Copland's Hope for American Music

by Howard Pollack

Copland was a dedicated and committed advocate for, in his words, “serious” American music. By “serious” he meant music that aspired to depth, some formal complexity, individuality, and high standards of craftsmanship. Copland did not presume that such music needed to fall within the tradition of European classical music, but he accepted the relevance of that tradition to the kind of music he had in mind.

Copland distinguished America’s “serious” music from its “folk” and “popular” music. He had nothing against these more vernacular expressions—on the contrary, he admired their vigor, unpretentiousness, and worldwide appeal. To take one example, while travelling through South America in 1947, he visited Brazil’s northern coast specifically to hear a more authentic folk music than that typically encountered in the clubs of Rio, and returned home with twenty recordings of samba. His own work, of course, made contact with a wide variety of folk and popular musics, mostly, though not exclusively, from the western hemisphere.

For Copland, however, the primary interest of American folk and popular music was as a stimulus for himself and other serious composers. Even when he thought that, say, the serious music of a certain Latin American country lacked the kind of vitality found in its more popular music, he remained fundamentally concerned about the growth and development of serious music in that particular country. And in contrast to such colleagues as Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, George Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein, all of whom shared his high regard for popular music, Copland consistently pointed out what he deemed such music’s shortcomings and limitations. “You can only hear popular songs so many times before you want to hear another popular song,” he would say.¹ He surely liked many folk and popular tunes more than an incompetent piece of serious music, but he considered these repertories as essentially different, a distinction posited in his references to Stephen Foster and Irving Berlin as “songwriters” as opposed to “composers.”

Copland made a special exception for jazz, which, at its best, exhibited many of the qualities he associated with serious music. But jazz also, in his estimation, had certain limitations that distinguished it from serious music; the latter, he claimed, had greater potential and bigger ambitions. Even as he praised the work of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Lennie Tristano, he wrote: “Jazz does not do what serious music does either in its range of emotional expressivity nor in its depth of feeling, nor in its universality of language. It does have universality of appeal, which is not the same thing.”² From his perspective, jazz, like folk and popular music, ultimately represented a crucial resource for serious music, and he accordingly counseled aspiring composers to study it for lessons in spontaneity and invention, rhythmic verve and instrumental ingenuity.

Such hierarchical distinctions run counter to recent trends which tend to equate “low”and “high” art, a line of thinking that actually would not have been all that new to Copland. Even when just beginning his career, in the 1920s, he was aware that certain listeners both at home and abroad, including some eminent intellectuals, thought jazz America’s “classical” music and the songs of Berlin and Kern its “art” songs. In the 1930s and 1940s, as he also well knew, polemicists of various political persuasions denounced “modern” concert music as “bourgeois” and “decadent.” And in the 1960s, some of his friends touted the recordings of Simon & Garfunkel as the important music of the age.

Copland took such attitudes seriously enough to occasionally offer a rejoinder; for instance, he stated that America also had its serious composers—and good ones, too. Moreover, in his own work, he allowed for such viewpoints to the point that his artistic development could even be seen as partly shaped by just such opinions. But the belittling and condescension that frequently greeted American serious music over the years left him unfazed. He never despaired, and he never lost hope.

Rather, he reserved his energies for full support of his ideals. Upon returning to the States from Paris in 1924, he began writing extensively on a wide array of American composers, periodically composing sharp, insightful articles that surveyed many of the most accomplished contemporaries in his field. In time, he lectured and wrote about earlier generations of American composers as well.

Such discussions, far from indulging in any chauvinistic ballyhoo, tended to be severe. Even when writing about those American composers he most admired—Ives, Ruggles, Sessions, Harris, Thomson, Chávez, Piston, Blitzstein, and Schuman, to name a few—he could be and often was rather critical of certain aspects of their work. The point of such exactitude was not just to offer a balanced appraisal for his colleagues themselves, but to help educate the public, for the enterprise Copland had in mind required a self-aware community of composers and a sympathetic but demanding and sophisticated body of listeners.

At the same time, such high-mindedness never dampened his far-ranging support for America’s serious composers as a whole. Roger Sessions even scolded him for wasting his time aiding so many mediocrities. Another colleague, George Antheil, opined that such efforts marked Copland himself as a minor talent. But Copland felt that a thriving and active school provided not only excitement and stimulation, but the necessary foundation for the emergence of still greater music to come.

To this end, Copland engaged in a broad range of activities. He organized concerts of American music (notably, the Copland-Sessions concerts of 1928-1931, and the two Yaddo Festivals of 1932 and 1933); oversaw the publication of new American scores for the Cos Cob and Arrow Presses; helped found the American Composers’ Alliance in order to obtain economic justice for composers and the American Music Center to help facilitate their careers; assisted aspiring composers in obtaining sponsors, patrons, and fellowships; advised performing musicians about American music; conducted scores of American works with professional and student orchestras around the world; and left the bulk of his multi-million-dollar estate to a fund devoted to the propagation of serious American music.

While these efforts were widely, if insufficiently, appreciated, Copland’s candid statements about a variety of matters could engender conflict and opposition. His belief that American composers needed to strike out on their own, for instance, made him particularly wary of any undue dependence on Europe’s great tradition. Not surprisingly, American composers who worked in an international style of one sort or another—not to mention European composers themselves—generally viewed this stance as provincial.

Copland, who criticized the “provincial imagination” of Smetana, Sibelius, and others, recognized such pitfalls himself. But he believed that nationalism provided at least one road toward artistic independence, especially in a country like the United States that lacked a well-established music tradition of its own. Thus, his admiration for American and Latin American composers similarly engaged in creating a distinctively American music, such as Ives, Harris, Chávez, Thomson, and Blitzstein. For Copland, this preoccupation with national idioms and themes did not mean merely striking a colorful or unusual note, but rather embracing one’s time and place, reflecting the world in which one lived, and ultimately expressing one’s place in it.

Even so, Copland’s tastes were far more cosmopolitan than often assumed. He appreciated and early on assimilated the work of such diverse figures as Mahler, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Bartók, and Webern. He also had high regard for Piston and the early Sessions, and had little patience with those who insisted that American music should be absolutely different from European music. In brief, Copland championed a balanced stance vis-à-vis Europe’s great tradition, one that promoted individuality, but not at the expense of cutting oneself off from the world. The cultivation of a distinctive voice in the context of worldwide trends remained a lifelong aesthetic principle.

Copland prized fine craftsmanship as another crucial prerequisite for a viable school of serious American music; indeed, he was unusually sensitive to the misplaced note or careless harmony. He often advised young composers to study with Nadia Boulanger, as he himself had done, not to become indoctrinated in some ideology or other, but as a way for American composers to master their craft. And while academicism left him cold, he had an honest respect for the well-made score. Much as the individuality of Billings, Gottschalk, MacDowell, Ives, Gershwin, Harris, and others compensated, in his opinion, for assorted technical lapses or crudities, so the finesse of such composers as Paine, Piston, Sessions, Barber, and Schuman made up for the lack of a clear and memorable stylistic profile.

Copland had other criteria for judging music. He took to task music perceived as sentimental, trite, sensational, and bombastic. This sensibility distanced him not only from much nineteenth-century music, but from a good many contemporary works for stage and screen. His own operas and film scores, in their unaffected directness, even have the quality of an attempted antidote.

At the same time, he had little sympathy for the hermetic, the inaccessible, the convoluted, and the cluttered. He complained of such overcomplexity, for instance, in certain works by Ives, Schoenberg, Sessions, Carter, Boulez, and Stockhausen. One senses, concomitantly, a strong preference—though not a doctrinaire one—for textural clarity.

In sum, Copland wanted for America a serious music that was individual, that reflected its time and place, that was well-crafted, and that was neither commercial nor hermetic. He shared many of these ideals with the numerous American writers, critics, musicians, film directors, choreographers, actors, and playwrights with whom he congregated and collaborated over the years, including one of his closest friends, the director and theater critic Harold Clurman. The rejection of the commercial and the hermetic, for instance, echoed the literary criticism of one of these associates, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who wrote of a culturally immature America comprised of “millionaires” and “saints.”

Copland may well have agreed with some of these friends that such ideals were best realized, among American artists, by the poetry of Walt Whitman. How far American composers succeeded in approaching Whitman’s achievement—either in the originality of their vision, the sureness of their craft, or the depth of their humanity—Copland hesitated to say. But he felt that America was a young country, and that a profound and meaningful musical culture required time to develop. He hoped that what he and his most esteemed colleagues had accomplished might shed some light towards that goal.

—University of Houston

Notes

Click on note to return to its place in the text.

¹ Interview with Trish Barnes, November 1980, Copland Clipping File, New York Public Library. Cited in Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Henry Holt, 1999), 114.

² Aaron Copland, "Pleasures of Music," unpublished 1959 lecture, Copland Collection, Library of Congress. Cited in Pollack, 118.

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