NYT: As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound
Premise Checker
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/arts/music/29copl.html
[I'm dubious myself about the merit of the earlier works of those whose
moral character was so low that they sold out to Hollywood. I'm thinking
also of Korngold. I've never been able to appreciate the popular works of
either.]
By [3]ALLAN KOZINN
A THOROUGH exploration of Aaron Copland's music, with a comprehensive
look at the 20th-century American culture that shaped him and that he
shaped, seems a natural idea and a likely audience draw. So the most
astonishing thing about the festival "Copland and His World" at Bard
College is that it was so long in coming.
Bard began presenting its composer-themed summer festivals in 1990,
the year of Copland's 90th birthday. (He died that December.) But that
first summer, the subject was Brahms. At the Copland centenary, in
2000, the festival, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., was devoted to
Beethoven. In its first 15 years, Bard has examined only one
thoroughly American composer, Charles Ives (in 1996), although a few
of its other subjects - Bartok (1995), Schoenberg (1999) and Mahler
(2002) - had important links to the United States.
Now Bard is more than making up for its tardiness. In addition to
three weekends of "Copland and His World" (Aug. 12 to 14 and 19 to 21,
and Oct. 21 to 23), the college's Summerscape series (of which the
festival is a part) is offering other programs that touch on Copland's
time.
This weekend, for instance, a highlight is a staging of "Regina," by
Marc Blitzstein, a composer who shared with Copland both an eclectic
musical sensibility and a progressive political outlook, and in the
weeks to come (starting on Thursday), the Blitzstein work competes
with a production of Copland's only full-scale opera, "The Tender
Land." Summerscape's film series includes several productions for
which Copland wrote the music, including "Of Mice and Men" (Thursday),
"The City" and "The Cummington Story" (Aug. 7), "Our Town" (Aug. 11)
and "The Red Pony" (Aug. 14).
All this attention seems only right, or at least it does to a critic
who grew up in the years when Copland was regarded, with something
close to unanimity, as the "dean of American composers." More than
Ives, the quirky loner, and more than Copland's most famous
contemporaries, like Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris and
William Schuman, he was for several generations the personification of
American composition. Still, those composers, as well as others who
wrote in a more rigorous, international style - Roger Sessions and
Elliott Carter, among them - helped create an atmosphere of both
collegiality and competition that was essential to their shared goal
of establishing an American compositional style, or styles.
New Music of the New World
It was not, after all, as if Copland had invented American music, or
claimed to. He was fully aware of century-straddling American
composers like George Whitefield Chadwick and Edward MacDowell, who
wrote in an essentially Germanic style, as well as Charles Tomlinson
Griffes, who was more inclined, like Copland, toward French
Impressionism.
There was also a line that stretched back to the early and mid-19th
century, when Anthony Philip Heinrich and Homer Newton Bartlett
affixed American names (like Heinrich's "Dawning of Music in
Kentucky") to works cast in European forms, and when Louis Moreau
Gottschalk built a concert career playing Lisztian fantasies on both
Old and New World themes.
Just before Copland's time, Scott Joplin's ragtime classics might have
become an American parallel to the array of nationalistic European
styles that ran from Chopin through Albéniz and Granados, and Arthur
Farwell tried to take up Dvorak's suggestion that an American voice
could be found in Native American chants and dances. And then there
was Ives, the crusty New England iconoclast who wove hymns, marches
and patriotic songs into his often dissonant harmonic fabric, and his
friend Carl Ruggles, whose musical vision of America was daring,
idiosyncratic and often muscular.
One thing Copland had that these composers lacked is a critical mass
of like-minded colleagues and competitors, as well as sympathetic
performers, all pushing to have American composition taken seriously
on the world stage. Bard's programs offer an overview of this thriving
milieu, sometimes to a fault: in some programs, the context is so rich
that Copland nearly fades into the background.
A program called "Paris, Boulanger and Jazz," for example, includes
Copland's early, cartoonishly descriptive piano work "The Cat and the
Mouse" (1920) and his Four Motets (1921), among works by nine other
composers, including several whose jazz-tinged compositions
(Stravinsky's "Ragtime," Milhaud's "Création du Monde" and Gershwin's
"Three Preludes," among them) influenced Copland's own hybrids.
Another, celebrating Copland's efforts as a promoter of new music,
through composer societies, publications and his own conducting,
includes only one of his works (the 1930 Piano Variations), alongside
scores by seven other composers, from Ives and Ruggles to Sessions and
Varèse. And a program devoted to neo-Classicism includes Copland's
Violin Sonata amid works by Stravinsky, Piston, Diamond, Fine and
others.
Many Shades of Copland
But even if Copland's works are vastly outnumbered, these thematic
programs trace the contours of his career. They also touch on a
longstanding point of contention in the world of Copland studies (or
even merely Copland listening). Specifically, how many Coplands are
there?
The most famous Copland, naturally, is the populist composer of
Western-tinged ballets, "Billy the Kid" (1938) and "Rodeo" (1942); the
instantly endearing "Appalachian Spring" (1943-44), with its deft
variations on a graceful Shaker melody; the earthy, broad-boned
"Fanfare for the Common Man" (1942); and the "Lincoln Portrait"
(1942), with its quotations from folk songs (and Stephen Foster) and
its narration from Lincoln's speeches.
But there is also the early Copland, whose works from the "Organ
Symphony" (1924) and the rugged Piano Variations (1930) through
"Statements" (1935) breathed the angularity of European modernism, and
the bluesy Copland, who, before hitting on the notion of evoking the
Old West, considered jazz the most direct route to an American
language. That Copland explored this approach in works like "Three
Moods" (1920-21) and "Four Piano Blues" (1926-47), "Music for the
Theater" (1925) and the Piano Concerto (1926).
Yet another Copland - the one who wrote "El Salón Mexico" (1932-36),
"Danzón Cubano" (1942) and the "Three Latin American Sketches" (1959)
- was fascinated with Latin rhythms, melodies and tone color.
And then there was the post-Americana Copland, who used 12-tone
methods in many of his later works, from the Piano Quartet (1950) to
his two last major symphonic scores, "Connotations" (1962) and
"Inscape" (1967).
Success and the Critics
The success that Copland's popular ballets and celebrations of
Americana brought was doubled-edged, not least because listeners were
puzzled when he abandoned it for - of all things - 12-tone composition
later on. But puzzlement ran in the other direction as well, from
critics who admired his early modernist scores, and regarded the
popular pieces as pandering. Depending on who was commenting, writers
described his catalog as split between the invitingly accessible (or
the overtly commercial) and the unbearably harsh (or the rigorously
high-minded).
Copland objected to this distinction, and the friction it caused can
be seen clearly in several of the contributions to the printed version
of "Aaron Copland and His World," a 528-page book edited by the
American music specialists Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick, and published
by Princeton University Press in connection with the festival. A
selection of correspondence between Copland and the composer Arthur
Berger, for example, finds Copland reacting with controlled irritation
to a biographical sketch Berger published.
"I think also that for the sake of drawing sharp distinctions you
rather overdo the dichotomy of my 'severe' and 'simple' styles,"
Copland wrote to Berger in April 1943. "The inference is that only the
severe style is really serious. I don't believe that."
It took until 1970 for Berger to recant fully. "I have become more and
more aware of the injustice that can be done to you by imposing too
much insulation between 'this kind of Copland music' and that," he
wrote in a 70th birthday salute, "and I see you more and more as the
unified, the whole musician, capable of expressing his devotion to the
highest musical ideals in any number of ways."
Shifting Political Currents
The impression that there were two Coplands is hard to shake, but
perhaps distance has made it easier to accept Copland's assertion that
all this music flows from the same source. The 12-tone works have
their harsh moments, yet the tone row that drives the Piano Quartet
yields themes that are essentially tonal and allow for the lyricism,
energy and even playfulness that are Copland hallmarks. There are
moments in that work that are couched in the same style of wide-open
harmonies you hear in "Appalachian Spring."
And "Connotations," which was greeted with near silence and critical
iciness when Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic first
performed it, has passages etched in the warmly voiced chords that
were a Copland thumbprint in the 1940's.
The festival's concerts, lectures and panel discussions also show the
degree to which just about every aspect of Copland's life and work was
part of an active exchange with the broader culture. And though
hindsight has smoothed over some of the ripples, that exchange was not
always comfortable.
Shifting political currents took their toll. Having aligned himself in
the 1930's and 40's with the progressive social causes that many
artists of the time supported - and which, certainly, were consistent
with the idealistic populism of his music - Copland found himself
ensnared in the anti-Communist hysteria of the postwar years. Life
magazine published his picture, taken at a Cultural and Scientific
Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1949, under the
headline "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts."
In 1950, he was denounced by the American Legion and blacklisted in
the infamous "Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio
and Television."
A 'Portrait' and Patriotism
When his "Lincoln Portrait" was scheduled to be heard in a National
Symphony concert celebrating President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
inauguration, in 1953, Fred E. Busbey, a Congressman from Illinois,
argued from the floor of the House of Representatives that "there are
many patriotic composers available without the long record of
questionable affiliations of Copland." The piece was quickly dropped:
suddenly Copland, the quintessential American composer, was being
declared un-American, and one of his most overtly patriotic works was
deemed unfit for a presidential occasion.
And in May 1953, Copland was summoned to testify before Senator Joseph
R. McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. When pressed
to name other participants in the 1949 peace conference, he told the
subcommittee that he didn't remember seeing anyone who wasn't named in
newspaper reports.
The effect of this on Copland's work is difficult to assess. Richard
Taruskin suggests, in his "Oxford History of Western Music," that it
might not be a coincidence that Copland began his first 12-tone work
just after he was denounced by the American Legion. Perhaps. But
Copland might have been feeling the limitations of his popular style
by then, anyway. Speaking about his style shift, he said simply that
12-tone offered a useful way to find new chords.
He was also doing something he had done several times before:
belatedly following a path traveled by Stravinsky before him. In a
way, Copland's ballets were American twists on the use of Russian folk
music in Stravinsky's early ballets. Copland flirted with Stravinskian
neo-Classicism as well. When Stravinsky began writing 12-tone music,
Copland resisted, but in the 1950's, he followed suit.
From Yiddish to the Prairies
One score that shows the strain of the hearings, though, is "The
Tender Land," the opera that Copland composed to a libretto by the
painter and dancer Erik Johns (writing under the pen name Horace
Everett) in 1952 (revised 1955). Inspired by James Agee's "Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men," with its Walker Evans photographs of the
Depression-era South, the opera is, on the surface, the quaint story
of a farm family, the Mosses, painted in Copland's familiar prairie
style.
But an episode at the end of the second act touches on Copland's
uneasy experiences with "Red Channels," the Eisenhower inaugural ban
and Senator McCarthy. When the Moss family hears reports that young
girls in the community have been assaulted, Grandpa Moss, the
embittered patriarch, suspects Martin and Top, two recently arrived
migrant workers.
The sheriff soon brings news that others have been caught and have
confessed, but Grandpa Moss declares that Martin and Top are "guilty
all the same."
Copland's Jewishness is the subject of a lecture and a concert, and is
touched on in several chapters in the "Copland and His World" book.
Copland took his background as a matter of fact: he was not religious,
and if he did nothing to hide his Jewish identity, he also did little
to call attention to it, beyond writing occasional works like
"Vitebsk," a 1928 chamber work based on a Yiddish song.
'Authentic' American Music
It was an issue for others, though. In the 1920's and 30's, composers
like Harris and Thomson, who had their own visions of the American
musical voice, called attention to Copland's ethnicity periodically,
sometimes with the suggestion (either vague or explicit) that it
disqualified Copland from producing truly authentic American music.
Some of Copland's colleagues disdained his early use of jazz, in his
quest to find an American accent, for similarly unsavory reasons. The
composer Henry Cowell, for example, described Copland and Gershwin as
"a pair of sophisticated Parisians" (a reference to their having
studied in Paris) and argued, in a 1930 interview with the German
magazine Melos, that "the roots of jazz are the syncopation and
rhythmic accents of the Negro; its modernization and present form is
the work of Jews - mostly New York 'Tin-Pan-Alley' Jews. Jazz is Negro
music, seen through the eyes of these Jews."
Copland and Gershwin might not have disagreed, except with the tone of
Cowell's observation, and with his assertion elsewhere that their use
of jazz was to American music's detriment.
None of these tempests did Copland permanent damage, though. And, as
it turned out, avowedly secular though he was, he had a rabbinical
streak that proved to be a central part of his personality. Like
Bernstein, Copland was a natural teacher, a persuasive explainer of
what music means and how it's made. In his books -"What to Listen for
in Music" (Signet), "Music and Imagination" (Harvard University
Press), "On Music" (Da Capo) and "The New Music 1900-1960" (W. W.
Norton) - he encourages listeners always to seek out the new and to
embrace it both intellectually and viscerally as the sound of its
time.
And in the two-part oral history he compiled with Vivian Perlis -
"Copland 1900-1942" and "Copland Since 1943" (St. Martin's Press) -
his avuncular and, at times, oracular voice comes through powerfully.
Visitors to the festival can hear Copland for themselves in a
collection of television interviews and documentaries to be screened
on Aug. 12 and 19. And although his music has retained its freshness
and its ability to speak for itself, this other aspect - his energetic
and authoritative championship of new music in general, and American
music in particular - remains crucially important. Who, after all, has
been his successor?
EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)
Premise Checker wrote:
> As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/arts/music/29copl.html
>
> [I'm dubious myself about the merit of the earlier works of those whose
> moral character was so low that they sold out to Hollywood. I'm thinking
> also of Korngold. I've never been able to appreciate the popular works
> of either.]
What an utterly asinine attitude! Did Prokofiev and Walton
"sell out", too, or do you reserve your disdain purely for
American composers? What's the difference between writing
for films and writing music to order for a wealthy patron?
(Except that writing for films is intrinsically more
difficult, and you collect fees instead of being a live-in
servant - as was often the case with the wealthy patron.)
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Premise Checker wrote:
>
> > As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/arts/music/29copl.html
> >
> > [I'm dubious myself about the merit of the earlier works of those whose
> > moral character was so low that they sold out to Hollywood. I'm thinking
> > also of Korngold. I've never been able to appreciate the popular works
> > of either.]
>
> What an utterly asinine attitude! Did Prokofiev and Walton
> "sell out", too, or do you reserve your disdain purely for
But not to Hollywood. (And don't forget Shostakovich.)
(Henry V, which is Walton's best-known filmscore, was WWII BritProp --
it leaves out the antiwar scenes.)
> American composers? What's the difference between writing
> for films and writing music to order for a wealthy patron?
> (Except that writing for films is intrinsically more
> difficult, and you collect fees instead of being a live-in
> servant - as was often the case with the wealthy patron.)
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Brendan R. Wehrung
Speaking of predecessors, has anybody heard a symphony by Powell on Albany?
Here's the Hurwitz take:
John Powell (1882-1963) composed his Virginia Symphony between 1941-51,
and purely in terms of harmonic style it might be taken for a somewhat
crude example of the work of the English pastoral school--E.J. Moeran
comes most readily to mind. This is because the "Virginian" folk tunes
Powell uses as his thematic material basically all came with the original
colonial settlers from England. More recent, native productions, never
mind gospel tunes and spirituals, simply were not part of Powell's world
(as a card-carrying racist and supporter of eugenics, anything African
American was strictly off the table). So if you enjoy Moeran's Symphony in
G minor, you will (kind of) know what to expect.
That said, Powell was no symphonist. What we really have here is basically
a suite in four movements, all of which sound pretty much the same (even
if the same really is pretty). There's certainly no dramatic flow to the
music, no reason that the climaxes appear where and when they do, and
Powell has a rather unfortunate habit of capping each crescendo with a
nice big cymbal crash, a strategy whose effectiveness remains inversely
proportional to its frequency of use. Perhaps if Powell had written a true
scherzo instead of two slowish inner movements the work would have sounded
more "symphonic", or in any event more contrasted. Still, it would be
churlish to deny the music its simple charms and joie de vivre. Certainly
it's not dull or uneventful, and JoAnn Falletta, that very reliable
champion of unfamiliar repertoire, gets typically fine results from the
Virginia Symphony, a group she has directed since 1991.
Carmen Dragon's equally pleasant arrangement of Shenandoah completes this
appealing package, and only serves to emphasize Powell's role as
"arranger" rather then "composer"--and really there's nothing wrong with
that. Toss in excellent sonics, and if you approach this symphony without
prejudice or unrealistic expectations (which is more than we can say for
its composer) you will find plenty to enjoy. It may fit Peter Warlock's
description of Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony as sounding "like a cow
looking over a barn gate"; but as long as the view from the farmyard is
lovely, who cares?
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com
Brendan
Premise Checker (che...@panix.com) writes:
> This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
> while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.
>
> --0-824512229-1122648254=:7999
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE
>
> As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/arts/music/29copl.html
>
> [I'm dubious myself about the merit of the earlier works of those whose=20
> moral character was so low that they sold out to Hollywood. I'm thinking=20
> also of Korngold. I've never been able to appreciate the popular works of=
> =20
> styles that ran from Chopin through Alb=E9niz and Granados, and Arthur
> Farwell tried to take up Dvorak's suggestion that an American voice
> could be found in Native American chants and dances. And then there
> was Ives, the crusty New England iconoclast who wove hymns, marches
> and patriotic songs into his often dissonant harmonic fabric, and his
> friend Carl Ruggles, whose musical vision of America was daring,
> idiosyncratic and often muscular.
>
> One thing Copland had that these composers lacked is a critical mass
> of like-minded colleagues and competitors, as well as sympathetic
> performers, all pushing to have American composition taken seriously
> on the world stage. Bard's programs offer an overview of this thriving
> milieu, sometimes to a fault: in some programs, the context is so rich
> that Copland nearly fades into the background.
>
> A program called "Paris, Boulanger and Jazz," for example, includes
> Copland's early, cartoonishly descriptive piano work "The Cat and the
> Mouse" (1920) and his Four Motets (1921), among works by nine other
> composers, including several whose jazz-tinged compositions
> (Stravinsky's "Ragtime," Milhaud's "Cr=E9ation du Monde" and Gershwin's
> "Three Preludes," among them) influenced Copland's own hybrids.
>
> Another, celebrating Copland's efforts as a promoter of new music,
> through composer societies, publications and his own conducting,
> includes only one of his works (the 1930 Piano Variations), alongside
> scores by seven other composers, from Ives and Ruggles to Sessions and
> Var=E8se. And a program devoted to neo-Classicism includes Copland's
> Violin Sonata amid works by Stravinsky, Piston, Diamond, Fine and
> others.
>
> Many Shades of Copland
>
> But even if Copland's works are vastly outnumbered, these thematic
> programs trace the contours of his career. They also touch on a
> longstanding point of contention in the world of Copland studies (or
> even merely Copland listening). Specifically, how many Coplands are
> there?
>
> The most famous Copland, naturally, is the populist composer of
> Western-tinged ballets, "Billy the Kid" (1938) and "Rodeo" (1942); the
> instantly endearing "Appalachian Spring" (1943-44), with its deft
> variations on a graceful Shaker melody; the earthy, broad-boned
> "Fanfare for the Common Man" (1942); and the "Lincoln Portrait"
> (1942), with its quotations from folk songs (and Stephen Foster) and
> its narration from Lincoln's speeches.
>
> But there is also the early Copland, whose works from the "Organ
> Symphony" (1924) and the rugged Piano Variations (1930) through
> "Statements" (1935) breathed the angularity of European modernism, and
> the bluesy Copland, who, before hitting on the notion of evoking the
> Old West, considered jazz the most direct route to an American
> language. That Copland explored this approach in works like "Three
> Moods" (1920-21) and "Four Piano Blues" (1926-47), "Music for the
> Theater" (1925) and the Piano Concerto (1926).
>
> Yet another Copland - the one who wrote "El Sal=F3n Mexico" (1932-36),
> "Danz=F3n Cubano" (1942) and the "Three Latin American Sketches" (1959)
> --0-824512229-1122648254=:7999--
--