunes to expansion, contraction, rearrangement, and superimposition. The planed and layered phrases of Copland’s ballets created mosaics of sound (quilts, even), revealing a profound “gift for combining the clear and simple melodic surfaces of American folk idioms with complex phrase and period interactions” (273). Many of the authors approach Copland through cultural studies. Paul Anderson writes about the influence of André Gide on Copland, whose library (housed in the Library of Congress) contains thirty books by Gide. Anderson focuses especially on Gide’s Corydon, Copland’s personal copy of which contains the composer’s many marginal notes, a book that “provided a logical framework within which homosexuality could be acceptable and even desirable” (55). Dance historian Lynn Garafola discusses Copland’s collaborations with Ruth Page (Hear Ye! Hear Ye!), Eugene Loring (Billy the Kid), Agnes de Mille (Rodeo), and Martha Graham (Appalachian Spring)—in short, the foundations of modern American ballet. Art historian Gail Levin draws affinities between Copland’s music and Mexican modernism in music and the visual arts by addresing the works of Diego Rivera, Carlos Chávez, Miguel Covarrubias, Silvestre Revueltas, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others. Cultural historian Morris Dickstein discusses “Copland and American Populism in the 1930s,” showing the composer and other American artists fusing modernism and populism in music, film, journalism, literature, and the visual arts. Beth E. Levy’s essay, “From Orient to Occident: Aaron Copland and the Sagas of the Prairies,” posits Music for Radio (1937) as pivotal in the reception of Copland’s music in the late 1930s and 1940s, helping “reconfigure Copland’s reputation, making him appear less ‘Jewish’ and more ‘American’” (316-317). Neil Lerner discusses the Copland score for the documentary film The Cummington Story (1945), produced by the Office of War Information, about the Cummington (Massachusetts) Refugee Hotel for European war refugees. Finally, Elizabeth B. Crist, in her essay “Copland and the Politics of Americanism,” and more fully in her recent book Music for the Common Man (Oxford University Press, 2005), weaves together the music, culture, and politics of the 1930s and 1940s. She carefully explains Copland’s relationship with the left—“the Communist movement (if not the Party) and … left-wing politics more generally” (278)—that culminated in the composer’s appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. Crist surveys the political inferences in such Copland compositions as Music for the Theatre (1925), Statements (1935), Lincoln Portrait (1942), and The Tender Land (1954) concluding: “Separately, these pieces stand as specific examples of Copland’s progressive politics as expressed in his music. Together, they advance a liberal, pluralistic notion of musical Americanism” (279). Although Crist draws a compelling and detailed background, Copland’s exact role in it eludes. Indeed, sometimes Crist may overstate her case. She suggests the sly quote of “Sidewalks of New York” in the second movement of Music for the Theatre implies Copland’s “defense of cultural pluralism” (284); its appearance in Statements is a “reference [to] the failed promise of Tammany … as well as the cultural conflicts surrounding [Al] Smith’s presidential bid” (287). (“Sidewalks” was Smith’s campaign song.) Even Crist acknowledges that Copland’s careful modesty and privacy make him difficult to pin down: he “speaks with an identifiably American voice, but the accent is hard to place … it seems especially easy to invest his works with a whole host of values and press compositions into the service of widely varying ideologies” (299). Crist’s careful context compels, even thrills, but Copland again escapes. Here is a wonderful and important collection
of essays on a composer at once familiar and elusive. Copland, when queried
regarding his preference between analytic approaches—historical context
vs. row-hunting—responded equivocally: “I, of course, love
both” (215). Perlis’s
summation of Copland’s politics suggests a similar ambiguity:
“Copland was not by nature a political person; he joined neither the
Socialist nor the Communist Party, but for a time in the early 1930s he was what might be called a fellow
traveler. When questioned about his leftist activities, his answer was
simply, ‘It seemed the thing to do at the time’” (106). In the end, both books teach
more about the context and historical staging of Copland’s life than
about the central character. Perhaps
one finds Copland only in the “long line” of his notes. De
Graaf’s transcript shows that at the beginning of the post-concert
question-and-answer session at the 1937 Composers’ Forum concert
featuring Copland’s music, the composer deadpanned: “I’d much rather go home. This is not my idea” (401). —Wayne Schneider University of Vermont Notes 1 Berger’s
letters are in the New York Public Library; Copland’s are in the
Library of Congress. 2 Copland’s 111 letters to Bernstein are
available online and at the Library of Congress; Bernstein’s 114 letters
to Copland are restricted—excerpts have been published here and there,
and some letters appear in this reader for the first time. ISAM home Who we
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