Aaron Copland and the Establishment of an American Sound in Classical Music

Lee 1

Seoungjun Lee (Elijah)

Mu139 Essay

16May 2013

Prof. Thomas Neenan

Aaron Copland and the Establishment of an American Sound in Classical Music

Aaron Copland, one of the most influential American musicians, was a composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor from 1900 to 1990. He became attracted by American folk music and incorporated music of the Americas into his concert music. Spending early days in France where he learned from Nadia Boulanger, Copland created a distinctly American Sound in his concert and ballet music during the years 1936 to 1944.

The son of Jewish immigrants, Aaron Copland’s early childhood contributed to an interest in music (Pollack 15). Copland depictshis parents as “genial entrepreneurs, loyal Americans, staunch Democrats, and loving but busy” (Pollack 17). Of his four siblings, Copland remained very close with Laurine who had studied voice and piano, learning enough to entertain the family with ragtime and popular songs.Laurine was crucial to Copland’s early unbringing not only because she “promoted his early musical education,” but also because she persuaded their parents to let Copland study in Paris (Pollack 19). After she had taught him all she could on the family upright, Laurine suggested that Copland should find a professional teacher (Pollack 32).

Although Copland stated that he had the “great luck” to be born with a musical gift, his early education would not be possible without his neighborhoods. One of the earlier instances was when word of mouth led him to Leopold Wolfsohn, who had a studio in Brooklyn. Copland studied with him from 1913 to 1917; according to Copland, Leopold Wolfsohn was “a competent instructor, with a well-organized teaching method” (Pollack 32).Under Wolfsohn’s guidance, Copland had decided to become a composer by thetime he was 15 (Gorlinski 176).In 1916, Copland essayed his piece to date, a Capriccio for piano and violin. Derived mainly from Italian opera and Russian-Jewish dance music, the piece demonstrated popular American styles. In the spring of 1917, Copland completed a solo piano piece, Moment Musicale - a Tone Poem, inspired by a poem, “Fear,” by his friend Aaron Schaffer (Pollack 33).

Copland sailed to France in 1921 to spend a year studying abroad, including a summer semester. He made a few new friends and took some conducting lessons at a new conservatory for young American musicians established in Fontainebleau (Pollack 45).After sitting in on a few classes and having some casual contact with Nadia Boulanger, he realized that he had found the teacher he was looking for (Pollack 46).Boulanger was the daughter of a French singing professor and a Russian contralto, enjoyed a pedigreed Parisian education, studying organ with Vierne and composition with Gedalge, Fauré, and Widor (Pollack 46). She was very knowledgeable about music and instrumental techniques as Copland recalled in his bookCopland on Music:

She knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky, and knew it cold. All technical know-how was at her fingertips: harmonic transposition, the figured bass, score reading, organ registration, instrumental techniques, structural analyses, the school fugue and the free fugue, the Greek modes and Gregorian chant. Needless to say this list is far from exhaustive (87).

Copland also admitted that Nadia Boulanger was particularly intrigued by new musical developments:

Before long we were exploring polyrhythmic devices together – their cross-pulsations, their notation, and especially their difficulty of execution intrigued her. This was typical, nothing under the heading of music could possibly be thought of as foreign. I am not saying that she liked or even approved of all kinds of musical expression – far from it. But she had the teacher’s consuming need to know how all music functions, and it was that kind of inquiring attitude that registered on the minds of her students (Copland 88).

Nadia Boulanger was the organist, composer, and pedagogue, who honed the compositional skills of half the major American composers of the rising generation – the revolt against Germanic grandiosity, the yen for lucidity and grace, and the cultivation of Baroque and Classical forms (Ross 291).

Piano Variations of 1930 is a monumental masterpiece of Copland that was greatly influenced by the teaching of Naida Boulanger. While composing the Variations, Copland undertook a systematic and chronological study of music literature, in particular keyboard works and variations form (Pollack 151).The piece surpasses the ultra-modern school of Varèse and Ruggles in the relentlessness of its attack, depicted as “a new American harmony, brash and bluesy, grow[ing] from primordial chaos” (Ross 293).The Variations consists of a short, compact theme, twenty variations, and a coda. The theme moves from minor to major and back to minor, andit also features a “pungent four-note motive (E – B-sharp – D-sharp – C-sharp)” related to Copland’s penchant for the octatonic scale and his admiration for Bach, who uses an identical four-note motive (Pollack 150). This four-note motive colors the entire piece, generating its own inimitable harmonic language, including juxtapositions of the motive that result in a series of piercing dissonances. The ingenuity with which Copland uses this theme won the admiration of musicians,and its originality of the form is shown throughout the pieceas Mellers stated, “There has neven been a work more decisive in its originality” (Pollack 151).Piano Variations became one of Copland’s most admired compositions, and the piece also became a footstep toward his style of Americanism through its distinctive style, which is tauter in form, leaner in texture, and still more direct and personal in tone, free from the sort of portentousness (Pollack 150).

Copland’s political stance played a major role in creating his perspectives and thus leading him to construct his own style of music. Copland inherited his interest in public life in part from his father, who briefly served as president of the local synagogue and who was active in the local Democratic Party. Although Copland never joined any political party, he described himself as “sympathetic toward the American-Liberal principles” (Pollack 271).With the onset of the Depression and the rise of Nazism, however, the climate grew more militant, and Copland and most of his friends became bona fide Communists or so-called fellow travelers, especially in the years 1932-38 (Pollack 272).Copland was not by nature a political person, yet he began associating with the Communist Party and its activities (Crist 15). Even though Copland was unaware of the grim and brutal realities of Soviet life, he was a youthful defender of the Russian Revolution, repeatedly attempting to visit the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1937(Pollack 280).Copland served as vice chairman of the council’s music committee, which along with the theater and literature committees hosted the First Conference on American-Soviet Cultural Cooperation (Pollack 282). For a while, he remained affiliated with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (Pollack 284). Then, in June 1950, Copland withdrew from the organization and also began severing ties with other leftist organizations. Furthermore, he resigned from the Workers’ Music Association, one of the last such groups he belonged to (Pollack 285).His flirtation with radical activism ended when he found the style – and the deeper experience of life – that he had long been seeking (Ross 300).Heassumed a more critical tone toward the Soviet Union, arguing that the loss of freedom in the Soviet Union had deprived the artist of one of his most important rights, “the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong” (Pollack 285).

Copland admitted that his most admired colleagues had left a mark on American music (Pollack 177).Copland and Sessions reacted immediately and strongly to each other’s music (Pollack 165).Copland first met Sessions (1896-1985) at Nadia Boulanger’s in May 1926, who grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts; attended the Kent School, Harvard, and Yale; and studied with Ernest Bloch (Pollack 165).Copland vigorously promoted Sessions, practically serving as his agent (Pollack 165).The Copland-Sessions Concerts sponsored two or three chamber music concerts annually over the four-year period 1928-31 (Pollack 166). Copland admired of Session’s work, singling out for praise something from the 1920s or else the Violin Concerto (1935). In Our New Music, he described the composer as the consummate, painstaking craftsman of “tactile sensibility” (Pollack 168). Copland valued Sessions’ “creative energies” stimulated by the absorption of the twelve-tone method, and praised that his music was “of serious import and permanent value” (Pollack 169). Copland’s relationship with Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) – the most legendary of all such friendships – had an element of the fateful as they met at an Anna Sokolow dance recital in New York in 1937 on Copland’s birthday (Pollack 193).Without Bernstein, Copland probably would not have found so large a public for his music (Pollack 193). Bernstein was a fanatic lover of Copland’s Piano Variations(Pollack 194). Bernstein supported Copland in a variety of ways, arranging El Salón México for solo piano, writing a few bars of Rodeo, producing The Second Hurricane, giving the premiere of the two-piano Danzón Cubano with the composer, and recording his favorite work of Copland’s, the Piano Sonata (Pollack 196).After all, Copland thought that Bernstein was the conductor who most “intuitively” understood his work (Pollack 197).

Copland’s friendship with the Mexican composer CarlosChávez lasted more than fifty years and was extraordinary (Pollack 216).Chávezfrequently conducted Copland’s music and programmed one or another Copland work nearly every season, including premieres ofthe Short Symphony and El Salón México(Pollack 220). Their friendship went beyond mutual support and shared ideals; they felt a deep spiritual and emotional bond (Pollack 223).Copland knew Chávez’s work intimately as he wrote an authoritative article:

His music is not a substitute for living but a manifestation of life. It exemplifies the complete overthrow of nineteenth-century German ideals which tyrannized over music for more than a hundred years. It propounds no problems, no metaphysics. .. He is one of the few American musicians about whom we can say that he is more than a reflection of Europe (Pollack 221).

Copland thought Chávez’s attempts at fashioning folk materials into “an art-form” at least as successful as the comparable achievements of Falla and Bartok (Pollack 221).Chávez deeply esteemed Copland’s music. He praised the Piano Variations as a work of “supreme intelligence, superior sensibility, and supreme culture” (Pollack 221).

The relationship between Copland and Chávez involved a certain Pan-American resistance and solidarity in the face of European cultural domination as Chávez wrote to Copland in 1931, “We must change the situation, Aaron. We must not accept to be in the hands of foreign conductors and interpreters whose mind and heart is far away of the spirit and culture of this new world.” “All you wrote about music in America awoke a responsive echo in my heart,” answered Copland. “I am through with Europe Carlos, and I believe as you do, that our salvation must come from ourselves and that we must fight the foreign element in American music” (Pollack 222). Copland believed that he was responsible for seeking for an authentic and unique American sound, and he lauded Chávez’s ability to evoke indigenous music without overt quotation as Elizabeth B. Crist explains in her book (46):

Copland regarded Chávez’s music from 1920s as a prime example of modern nationalist composition. He admired the ways in whichChávez integrated folk music and a contemporary compositional idiom, melding techniques associated with musical modernism and Mexican Indian music […] Thus Chávez seemed to have satisfied Copland’s own desire to write modern music that was identifiably American (Crist 46).

Chávez’s music exemplified the complete overthrow of nineteenth-century Germanic ideals, offering the first authentic signs of a new world with its own new music (Crist 46).

El Salón Méxicoby Aaron Copland under the direction of CarlosChávez is a symphonic composition that demonstrates an American sound. On Copland’s first trip to Mexico in 1932, he began working on a piece using Mexican tunes, El Salón México, which he completed in 1936. El Salón Méxicofollowed in the footsteps of one of Copland’s favorite pieces, Milhaud’s La Creation du monde; as Milhaud found inspiration in a Harlem nightclub, El Salón México also demonstrates a famous dance hall in Mexico City calledEl Salón México (Pollack 298). In writing the work, Copland incorporated two recent collections of Mexican folk tunes, one edited by Ruben Campos, the other by Frances Toor. Most of these tunes utilize meters of 6/8 or 3/4, sometimes in alteration, as in the traditional traditional huapango. Copland freely deleted and changed pitches and also varied rhythms, often prolonging or shortening a note or adding or omitting a rest (Pollack 299). His rhythmic ingenuity stemmed from the actual practices of Mexican folk musicians. Thus, Copland used modern techniques in order to get to the heart of a folk melody (Pollack 300). He fused Mexican folk music with his own arrangement – fusing with popular jazz style, and his preference for distinctive national styles was evident for his own American sound. As a symbolic act, the music forges identification between otherwise distant cultures: traditional and modern, rural peasants and the urban proletariat, Americans of all nationalities and ethnicities (Crist 59).

One of other pieces in depicting Americanism is Copland’s Billy the Kid, the first section of which is called“The Open Prairie,”a phrase that has become synonymous with Copland’s populist or Americana style” (Ross 300).Woodwind figures in rough-hewn parallel fifths cut across an emptied-out musical space, conjuring the picture of a wagon train moving across some long, dusty valley of the West. Later, a liberal sprinkling of cowboy melodies – “Great Granddad,” “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and so on - made the Wild West explicit (Ross 301). In quick succession Copland manufactured another “all-American music icon”: the ballet score Appalachian Spring (Ross 329). Just like many other Copland works, it provides images of an ideal notion, the America that could have been or might still be (Ross 329). A recording of Copland leading a rehearsal of Appalachian Springvividly demonstrates his comments, “Softer, very sul tasto, misterioso, great mood here… That’s my favorite place in the whole piece… organlike. That sounds too timid. […] Take it freshly again, like an Amen” (Ross 332). Copland conjured a perfect American music as he took his all effort to find the unique American sound.

It was a natural choice for Copland to participate in government programs for cultural exchange, as he had already established himself as leading figure in American musical life (Crist 59). In 1940 he was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Music within the Department of State Division of Cultural Relations. Then, within the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Copland was appointed to the Committee for Inter-American Artistic an Intellectual Relations and chaired the U.S. group for Latin American music (Crist 60). In 1941 government sent Copland on a mission to explore the musical life of the Americas. He toured Latin and South America; in sum, he visited nine countries, made twenty-five public appearances, including three concert performances as a pianist, met sixty-five composers, eight musicologists, and as many conductors (Crist 61). Later, Copland made two more trips to Latin America in 1947 and 1963, each time giving lectures, making radio appearances, conducting local orchestras, and meeting various composers and musicians (Crist 68). He enjoyed the sense of possibility, the potential for transgression, of cultural and musical mixing through the trips. Copland looked south for inspiration and found a new ideal of Americanness (Crist 69).

Aaron Copland was a precursor for popular front music during the 1930s and the 1940s (Ross 293).American music owes Copland much, and every serious musician is aware of this debt. At every stage of his career Copland had given more than freely of his own time to help, support, and encourage his colleagues (Goldman 3). As composer, teacher, writer of books and articles on music, organizer of musical events, and a much sought-after conductor, Copland expressed the deepest reactions of the American consciousness to the American scene (Gorlinski 179).In his later years, Copland refined his treatment of Americana: “I no longer feel the need of seeking out conscious Americanism. Because we live here and work here, we can be certain that when our music is mature it will also be American in quality.” (Gorlinski 177). To America and the world Aaron Copland left the paradoxical legacy. As a Jewish, homosexual, liberal New Yorker, he created an American musical language (Pollack 556).

References

Copland, Aaron. Copland on Music. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963. Print.

Crist, Elizabeth B. Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War.

New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Goldman, Richard F. The Musical Quarterly. Vol. 47. No.1. Oxford University Press, 1961.

Print.

Gorlinski, Gini. The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time. New York: Britannica

Educational, 2010. Print.

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man

(Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Print.

Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York, NY:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.