Archive obit: Aaron Copland, Dec.2, 1990
deb...@comcast.net
By JOHN ROCKWELL , NY Times
Aaron Copland, America's best-known composer of classical music and a
gentle yet impassioned champion of American music in every style, died
yesterday evening at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, N.Y.
He was 90 years old.
His physician, Charles L. Starke, said the cause of death was
respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia. Mr. Copland, who was
suffering from diabetes, had two strokes within the last three weeks,
Dr. Starke said.
Integrating Opposites
Of many notable achievements, Mr. Copland's greatest gift was his
ability to be both serious and popular, to adhere to the formal
integrity and moral earnestness of modernism and also to espouse the
generous accessibility of the dominant political mores of the 1930's
and 40's.
In ballet scores like "Billy the Kid" (1938), "Rodeo" (1942) and above
all "Appalachian Spring" (1944), and in concert pieces like "El Salon
Mexico" (1937), "Fanfare for the Common Man" (1942) and "Lincoln
Portrait" (1942), Mr. Copland touched a chord in the American psyche
reached by no other classical musician this country has produced.
Yet in less programmatic works, some of them even embracing the
supposedly elitist 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, like the Piano
Variations (1930), the "Short" Symphony (1934), the Third Symphony
(1946) and "Connotations" (1962), Mr. Copland managed to speak with an
uncompromisingly rigorous voice. That musical integrity underlay his
more popular pieces and lent gravity to their charms.
A New Appreciation
Attacked by admirers of his more popular style, the later works now
increasingly seem the work of the same man, whose breadth of vision and
warmth of spirit could unite Teutonic Serialism and all-American
hoedowns.
Mr. Copland's tireless industry as a concert organizer and promoter of
new music was nearly as important a part of his legacy to American
music as the paramount importance of his compositions.
Blessed with what the composer David Diamond once called an "innate,
natural sense of diplomacy," Mr. Copland worked throughout the 1920's
and 30's to organize concert series of new music, to publish American
scores and to further the cause of the American composer in a time in
which cultural fealty was still paid to Europe. He was particularly
active in forging bonds between composers in the United States and
Latin America, Mexico especially.
His most important steps as a promoter of new music included the
founding, with Roger Sessions, of the Copland-Sessions Concerts in New
York. He was the President of the American Composers Alliance from 1937
to 1945 and a member of the executive board of directors of the League
of Composers. For 25 years a leading member of the faculty at the
Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, he helkped, along with the Boston
music director Serge Koussevitzky, to make that festival a center for
contemporary music of all kinds and nationalities.
In 1932, he directed the First Festival of Contemporary Music at Yaddo,
the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The festival included a
selection of songs by Charles Ives, an important step in the revival of
Ives's then-obscure music. Among the now-important composers that Mr.
Copalnd encouraged in their formative years were Leonard Bernstein,
Lukas Foss, David Diamond, Toru Takemitsu and David Del Tredici.
It Was Jazz, And It Outraged
Mr. Copland had his occasional detractors. In the 1920's, conservatvies
criticized his use of jazz rhythms as tantamount to barbarism. At the
Boston premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1926, audience members accused
Koussevitzky of insulting them.
Twenty-five years later, Mr. Copland offended dismay many listeners and
many of his old champions by adopting, in his own manner, the very
idiom they thought he stood staunchly against -- Schoenberg's 12- tone
composition. Such works as the Piano Quartet (1950), the Piano Fantasy
(1957), "Connotations" and "Inscape" (1967) have made their way more
slowly into the repertory than his easily accessible works.
In 1951, Mr. Copland was the first American composer to deliver the
Norton lectures at Harvard University. He lectured about American music
throughout the world. Although not a prose stylist, he nonetheless
produced many influential booka articles, especially in popular
journals, about the lot of the composer in today's society.
His books includied "What to Listen For in Music" (1939), "Our New
Music" (1941, revised and published in 1968 as "The New Music
1900-1960") and "Music and Imagination" (1952). In 1984, "Aaron
Copland: 1900 through 1942," an autobiography assembled from interviews
conducted with the American musicologist Vivian Perlis, was published
by St. Martin's Press. The second and final volume, "Copland Since
1943," appeared in 1989.
Julia Smith, in her biographical study "Aaron Copland: His Work and
Contribution to American Music," called the composer "this simple and
great man in our midst." In an essay on Mr. Copland in his book
"American Music Since 1910," Virgil Thomson observed, "The Copland
catalogue has good stuff under every heading, including opera."
"He has never turned out bad work," Thomson wrote, "nor worked without
an inspiration. His stance is that not only of a professional but also
of an artist -- responsible, prepared, giving of his best. And if that
best is also the best we have, there is every reason to be thankful for
its straightforward employment of high gifts. Also, of course, for what
is the result of exactly that, 'this simple and great man in our
midst.' "
Mr. Copland was the youngest of Harris and Sarah Copland's five
children. His early life was divided between the pleasures of a humble
but hard-working home, Jewish life and the American immigrant
experience. His parents had come to this country in the 1870's and 80's
from villages in the Polish and Lithuanian parts of Russia.
In "Our New Music," the composer wrote: "I was born on Nov. 14, 1900,
on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab. It had none
of the garish color of the ghetto, none of the charm of an old New
England thoroughfare, or even a pioneer street. I mention it because it
was there that I spent the first 20 years of my life. Also, because it
fills me with mild wonder each time I realize that a musician was born
on that street."
His First Music From His Sister
Mr. Copland's first musical training consisted of picking up scraps of
musicianship from his older sister, an amateur pianist. He continued
his piano studies with Leopold Wolfsohn, Victor Wittgenstein and
Clarence Adler. Early impressions included regular attendance at New
York Symphony concerts under Walter Damrosch at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music. He was also moved by Paderewski, Cyril Scott, Isadora Duncan and
the Diaghilev Ballets Russes.
Graduating from Boys High School in 1918, Mr. Copland continued his
studies of harmony, counterpoint and sonata form under the conservative
Rubin Goldmark, whose strict adherence to Fux, Beethoven and Wagner
helped inspire a rebellious interest in the impressionism of Debussy,
Ravel and Scriabin.
The young musician is said to have once glimpsed the score of Ives's
"Concord" Sonata on the piano in Goldmark's studio, but that his
teacher kept it from him, refusing to let his student become
"contaminated."
Although he never attended college -- an omission that made him
insecure in the presence of intellectuals later in life -- Mr. Copland
was inspired by Romain Rolland's novel "Jean Christophe" and by the
encouragement of a friend to continue his musical studies in France.
"It was where the action seemed to be," he recalled in 1985.
"Stravinsky was living there, and the whole new 'group of six' with
Milhaud and Poulenc. And so I went to study at a new summer music
school at the Palace of Fontainebleau. It's always said that I went to
France to study with Nadia Boulanger, but I had never heard of her
before I arrived."
Mr. Copland's formative encounter with Boulanger made him the first in
a distinguished line of American composers to train with her, a list
that included Thomson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston and Philip Glass.
Friendly with Koussevitzky, who had recently been appointed to the
Boston Symphony music directorship, Boulanger won a promise that he
would lead a new symphony for organ and orchestra that Mr. Copland had
agreed to write for her upcoming American tour.
Koussevitzky did indeed conduct the Organ Symphony, but not until a
month after its premiere, on Jan. 11, 1925, by the New York Symphony
Society under Damrosch. Addressing the audience immediately following
the work, Damrosch said, "If a young man can write a piece like that at
the age of 24, in five years he will be ready to commit murder!" The
remark was widely quoted and no doubt boosted Mr. Copland's career.
Gaining the Summit 'By Easy Stages'
"When he came home from Paris at 24, his study time with Nadia
Boulanger completed, and began to be a successful young composer, it is
said that he determined then to make no unnecessary enemies," Thomson
wrote in "American Music Since 1910." "It is as if he could see already
coming into existence an organized body of modernistic American
composers with himself at the head of it, taking over the art and
leading it by easy stages to higher ground."
"Composers differ greatly in their ideas about how American you ought
to sound," Mr. Copland said in 1985. "The main thing, of course, is to
write music that you feel is great and that everybody wants to hear.
But I had studied in France, where the composers were all distinctively
French; it was their manner of composing. We had nothing like that
here, and so it became important to me to try to establish a naturally
American strain of so-called serious music."
He attempted to do just that by incorporating jazz into "Music for the
Theater" (1925) and then into the Piano Concerto (1927). He followed
these works with more expansive scores like the Symphonic Ode (1929)
and the Dance Symphony (1930).
But his next phase, epitomized by the Piano Variations, the Short
Symphony and the "Statements for Orchestra" (1934), constituted the
culmination of the first phase of his more serious style, which for
some time he himself had trouble reconciling with his more popular
works.
The problem was exacerbated by the political climate among artists and
intellectuals in the 30's, when so many became, if not actual
Communists, then deeply sympathetic to left-wing ideology and its
attendant populism. Although Mr. Copland himself never joined the
Party, he was, in the words of Ms. Perlis as "fellow traveler" and
defended his former ideological comrades when they were attacked.
"It seemed to me," he wrote in "Our New Music," "that we composers were
in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for
music had grown up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense to
ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt it
was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the
simplest possible terms."
His first composition in this overt populist style was "El Salon
Mexico," first played in Mexico City under the direction of Carlos
Chavez. It not only became one of the composer's best-known works, but
also drajmatized in soudn his concern to bring American and Mexican
composers and traditions under a common roof. Other works from this
period include the opera "The Second Hurricane," with its folk-flavored
egalitarianism and tunefully compelling melodies.
Mr. Copland quoted cowboy songs in his ballet "Billy the Kid" and other
kinds of American folk tunes in "Rodeo." "Appalachian Spring,"
commissioned by the modern-dance choreographer Martha Graham, evoked
rural mysticism and the open-fifth harmonies of country fiddlers and
included an elaborate finale based on the Shaker hymn "The Gift to Be
Simple." The suite from "Appalachian Spring" was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for Composition in 1944.
It was during this period that Mr. Copland, like so many American
composers, had a flirtation with Hollywood, the best-known results of
which were his scores for "Our Town" (1944), "The Red Pony" (1948) and
"The Heiress" (1948), for which he won an Oscar.
"Most of 'Appalachian Spring' and a good part of my Violin Sonata were
composed at night at the Samuel Goldwyn studios in Hollywood," Mr.
Copland recalled. "An air of mystery hovers over a film studio after
dark. Its silent and empty streets give off something of the atmosphere
of a walled medieval town. This seclusion provided the required calm
for evoking the peaceful, open countryside of rural Pennsylvania
depicted in 'Appalachian Spring.' "
There are no quotations from folk melodies in the Symphony No. 3
(1946), but it remains very much of a piece with the other music from
this period. "The Tender Land," Mr. Copland's full-length opera, avoids
quotations from popular sources, but retains a thoroughly American
identity through a simulation of folk styles. Although it was neither a
commercial nor a critical success when it was first performed by the
New York City Opera, B. H. Haggin and other critics have counted it
among the great American operas.
Mr. Copland's adoption of the 12-tone system was a gradual decision,
begun in the early 1950's. Leonard Bernstein was among many former
friends and champions who lamented Mr. Copland's decision. In 1970,
Bernstein wrote: "One of the sadnesses I recall in recent years
occurred at the premiere of Copland's 'Inscape,' when he said to me,
'Do you realize there isn't one young composer here, there isn't one
young musician who seems to be at all interested in this piece -- a
brand new piece which I've labored over?'
"The truth is that when the musical winds blew past him, he tried to
catch up -- with 12-tone music, just as it, too, was becoming
old-fashioned to the young."
These comments rankled Mr. Copland and he made a public reply to
Bernstein in an interview with Donal Henahan in The New York Times.
"I thought it was rather naive of him to imagine that you can just
happily go on doing what you always had been doing and get away with
it," Mr. Copland said. "Going into 12-tone seemed to me to be giving
myself possibilities I wouldn't otherwise have had, and it never
occurred to me that by adopting a method that so many other people were
working with that I was somehow betraying myself, my chosen path."
Some years before his death, there were signs that posterity would see
all of Mr. Copland's work as part of the same unified sensibility --
even if the composer himself did not always do so. As he put it in the
1930's, "I occasionally had the strange sensation of being divided in
half -- the austere, intellectual modernist on the one side; the
accessible, popular composer on the other."
But the resolution of his dilemma had lain within him from his earliest
works. In the mid-20's, he had conceived his task as one of
reconciliation.
"The challenge," he recalled, "was to do these complex vertical and
horizontal experiments and still retain a transparent and lucid texture
and a feeling of spontaneity and natural flow." It was his success in
that synthesis of opposites that lends his severe late works their
appeal and his frothiest populism its lasting significance.
A Contented End To His Composing
Still, after 1970, Mr. Copland virtually stopped composing. It was one
of the most striking creative cessations since Rossini and Sibelius,
both of whom abandoned composition at the height of their careers.
"I'm amazed I don't miss composing more than I do," Mr. Copland told an
interviewer in 1980. "You'd think if you had spent 50 years at it you'd
have the feeling that something was missing, and I really don't. I must
have expressed myself sufficiently. I certainly don't feel tortured or
bitter, only lucky to have been given so long to be creative. And
resigned to the fact that it appears to be over."
Mr. Copland remained active, however, as a conductor and lecturer,
until the mid-1980's. He regularly attended performances of his music,
and was always helpful to young students. Although he was at first not
known as a persuasive conductor, his later recordings are now prized.
Asked about his conducting, Mr. Copland replied that "every composer
secretly thinks he knows best how his own music should sound. I had
reason to believe that I was something of a performer by nature."
His later years were filled with honors. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the Henry
Howland Memorial Prize by Yale University in 1970, the Gold Baton from
the American Symphony Orchestra League in 1978 and the Kennedy Center
Award for "a lifetime of significant contribution to American culture
in the performing arts" in 1979. In celebration of his 70th, 75th,
80th, and 85th birthdays, he was saluted with performances throughout
the world.
Mr. Copland was once described as a "tall, rather loosely knit man, who
surveys the scene through plain spectacles with clear blue eyes." His
manner was called "simple, unassuming and urbane." A lifelong bachelor,
he lived for many years in the Empire Hotel near what is now Lincoln
Center before moving to a modest house in Westchester County.
His friend Minna Lederman Daniel once recalled: "There was always a
modesty about Copland, an attitude of not taking success for granted.
Famous the world over, more than comfortably well off, there is still
for him a modicum of wonder about it all."
The closest survivors are two nieces, Gladys Hecht of West Orange, N.J.
and Felice Marlin of Manhattan, and two nephews, Ralph Marcus of
Stuart, Fla., and Burton Marcus of Woodmere, L.I.