Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Americas Composer
Heather Scott
INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
HONORS PROGRAM
MUSIC EDUCATION
Abstract
Aaron Copland, a name known by many as one of the fathers of American classical music. Despite his
fame for many of his more popular works such as Appalachian Spring, Quiet City, Fanfare for the
Common Man, Music for Theatre, and many more, Coplands history is surrounded with little pieces of
controversy that would lead one to believe that he was not a likely candidate for being such a profound
impact on American Music. Some of these controversies surround his personal life and sexual
orientation, as well as his love of travel outside of the United States and his once suspected ties to the
communist party. Despite these controversies, Copland creates an American idiom for music through
the use of folk tunes, hymn songs, and jazz. In this paper I discuss how Copland created the American
idiom and the controversies surrounding his personal life through the use of detailed research of his life
both the musical informed and musically uniformed. Leonard Bernstein is one, Aaron Copland is
also one. Aaron Copland, while most known for works such as Fanfare for the Common Man,
Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, has become the center point of the idea of an American
composer.
For this paper, I shall examine what things make Coplands music considered
American as well as examining his own background. In order to do this I shall study
Coplands background and examine his own works through books and biographies. Ultimately I
will discuss Coplands own background that would make him an odd choice as Americas
composer as well as the compositional devices within his music that does in fact make him
Americas composer.
Harold Schoenberg once described Aaron Copland as a Counselor and elder Statesman
as well as a respected symbol of half a century of American music.1 However, before looking
at Copland as an older man, we must first discuss his beginnings in music. Both of his parents,
Sarah Copland and Harris Copland, emigrated from Russia to the United States as Jewish
immigrants. Neither of his parents had any sort of musical training nor the desire to pursue
music. Copland was born the youngest child in his family and his family, having spent money on
the rest of his siblings for piano study, did not want to finance what could be another potential
dead end in music study for Copland. However, Copland was determined. At the age of eleven,
his sister Laurine taught his first piano lessons, using books that she had been taught from. Soon
1
Neil Butterworth, The Music of Aaron Copland (New York: Universe books, 1986), 185.
after they began, his sister declared that he knew more than she did and that he would need a real
teacher if he wanted to progress. 2 At first his parents resisted the argument of their youngest son,
but despite the resistance, Copland eventually won out and he was allowed to go out and find his
own piano teacher for lessons.3 In the fall of 1917, after beginning lesson with Mr. Leopold
Wolfsohn, Copland began to study music theory with the nephew of Karl Goldmark, Mr. Rubin
Goldmark.4 He progressed through his studies until he decided he was going to study abroad for
a summer in Paris. In 1912, Aaron Copland arrived at Fontainebleau as a music school for
Americans was being organized. Here he discovered his future teacher and longtime mentor,
Nadia Boulanger. Copland was the first in a long line of creative musicians who came to study
with her.5 Despite Coplands intentions of only staying the summer, a year at the maximum, he
ended up staying in Paris for three years. Here he had his first experience in having his music
played publically in a concert, in February of 1922. Two years later, he had his first introduction
to the American public in a concert in New York. However, the next year came a very important
performance for Copland, one that would bring him in contact with a person who would arguably
be the second most important person in Coplands musical career: Serge Koussevitzky.6
Koussevitzky had spent his time in Russia conducting and programming new works. When he
came to America, he continued that pattern fully, leading to a performance of one of Coplands
works.
In looking at Coplands life there are three points that would make it interesting to see him
become the epitome of American composition: his Russian - Jewish heritage, his homosexual
2
Arthur Berger Aaron Copland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) 4
3
Ibid, 4
4
Ibid, 5
5
Ibid, 7
6
Ibid, 12
lifestyle, and the accusation of his ties to Communism. Throughout his life, Copland has faced
criticism as an American composer whose heritage came from a place that was not American.
Pollack in his book on Copland said that, Although Copland only occasionally used explicitly
Jewish subjects or themes in his music, many listeners over the years perceived his music, in one
way or another way, as Jewish.7 This is partially due to in the 1920s, his music suggested some
connections to Russian-Jewish style, but also they had a tendency to conform to the association
of Jewish composers with jazz and with avant-garde music. Some people felt that Coplands
background meant that he could not be an American composer. Daniel Mason claimed that
Coplands background precluded him from the ability to write music that was genuinely
American and argued that the spaciousness, the superficial charm and persuasiveness of
Hebrew art, its brilliance, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant eroticism and
pessimism were completely opposed to what he described as the American character which he
felt was marked by the poignant beauty of Anglo-Saxon sobriety and restraintthe fine reserve
so polar to the garrulous self-confessions.8 Similarly Henry Cowell felt that the Jewish-
American composers who employed jazz Copland, Gershwin, and Louis Gruenberg could
not genuinely compose American music. Along with the taunts he received for his Jewish
heritage, were the taunts he received for him being homosexual. At some point in his friendship
with Irving Fine, he told him that when he attended Boys High School, he felt very different.
Fine believed this had to do with his homosexuality more than his being Jewish.9 A documentary
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn documents how homosexual, or at least effeminate boys and boys
7
Howard Pollack Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt and Company
Press, 1999), 518.
8
Ibid, 519
9
Ibid, 24
of Jewish decent were quite commonly taunted.10 His own parents would never really develop
more than a vague understanding of Copland or of his world, including his homosexuality, a
topic that was just not discussed within the Copland family circles. When his niece was asked by
her son why Uncle Aaron was not married she told him that Hes married to his music.11 Later
in life, Copland was one of the numerous composers and artists that were accused of being
sympathetic to or of simply being a communist. During the United States history of the Second
Red Scare, three former FBI agents had included Aaron Copland in the notorious Red Channels:
The Reports of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which was a compendium of 151
artists and their theoretical communist associations.12 In April of the same year, Senator
McCarthy had frightened the U.S. State Department into putting into place stringent security
hurdles for sending music and recordings to libraries abroad. Any derogatory allegations made
against a composer, despite the legitimacy, meant an immediate barring of the composers work
for any of the official American libraries around the world. Of the list of prominent American
composers, the State Department could clear only one; they blacklisted not just Aaron Copland,
but George Gershwin, Roger Sessions, Randall Thompson, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and
Leonard Bernstein.13 However, despite these accusations, Copland was later cleared after
Coplands Americanisms
Aaron Copland is known for several of his works, but what in these works make them
known as American works? With Copland, he recognized that there had appeared a gap between
10
Pollack Aaron Copland: The Life and Work, 24
11
Ibid, 18
12
Ibid, 452
13
Ibid, 454
concert audiences and popular audiences and remarked that composers would need to find a
musical language that would satisfy both composers and popular audiences. Vivan Peralis
remarked in her book that Aaron brought leanness to America, which set the tone for our
musical language throughout [World War II]. Thanks largely to Aaron, American music came
into its own14 Of the numerous compositional techniques and materials that Copland used, there
are three main ideas that come to the forefront: Hymns, jazz, and folk songs. When Copland first
started composing, he would use tunes that he knew to reset. Being familiar with the Jewish
traditions, a few times have led to him resetting Jewish hymns. More than that, hymn tunes have
been a popular source material for composers looking to create a national style, as Copland was.
The influence of deeply ingrained hymn-tunes that have effected these composers could be
considered the original but indirect source for the hymn melodies of Copland.15 In some cases
pre-established funds of Americanism style was added to and fused with American hymnody,
adding a more declamatory style to the music. Further, Coplands brief reliance on Jewish
folksongs for thematic material contained seeds of yet another style that Copland followed: The
American Folksong Period. Arthur Berger once said that it might even be said, with a certain
irony, to be sure, that Copland has had more influence on American folk music than it has upon
him. 16 Although Copland at one point believed that American composers could not create a
music that was distinctly national without a literature of folk music as a background. In holding
with this belief, he made it enduring and tangible with his presentation and assimilation of
American folklore, beginning with highly successful ballets. Folksongs became a staple of
Coplands music and in turn became more of an American musical trait. Arthur Berger noted that
14
Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: Since 1943 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989), 124
15
Butterworth The Music of Aaron Copland,184
16
Ibid, 184
when New England and Shaker hymnody and cowboy songs were later incorporated, an
indigenous substratum had thus already been well developed. In tapping this store of raw
material, Copland was no doubt spurred on by the additional earmarks of Americanism that
would come in its wake.17 Copland used multiple different folk songs including Shaker
melodies, cowboy songs, Jewish folksongs as well as a German tune. In his short symphony,
Copland quoted a short German tune that he had heard once in a German film.18 Before Copland
used folk melodies, however, he found another way to make his music apart of the American
idiom: Jazz. When Copland came back from his time in France, he wanted to write a work that
decided to adopt the jazz idiom and see how he could rework it in a symphonic manner. The
spectacular result was the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. It had an unmistakable tang but it
became the last of Coplands symphonic jazz experiments.19 Copland had found a way to work
the jazz form into the framework of the piece so that once specific allusions to the popular form
were removed, the skeleton of the work still remained jazz. One particular piece that Copland
filled with jazz material was his First Symphony. Julia Smith noted the different jazz idioms
syncopated melodic line featuring flatted intervals of a third and a second which suggest
whole steps; and a three-part jazz-canon at the unison.20 Aaron Copland was not the only
composer writing in the jazz idiom, George Gershwin had been writing symphonic jazz.
17
Berger Aaron Copland, 91
18
Ibid, 91
19
Gilbert Chase, Americas Music: from the Pilgrims to the Present (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987),
478-79
20
Julia Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution to American Music (New York: E.P. Dutton &
Company, 1955), 81
However, despite writing in the same style, Gershwins works seemed to be weighed down by
symphonic interludes of European tone poems that had been poorly integrated.
From the popular pieces within Coplands repertoire there are numerous aspects that are
considered Americanisms. In this section, the following pieces will be discussed: Appalachian
Spring, Quiet City, Music for Theatre, Rodeo, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and briefly The
Red Pony.
Appalachian Spring is most known for its infamous section of Simple Gifts. First
performed in October of 1944, it was commissioned by Martha Graham for her ballet company.
It was originally written for thirteen players and later reorcehstrated for a medium to large
orchestra in 1945. The music is supposed to evoke the mood of a pastoral, early America. The
five variations of Simple Gifts has been called American Baroque.21 In the style of
Coplands writing at this time, Simple Gifts is but one of the numerous genuine folk-song that
appears throughout the ballet. It is also considered the epitome of his American style. The
piece, even if its visual aspect is taken from the piece, has each bar rooted in the feeling of the
countryside of New England, giving this piece a strong feeling of national expression.22
Appalachian Spring also includes the open fifth harmonies that are quintessential idiom of
Quiet City brings in Coplands ability to portray American cities and the experience of
being in a city. Someone once said in reflections on the piece, The first of [Coplands] music I
ever heard was Quiet City in 1940, and it bowled me over. Except for Chicago composers,
21
Chase, Americans Music, 479-80
22
Butterworth, The Music of Aaron Copland, 101
Sowerby and Carpenter mainly, the notion of American music hadnt quite taken with me. Now
here suddenly was Aaron Coplands gem, at once so French like I adored with its succinct
expressivity, yet so unFrench with its open-faced Goodwin.23 Others believed that in the
openness of the accompaniment alongside the English horn and trumpet solos brought about the
ideal programmatic writing of the experience of being in the big-city. The idea of spiritual
acceptance and isolation with still having jaunty, tender, and harsh moments as well.24
The idea of symphonic jazz works being brought into Carnegie Hall in 1925 had people
crying Sacrilege. Music for Theatre became one of Coplands most popular symphonic jazz
works although one of his first serious challenges as a composer. The piece was commissioned
by the League of Composers who had invited Koussevitzky to conduct. Copland wanted to write
and develop something specifically among the American idiom after having been immersed in
European music during his years abroad as a student.25 Despite Coplands attempt at writing a
purely American piece, some musicians believe the work to be his most popular work of the
French-Jazz period. The piece is riddled with jazz idiomatic writing, each movement filled with
many examples. The second movement adopts the more popular style of jazz and includes
polyrhythms that are manipulated toward the harmonic progression of dominant seventh chord,
moving towards its implied root in a 3-2 suspension. It also applies the older ragtime bass with
the emphasis on one and three. Movement three contains a real blues melody that is repeated
three different times in slight variations. The fourth movement is a form of jazz scherzo. Each
movement is adding to the cyclic form, bringing the central melody back through until the piece
comes full circle with the trumpet motive. The piece becomes a major point of development in
23
Copland and Perlis, Copland: Since 1943, 121
24
Butterworth, The Music of Aaron Copland, 185
25
Berger, Aaron Copland, 13
Coplands style as it notes the separation from the European, or French, manner of composing
while trying to use that to create an American style through jazz idioms.26 When talking about
Copland and his use of jazz in his compositions, Music for Theatre becomes one of the forefront
pieces.
Neil Butterworth once described this piece as wholly American and said that the story
alongside the treatment of the songs produced Coplands first totally national work.27 Billy the
Kid sounds like a Western film score. The first movement at first present a singular pastoral
theme, only six measures long. The melody is harmonized in open fifths and both the
harmonization and the woodwind setting helps convey the feeling of wide expanse and nostalgic
loneliness of an open prairie.28 The second movement brings in a folk tune Great Grandad.
Copland chooses to freely adapt folk melodies into a rondo form. The waltz in spite of its
European rooted origin, Copland gives it an American folk song and an American cadence
through the use of syncopated American rhythms. Alongside Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid
In the same vein as Billy the Kid, comes Rodeo and The Red Pony. Rodeo is another piece
that is of Coplands folk tune compositional period. Like a few of his other pieces containing
folk songs, some of them come from other countries but are reworked by Copland to make them
more American. An example of this comes from a brief quote of McLeods Reel, a Scottish
connection. Copland reworks this tune through a jazz treatment, making the entire movement
very American in style. Although Rodeo is in the same vein as Billy the Kid, Copland uses more
jazz treatments throughout, using polyrhythmic vamps and rural American sources. Rodeo is
26
Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution, 86
27
Butterworth, The Music of Aaron Copland, 79
28
Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution, 188
considered to be one of Coplands most easily understood and most accessible works. It is
Simple and direct both in design and language, really Americana at its best.29 The same open
fifth harmonies that are present in many of Coplands American tunes can be also found in The
Red Pony. The Morning at the Ranch movement begins idyllic in mood, using the motives that
suggest natures gradual stirrings in the morning, the theme suggesting the atmosphere of
write a piece for an American figure and soon after finding that Walt Whitman had been taken
by another composer, his focus turned towards Abraham Lincoln. When Copland told one of his
composer friends that he was writing a piece to portray Abraham Lincoln in a composition, he
was told that there was no possible way of composing a piece that would stand up to the
brilliance of Lincolns own writing. With that in mind, Copland decided to put Lincolns own
writing into his work creating a piece for orchestra and narrator. The piece has a wide scope from
the literary classical of Lincolns writing to the popular folk tunes that are used. The most
notable section of the piece is the quotation of the Gettysburg Address that is spoken overtop of
popular songs that hail from the civil war period. Along with that is the beautiful presentation of
the Springfield Mountain folk ballad as a reoccurring theme throughout.31 Another matter of
Americana within the piece was the purpose behind the piece. The work had a specific purpose
in mind when it was commissioned to be a work that would help bring together the American
people during the World War II years when it was felt that certain concept of America needed to
emphasized and restated in simple and direct terms.32 Copland wrote the work in a style that
29
Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution, 193
30
Ibid, 209
31
Chase, Americas Music, 480
32
Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution, 225
united serious symphony goers along with the casual listeners, making the piece so accessible to
all American people and not just the professional musician or the sophisticated symphony
attendees. Robert Lawrence said that, Here, in its sinew and lack of rhetoric, is American
music.33
Conclusions
composer well known for writing music that truly evokes the spirit of America. Despite being
a part of several groups of people that were not well received at the time of his growing up:
being of Jewish descent and being homosexual. Then later in his life being accused of
sympathizing with communist groups during McCarthys second red scare. A good portion of his
significant training as a composer also happened abroad for three years, soaking in European
music. Despite all of these aspects, however, Copland has helped develop an compositional style
of music that is recognizable as wholly American. In many cases it involves open quartel and
quintel harmonies as well as folk tunes or folk tune like writing and jazz. The combination of
these items allows for an American idiom in music that can still be heard today in compositions
both popular and classical. Jim Beckel Jr.s Glass Bead Game and The American Dream both
having callings towards Coplands writing. Todays Western film scores still use Coplands open
fifths and fourths to set the mood of wide open spaces and peaceful prairies. Frank Tichelis
Shenandoah uses the classical folk tune of Shenandoah and then intermixes the Battle Hymn
of the Republic into it. Even in vocal tunes, Libby Larsons Raspberry Island Dreaming, uses
not only folk songs, but similar treatment to the vocal line as Copland uses in his setting Emily
33
Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution, 225
Dickenson poems. In spite of Coplands past leading to him being an almost unlikely candidate
for being Americas composer, he has discovered and cultivated musical idioms that have
Berger, Arthur. Aaron Copland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Print.
Butterworth, Neil. The Music of Aaron Copland. New York: Universe Books, 1986. Print.
Chase, Gilbert. Americas Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. Chicago: University of
Copland, Aaron and Vivian Perlis. Copland: Since 1943. New York: St. Martins Press, 1989.
Print.
Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Henry
Smith, Julia. Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution to American Music. New York: E.P.