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Aaron Copland: A Snapshot
1999
The one and only time I saw Aaron Copland conduct was when my parents took me to Tanglewood for a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I was maybe thirteen at the time, but already Copland was to me a famous composer and the BSO represented the best that New England culture had to offer.
Copland’s stage persona was the gift to be simple, if at that. His white tuxedo hung at an awkward angle off the frame of his lanky body, and his long forehead and even longer nose suggested Ichabod Crane to me. He struck up the band: Preamble for a Solemn Occasion, an "official" piece of a type that only could have been written by a composer who’d become a national institution. Even at my young age I could detect something obligatory and half-hearted about its tone. A commission from the United Nations, it was the kind of command performance piece to which a recognized composer would be unable to demur.
When conducting he was all joints and bones, and the BSO players, who obviously loved him, were pressed to find the center of his beat. But it was nevertheless a thrill for me, a boy from a small town in New Hampshire, to see America’s most famous composer conduct what I thought was the world’s greatest orchestra. He followed with Appalachian Spring, after which Charles Munch finished the program with Daphnis and Chloe.
Appalachian Spring was even by then a piece of iconographic Americana, and Copland, whose sixtieth birthday later that year was deemed important enough to be celebrated on NBC by a special live telecast from Lincoln Center, had come to represent The Great American Composer that we always felt we had lacked. But by this point–1960–his best work was long behind him, having secured a niche in the cultural pantheon along with artists like Edward Hopper, John Steinbeck or Robert Frost. Even though Copland had started out in the Twenties as a provocateur, he had shortly thereafter adapted his music and his image to fit the mythos which the country so fervently demanded during the moral and economic crisis of the Thirties.
Copland’s apprenticeship and maturation ran a parallel course with his Mexican contemporary, Diego Rivera. Both went to Europe as very young men. Rivera went to Spain and Paris to study traditional landscape and portraiture, and Copland became a protégé of Boulanger and an acolyte of Stravinsky during the postwar years in Paris. Rivera soon became a major voice in the Cubist movement and was on the point of enjoying real commercial success when he abruptly turned his back on what he felt was an elitist activity and returned home to Mexico and radically refashioned his art to reflect his profound identification with his native roots.
The young Copland, although even then too careful and deliberate to be a real avant-gardist, was nevertheless in the minds of the polite audiences of the BSO and the New York Philharmonic a hooligan . The works written during his twenties and early thirties were brilliant, daring, and full of the urban energy that we associate with the best American art of that era. Some of it, like the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theater, was suffused with the raucous,
jittery spirit of the Jazz Age. But other works like the Piano Variations and the Short Symphony could be as severe and spartan and every bit as Modernist as anything written by his European contemporaries Schoenberg, Hindemith or Bartók.
But then Copland, like Rivera, experienced his own kind of populist conversion, and by the mid-Thirties he began producing those totemic works–Billy the Kid, Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait, Appalachian Spring–which transformed him from being
simply another talented composer of classical music into a cultural icon. Nowadays the mind-numbing regularity of orchestra programming, classical recordings and even television have so relentlessly driven home the populist Copland that we can often be shocked to encounter the flintier, more challenging side of his musical personality that disappeared during his mid-career only to resurface in his later works, some of them, like Connotations and Inscape, written in his own version of the twelve tone style.
What delights us today about the early works is their astonishing freshness and audacity. All the elements of the Copland style are already present by 1925 in Music for the Theater: the simple diatonic melodies (often reminiscent of cowboy ballads, blues songs or work songs), the jazzy riffs for saxes and trumpets, the Stravinskian disjointed syncopations and, most significantly, the lean, spare, clean sense of harmonic space that derives from his personalized use of open fifths.
Along with Gershwin’s two famous piano and orchestra pieces, Copland’s Piano Concerto defines the genre of the "urban concerto". In it we hear the first example of those soaring skyscraper themes that became the grist for future mills of Hollywood. And we hear too the bustling city traffic, musical street scenes with sassy, honking car horns and abrasive instrumental ejaculations that even today would make the rudest of New York City cabdrivers proud. What became thoroughly familiar thirty years later in West Side Story had its origins in this remarkble eighteen-minute concerto which even today has yet to win its deserved place in the repertoire.
Copland’s career fell perfectly in synch with two signal phases of the American collective consciousness, the wild and wooly Twenties and the socially conscious (and mythically self-conscious) Thirties. Like his idol, Stravinsky, Copland fell under the pervasive influence of Schoenberg and Webern during the late Fifties, and his last compositions reflect a mature composer’s attempt to come to terms with a radically different style of making music. The late works like Connotations and Inscape have their own unique strengths, and even today, a century after their composer’s birth, they retain a strong, provocative power first encountered in pieces from the Twenties such as Symphonic Ode. Copland was gifted enough to preside musically over two major shifts in a nation’s cultural mood and he even had the temerity in his last pieces to go completely against the grain of what his public might expect from him. That in itself is more than most artists can ever hope for.
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