Fall 2000 Volume XXX, No. 1

Life with Fatha by Jeff Taylor Seven Steps to Piano Heaven: The Artistry of Sir Roland Hanna by Mark Tucker Visualizing Modernity and Tradition in Copland's America by Gail Levin Mark Tucker by H. Wiley Hitchcock Local Music/Global Connections Conference by Ray Allen ISAM Matters Reviews Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe Rediscovering the Sylviad by Douglas A. Lee Seeger Scholarship by Marc E. Johnson Zygotones by George Boziwick ISAM Home

Visualizing Modernity and Tradition in Copland's America by Gail Levin Commenting at mid-century on Ives’s Central Park in the Dark, Aaron Copland wrote, “The effect is almost that of musical cubism, since the music seems to exist independently on different planes.”1 Reflecting on his own music some fifteen years earlier, Copland described himself as using jazz “cubistically” to create greater intensity and excitement.2 These two observations reveal the composer’s appreciation for the power achieved by painters in their experiments with multiple perspectives and simultaneity, while they underscore the esthetic and intellectual parallels between Copland’s music and the work of visual artists who were his contemporaries. Copland’s interests in visual arts were not confined to cubism, but included the folk expressions of the common man that he and many artists who were his contemporaries came to champion. Copland is most original, yet also most American, when he weaves into a distinctive modernist fabric the strains of folk and popular art, amalgamated and transformed into a renewed classical matrix. Copland’s attraction to the agendas of modernists would become for him in later years a point of pride. He recalled reading a little magazine called The Seven Arts as early as 1916, when it featured Paul Rosenfeld’s “The American Composer.” Rosenfeld issued a ringing challenge to create “enthusiasm for American music” and attributed the dearth of American music to “the American’s lack of self-confidence that impels him to take his ideas and his art modestly and gratefully from Europe, and neglect his own.”3 Copland credited both Rosenfeld and the critic Waldo Frank with introducing him to the ideas and personalities of American modernism. Copland’s interest in Stravinsky, whom he met through his teacher Nadia Boulanger during his first years in Paris, also reveals his own musical agenda: “This extraordinary rhythmic puissance Stravinsky owes to his Russian heritage—to the folk songs of his country....”4 Copland recalled that Stravinsky “borrowed freely from folk materials,” and admitted, “I have no doubt that this strongly influenced me to try to find a way to a distinctively American music.”5 Copland’s fascination with folk music led him to forge cultural links with Mexico. In the fall of 1926, he met the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, who was rooming with the painter Rufino Tamayo in a tenement on Fourteenth Street. While in New York, Chávez and Tamayo maintained their interest in indigenous Indian culture and their sympathy for the Mexican Revolution and for ensuing art initiatives by the new government. The enthusiasm of Copland’s Mexican friends for indigenous folk songs and folk art fueled his own investigations into folk music and ethnic identity. Writing about Chávez in 1928, Copland cited the composer’s “use of folk material in its relation to nationalism” as a major trait of modern music.6 In May and June of 1928, Copland traveled to the artist colony of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where no visitor could ignore the presence of picturesque adobe houses and active Spanish folk traditions, which included Spanish-American folk songs, some of which were imported from Old Mexico.7 Copland spent much of his two months in Santa Fe working on Vitebsk, a “Study on a Jewish Theme for violin, ’cello, & piano,” which drew on the ethnic roots of his own family. He later explained, “I grew up in the Eastern European tradition.”8 Copland described the “fast section” of Vitebsk as “a Chagall-like grotesquerie that reaches a wild climax and interrupts itself in mid-course, causing a dramatic pause”9 but noted that “It was always a musical stimulus that got me started, as when I heard the folk theme that the Polish-Jewish author S. Ansky used in his play The Dybbuk. It appealed to me just as it had to him. Vitebsk, a small Russian village, was the playwright’s home.”10 There are many significant links of American folk art to modernism in New York. The most important was a show entitled American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900, organized in 1932 for the Museum of Modern Art by Holger Cahill. That year, Van Vechten photographed Copland’s distinctive profile in front of a patchwork quilt to evoke rustic Americana, pioneer virtues of thrift and ingenuity. Van Vechten had clearly heard Copland’s call for an American music. Copland would recall: “The desire to be ‘American’ was symptomatic of the period.”11 Together with the writer Gerald Sykes, Copland enjoyed conversations with Alfred Stieglitz, who called his last gallery, which opened in December 1929, “An American Place.” Of all the artists in the Stieglitz circle, Copland was closest to the photographer Paul Strand, who photographed their mutual friend Chávez. During the 1930s, both Copland and Strand worked in Mexico. Copland praised “the sense of human warmth” in Strand’s work.12 It was through Chávez that Copland met the painter Diego Rivera, with whom Chávez collaborated on the ballet, H.P. (Horse Power)—Rivera designed the sets and costumes. Persuaded to travel to Mexico City by Chávez, Copland found the allure of the folk music there so intense that he went on to compose El Salón México (1932-36). Folk music had the appeal of popular accessibility, which would become an important ideal for the political left. Tamayo, a part of the Mexican Delegation of the left-wing Artists’ Congress in New York, had illustrated Cancionero Mexicano, a book of Mexican folk songs, some of which Copland drew upon for El Salón México. Published in 1931 by the American anthropologist Frances Toor, who gave Copland a copy in Mexico City in 1932, this collection meant so much to Copland that he presented his copy to the Library of Congress in 1957 along with his manuscript for El Salón México. By the mid-1930s, Copland began to expand his musical style, turning from high modernism to what he called “imposed simplicity.”13 From 1935-39, Copland taught at the Henry Street Settlement House on New York’s Lower East Side, where the music director commissioned from him a work that could be produced by young people in the school. He collaborated with librettist Edwin Denby to create The Second Hurricane (1936), which used American references, including the Revolutionary War folk song “The Capture of General Burgoyne.” Another of Copland’s works inspired by folk music was the ballet Billy the Kid (1938). Lincoln Kirstein sought from Copland an American ballet based on Walter Noble Burns’s popular book, The Saga of Billy the Kid, which chronicled the brief life of the cowboy William Bonney. Kirstein gave Copland some published arrangements of cowboy folk songs, six of which were to figure in the ballet in the form of quotations. These quotations contributed to the popular and critical success of Copland’s music for Billy the Kid. The need to venture West for inspiration never possessed Copland, who liked to tell how he composed Billy the Kid in an apartment on the rue de Rennes in Paris.14 Copland also drew upon the folk culture of the Shakers, adopting a motif from their hymn “Simple Gifts” for his Appalachian Spring ballet score, which he composed in 1944 at the request of Martha Graham. During the course of their collaboration, Graham sent Copland several scripts. She outlined a scene inside and outside a house with a doorway, a front porch, and a swing. On the porch was to be “a Shaker rocking chair with a bone-like simplicity of line.”15 In imagining the overture for the ballet, Graham evoked American folk painting when she compared the character of the Mother to “an American Primitive, small and perfectly drawn in costume and position.”16 In Graham’s script for the ballet, the Mother says, “Spring comes early this year, daughter. About time for spring planting, son.”17 This suggests several of Grant Wood’s paintings with which Graham must have been familiar; surely she had seen his Spring in Town reproduced on the cover of the 18 April 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. In one script, Graham remarked on “the spare beauty of fine Shaker furniture,” noting that “Grant Wood has caught it in some of his things.”18 The Shaker esthetic appealed to the modernist sensibility because it eliminated the superfluous and made simplicity the key, creating an almost abstract design. To create the sets for the ballet, Graham commissioned sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who commented, “Appalachian Spring was in a sense influenced by Shaker furniture, but it is also the culmination of Martha’s interest in American themes and in the puritan American tradition.”19 Copland said of Graham, “she’s unquestionably very American,”20 and added, “Appalachian Spring would never have existed without her special personality. The music was definitely created for her, and it reflects, I hope, the unique quality of a human being, an American landscape, and a way of feeling.”21 Copland’s remarkable talent developed in synergy with powerful artistic concerns that shaped the times. His wide-ranging musical interests parallel developments in the visual arts, particularly his fascination with folk culture and with the search for an American national art. –Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Notes Click on note number to return to its place in the text. 1Aaron Copland, “The Composer in Industrial America,” in Music and Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1952), 106. 2 Aaron Copland, WPA Composers’ Forum-Laboratory, New York City, 24 February 1937, WPA Composers [sic] Forum Transcripts, National Archives, as quoted in Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism (UMI Research Press, 1980), 251. 3 Paul Rosenfeld, “The American Composer,” The Seven Arts 1 (November 1916): 89. 4 Aaron Copland, The New Music: 1900-1960 (W.W. Norton, 1968), 46. 5 Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland 1900 Through 1942 (St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 73. 6 Aaron Copland, “Composer from Mexico: Carlos Chávez,” in The New Music, 145-146. 7 Edna Robertson and Sarah Nestor, Artists of the Canyons and Caminos Santa Fe: The Early Years (Peregrine Smith, 1976), 95. 8 Copland and Perlis, Copland 1900 Through 1942, 160. 9 Ibid., 162. 10 Ibid. 11 See Aaron Copland, “The Composer and His Critic,” Modern Music 9, no. 4 (May-June 1932): 143. 12 Copland to Paul Strand, letter of 6 August 1974, Copland Collection, Library of Congress (CCLC), cited in Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Henry Holt, 1999), 102. 13 Copland, “Composer from Brooklyn,” 161. 14 Copland, “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet,” CCLC. 15 Martha Graham, “House of Victory,” script sent to Copland, 16 May 1943, CCLC. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 From the script version entitled “Name?” sent by Graham to Copland in summer 1943, CCLC. 19 Quoted in Copland and Perlis, Copland Since 1943 (St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 53. 20 Ibid., 32. 21 Copland to Philip Ramey, interview published on cover of Copland Conducts Copland: First Recording of the Original Version, Appalachian Spring (Complete Ballet), Columbia Chamber Orchestra, CBS Modern American Music Series, 1974. Editors’ note: This article is a revised excerpt from Gail Levin and Judith Tick’s book Aaron Copland’s America: A Cultural Perspective (Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000). “Aaron Copland’s America,” an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY, was guest curated by Gail Levin and is open through 21 January 2001.