Composer of the Month
The American composer should be credited with forging a national style but, explains Mervyn Cooke, his music went far beyond that
Mervyn Cooke on the voice of America, Aaron Copland
These days, thanks largely to our constant exposure to film and television music, we have a very clear idea of what constitutes an ‘American’ orchestral sound. There are several different types: the brashly optimistic brass-driven march idiom of a John Williams blockbuster theme; the breezily tuneful and rhythmically dynamic bustle of a typical western score; delicately transparent chamber ensemble music, embodying the simple melodic style of a folksong or communal hymn; the elegiac solo trumpet issuing its forlorn yet noble call from a distant battlefield; the dignified, patriotic (and sometimes
disconcertingly militaristic) strains we associate with almost any depiction on screen of a fictional or historic US president; and the exciting mix of classical and popular musical traditions in colourful symphonic jazz. Astonishingly, all these diverse American idioms – unified by a common nationalism – owe their origins and development to the pioneering work of a single, remarkable musician: Aaron Copland, the most important and influential mainstream American composer of the 20th century.
It was, somewhat ironically, an expatriate European who first seriously suggested that American composers should draw on their homeland’s musical traditions. While working in New
York in 1895, Dvo ák had urged local musicians to engage creatively with African-american folk tunes – an idea that flourished decades later with the work of Harlem Renaissance musicians including William Grant Still, James P Johnson and Duke Ellington. But when Copland embarked on his compositional career in the 1920s, American concert music was still thoroughly indebted to European styles and, in order to be taken seriously in the US, it was still virtually compulsory for American composers to pay their dues in Europe first. Copland was fortunate, as were so many of his younger compatriots, in being able to study in Paris with the formidable Nadia Boulanger, who taught him between 1921 and ’24 at the American Conservatory
Copland was bowled over by the music of Stravinsky and Milhaud in particular
at Fontainebleau. His sojourn in France was revelatory not only on account of Boulanger’s inspirational musicianship and deep understanding of the practicalities of being a composer, but also by being surrounded by the latest trends in contemporary arts. He was bowled over by the music of Stravinsky and Milhaud in particular, and the music he himself composed in these early years reflected the former’s rhythmic unpredictability and the latter’s idiosyncratic fusion of classical and popular styles. Their influence is heard in the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (later reworked without organ as his First Symphony), which Copland wrote for Boulanger to perform, and which she premiered in New York in 1925 after he had returned home.
Copland soon came to realise that his future lay in distancing himself
from European influences and cultivating a manner of composing that was uniquely American. His first strategy was to import jazz elements into his concert works, an initiative that seems obvious enough now but which was controversial at the time. This collision of musical worlds occurs in his Music for the Theatre (1925) and Piano Concerto (1926), the orchestration for the latter featuring saxophones and a drum kit. ‘Any piece based on jazz was assured of a mild succès de scandale,’ he later wrote; but this understatement hardly suggests the critics’ hatred for the Piano Concerto in particular. One said the music sounded like ‘a jazz dance hall next door to a poultry yard’, while others felt it was ‘a harrowing horror from beginning to end’. In 1927 Copland still felt jazz had a future in concert music, hoping that it might prove to be ‘the substance not only of the American composer’s foxtrots and Charlestons, but of his lullabies and nocturnes’. The following year, however, the hostility shown towards the concerto by belligerent orchestral players during rehearsals for a performance at the Hollywood Bowl led to a Los Angeles newspaper headline that bluntly announced: ‘Copland to Abandon Jazz in Future Compositions’. It would be some years before Copland’s protégé, Bernstein, picked up the symphonic-jazz torch.
Still in search of a national sound, Copland turned instead to folk traditions that, unlike city-centric jazz, were associated with the simple lifestyles and natural beauty of rural America. First came an immediately recognisable brand of cowboy music, suggestive of wide open spaces but also by turns buoyantly down-toearth and folksy, which was epitomised by the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942). Both influenced later movie scores written for westerns. The famous ‘Hoedown’ from Rodeo was a response to an instruction from his choreographer to ‘hit a fiddle tune hard’ and to include ‘brass yells and whoops’. Not wishing to become typecast as a populist prairie-bound composer, Copland later developed a more abstract, economical and tonal idiom that, while reflecting American traditions in the simplicity of its melodic style, continued to demonstrate his admiration for Stravinsky. Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring (1944), which uses the Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts’ and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, exemplifies this style. So vivid is the music’s image of rustic purity that it is instructive to realise that the title was an afterthought, the composer having already written the score on the assumption that it was to be an abstract dance piece.
Copland’s film scores were also influential. The music he wrote for documentaries in the 1930s typified his wish to break away from what he called
‘the lush sort of Hollywood music that often had little relationship to the action, emotions or ideas in a movie’. Several of his later films were based on classic works of American fiction by Henry James,
John Steinbeck and others, and both his cowboy-ballet style and more rarefied neo-classicism proved suited to the narrative demands of The Red Pony and The Heiress (both 1949). He won an Oscar for The Heiress, but then wrote to the press to complain that his main-title music had been replaced by a popular song tune; as a direct consequence of his protest, or so he felt, invitations to work in Hollywood dried up. Nevertheless, the patriotic tone of such wartime concert works as Lincoln Portrait (1942) and Fanfare for the Common Man (1943, later incorporated into his Third Symphony) carried on influencing other American film composers.
If a large part of Copland’s mission was to create an American soundworld that would appeal to a wide audience, he remained committed to a more esoteric, dissonant modernism that ref lected his admiration for the innovations of European composers. Works such as the Symphonic Ode (1927-32) and Piano Variations (1930; later orchestrated as Orchestral Variations) were in part inspired by a revelation from Boulanger’s teaching:
the concept of la grande ligne (a sense of fluid continuity in a musical structure) – or, as Copland put it with respect to the Ode, the challenge of creating music ‘with an unbroken logic … so thoroughly unified that the very last note bears a relation to the first’. Copland described his works based on this principle as his ‘hard-bitten’ pieces, and this proclivity for abstract composition later came to involve an engagement with Schoenberg’s serialism. Such structural procedures are encountered in Copland’s Piano Quartet (1950), Piano Fantasy (1957) and his orchestral work Connotations (1962). Some have argued, perhaps spuriously, that a Cold War agenda was lurking in the wings here, with a US composer delighting in using techniques condemned by the Soviet regime as decadent. Connotations was written for the opening of Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall), and was designed to be modern in spirit. As Copland explained in a televised address before the premiere: ‘I wanted to remind our listeners that we are dedicating [the hall] not only to the rehearing of the great music of the past but also to the more challenging music of our own day.’ But audiences were still not prepared for such gritty music, especially on gala occasions. The First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, was vexed by the new piece, and could only repeatedly exclaim ‘Oh, Mr Copland!’ when they went backstage after the premiere.
When Copland died in 1990 aged 90, the New York Times’s obituary aptly described him as ‘a gentle yet impassioned champion of American music in every style’, and that his ‘greatest gift was his ability to be both serious and popular’. These were no mean achievements, and we can be thankful that music in America and beyond continues to pay homage to his indelible success in placing his country distinctively on the 20th-century musical map.
‘Aaron Copland’s greatest gi was his ability to be both serious and popular’