Search Results

More than any other composer in the generation born around 1900, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) has come to be seen as championing an idiom that was identifiably American. Copland began pursuing a nationalist voice during the 1920s, while keeping pace with the latest developments abroad. During this period, Copland grasped the importance of having both an international purview and a national one. His transatlantic gaze was deeply intertwined with his personal response to neoclassicism. Copland's European connections were reinforced by Paul Rosenfeld, as well as by the modernist climate in New York City, with the high value it placed on new music from abroad. Over the course of the 1920s, Copland kept his transatlantic ties strong by visiting Europe frequently, and played a public role in encouraging Euro-American communication by publishing essays and reviews commenting on his experiences. Through these trips and articles, Copland's relationship to neoclassicism emerged with clarity.

This chapter examines the Cold War experience of composer Aaron Copland. It argues that after suffering at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cronies in the early 1950s, Copland reoriented himself. He not only turned away from musical Americanism as a composer but also took advantage of opportunities to tour overseas for the State Department, both to remove the taint of leftism from his image and to politically neutralize the Americanist style. Yet Copland’s Cold War choices were not simply a strategic response to a radically altered political landscape. Both his work with government and his musical works from this period show his enduring commitment to a set of strong personal principles that shaped his compositions, his writings, and his cultural diplomacy work across his long career. Copland’s ability to stay true to what he believed in ensured he never succumbed to cynicism, as did many other members of the Old Left.

In Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett’s analysis, the “identities and dichotomies” of her title concern a single piece of music, Aaron Copland's Piano Quartet (1950) but also a number of extramusical issues that preoccupied the composer at the time. She places Copland’s work, including his Hollywood film score for “The Heiress” and the efforts of his contemporaries (such as Schoenberg, Virgil Thomson), within the complex political landscape post-World War II, the Red Scare in the United States, and the Cold War. Several incidents in Copland’s career circa 1950 indicate that he, with good reason, felt vulnerable to the forces of reaction at work. DeLapp-Birkett demonstrates conclusively that in his public statements and in his compositional development Copland was responding consciously to the pressures from a variety of sources.

This chapter analyzes Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944) as a work that encrypts its popular front critique of American history through revisions of the scenarios Graham wrote for Aaron Copland and changes in the choreography. The subtext of slavery and John Brown is discussed, the idea of character compression in Graham’s dramaturgy, and her distrust of narrative.

This chapter introduces the political landscape caused by World War I, the crisis in capitalism, the Great Depression, and the Popular Front, crises that would shape Copland’s and Eisler’s individual musical and political perspectives. Their political commitment led them to embrace film music and to seek employment in Hollywood. Their decisions took place within the debates regarding the aesthetic and political values of high and low culture as exemplified by culture critic Gilbert Seldes (The Seven Lively Arts), George Antheil, and others. The chapter also discusses Hollywood as an industrial enterprise and the conditions that composers like Copland and Eisler faced working in the movie capital.

Though Harris was Schuman's last major teacher, it was Aaron Copland who gave Schuman the biggest boost in his career, first by helping Schuman win the prize for the Second Symphony and then by encouraging Schuman to present the work to Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky agreed to perform the symphony, and Schuman's host that weekend was a junior at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein. This chapter explores the early beginnings of these new and seminal relationships, with an emphasis on the close friendship Schuman developed with Copland. This chapter also looks at an aborted ballet Schuman was commissioned to write and considers the possibility that some of this music became part of the American Festival Overture.

This chapter examines the process by which Aaron Copland's westernness replaced his more contentious leftism, overshadowed his overt engagement with African American musical materials, and won nationwide popularity for a composer who might otherwise have been marginalized based on his Russian–Jewish heritage or his homosexuality. The conjunction of whiteness, masculinity, and the West that was so significant a part of Harris's appeal had different but still powerful implications for Copland. The aggressive heroes and rugged landscapes of the West helped balance (veiled) allusions to his homosexual preferences, deflecting interest away from his Jewish, cosmopolitan background and focusing it on an Anglo, western mythology that was rapidly becoming a favorite arena for representations of American identity in the mass media.

This chapter traces a new history of midcentury musical modernism in the U.S. It suggests that political and cultural factors influenced compositional style and regime shifts. It highlights the decline of tonal Americana and of Aaron Copland's career as Dean of American Music and discusses the emergence of twelve-tone serialism and other complex music.

This chapter describes the researching and reconstructing of what was perhaps the most infamous modern music event of the 20th century after Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, George Antheil's “Ballet Mecanique” for player piano, eight concert grands, xylophones, drums, a fire siren, doorbells, and aeroplane propellers. It was designed to shock, but beneath its wild surface lies a story that includes the poet, Ezra Pound; artists and film makers Leger, Man Ray, and Picabia; composers W. C. handy (and his all-negro Orchestra) Colin McFee, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson; and the violinist, Olga Rudge. It was the first work to encompass silences, some as long as twenty-four seconds, and in many minds, minimalism.

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Aaron Copland. He talks about listening to recordings of Copland's ballets as a teenager and the romance of America they conjured up. Later, at Cornell, he heard his Clarinet Concerto written for jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, and the Piano Quartet that began his encounter with 12-tone music.

This chapter continues to trace Schuman's meteoric rise. It begins by revisiting his close relationship with Copland and looks at Schuman's continued belief in musical propaganda. His relationship with Koussevitzky also reappears in this chapter. An aborted commission for a stage work resulted in one of Schuman's most enduring compositions: the song “Orpheus with His Lute.” The chapter concludes with Schuman's decision to leave Sarah Lawrence College to become the director of publications at G. Schirmer Publishers, a decision Schuman quickly rued. Fate would intervene and give Schuman another, more prestigious position from which to disseminate his ideas about music education and contemporary music.

This chapter first considers Aaron Copland's political engagement, particularly the geographical settings that agitated his political conscience and the impact which leftism had on his views about folk music. It suggests that Copland's biographical and emotional distance from western Americana opened up space for irony, comedy, and nostalgic displacement in such works as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and The Red Pony. Copland's own biography supplies supporting evidence for the idea that the imagery of the American West offered a haven for social and sexual aberrance, but also a site where patriarchal visions of social and moral order could be vigorously upheld.

In a 2001 Musical Quarterly article, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood” Neil Lerner suggests that it is the “pastoral” textures in Copland’s concert music that provided a wellspring of material for film scores composed by John Williams, James Horner, and Randy Newman, to name a few, and that the feeling of “wide open spaces” blended well with advertising campaigns aimed at suburbia. Increasingly, more contemporary films have revealed the seamier side of suburbia’s utopian promises. American Beauty, In the Bedroom, Little Children, and Revolutionary Road do not extol the benefits of living in blissful conformity, but rather highlight the isolation and anxiety. These films all share the same composer: Thomas Newman. This chapter builds on Lerner’s work, not by tracing the “pastoral” influence of Copland on Thomas Newman, but in examining how Newman channels the urban loneliness and isolation found in Copland and conveys similar feelings while underscoring suburban narratives.

The stylistic designation “neoclassicism” met with especially strong resistance from young composers in the United States during the 1920s. Although slippery to define, neoclassicism popped up all across the Western modernist spectrum, often encompassing stylistic principles of “clarity” and “simplicity” and a broad range of attempts in art, music, and literature to re-imagine materials from the past. Whatever its profile, as a loosely defined aesthetic it affected a significant body of American works written late in the decade. These included compositions by Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, Carlos Chavez, Walter Piston, and other newcomers to the scene. Much of the ambivalence of American composers toward neoclassicism hung on the question of whether the aesthetic yielded orthodox Europeanism, or whether it represented an empowering form of internationalism. Selected works from the Copland-Sessions Concerts exhibit sprightly responses to varying aspects of the aesthetic, showing how American composers achieved individuality while responding to a transnational set of aesthetic values.

Intentionally nationalist works are often discussed in pejorative terms in historical accounts of twentieth-century music. But during World War II such compositions flourished, including so blatantly obvious a piece of Americana as Morton Gould’s still popular American Salute (1943). Americana also conjured up a much broader set of signifiers, especially in more commemorative works such as Bernard Herrmann’s For the Fallen. Presenting these works at the end of my journey allows for a deeper contextualization that goes beyond their facile dismissal as nationalist trifles or bombast, showing instead that for all their topicality, they also responded to more sophisticated and long-standing concerns about musical and national identities in the United States, and in various ways to the massive popular reception in the United States of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”). Three types of musical Americana are discussed in this chapter: first, patriotic and commemorative works such as William Grant Still’s In Memoriam and Roger Sessions’s “Turn O Libertad”; secondly, compositions drawing on signal moments of U.S. history with the Revolutionary and Civil Wars: Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom (on words by Thomas Jefferson), Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, and Roy Harris’s Symphony no. 6, “Gettysburg”; and thirdly, the “Great American Symphony,” renewed interest in the concept of which was spurred by World War II and for which contenders included Harris’s Fifth Symphony, Copland’s Third, and Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony.

Debuted by Ballet Theatre in 1944, Fancy Free represented the first major success for its composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. Inspired by The Fleet’s In, a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, Fancy Free encoded a queer strain in its plot and musical style. Correspondence in the archives of Bernstein and the composer Aaron Copland documents how gay relationships inflected the work’s overall outlook, intermingling biography with art. This chapter probes Bernstein’s musical language as an aesthetic of parody and montage in which he simulated a rapidly shifting array of styles, then stitched them together much like a cartoon or film score.