Copland
A few weeks back, I wrote briefly on the value of relevance in music, speaking in that instance of the music of Viktor Ullmann.
“Copland’s real achievement … was to create an American vernacular from materials that were mostly self-fashioned.”
Quite true. However, he also says-
“Though the music may show none of the alienation of a Mahler or the expressive frenzy of a Schoenberg, it comprehends the loneliness inherent in American individualism, and accepts it as a price worth paying.”
“To have given musical voice to a nation as heterogeneous as America is a staggering achievement, all the more surprising when you consider that this vision of a rural WASP uprightness was achieved by an urban, left-wing, homosexual Jew.”
“Here in the US we composers have no possibility of directing the musical affairs of the nation- on the contrary… I have the impression that more and more we are working in a vacuum. There seems to me less than ever a real rapport between the public and the composers and of course that is a very important way of creating an audience, and being in contact with an audience. When one has done that, one can compose with real joy.”
When I say that classical music should charge the ramparts, that we should be fearless participants in the struggle to shape a better world, it may sound a bit silly. Yet, in 1933, who would have thought a “left-wing, homosexual Jew” could help heal, sustain, reinvent and redefine the nation for the better simply through his music?As Christoph von Dohnanyi said in an interview a few years back, nobody remembers who the ruler of Germany was when Beethoven was writing his Fifth Symphony. Art is the single most powerful positive force in society.
Even as we feel that great music in all genres has never been more pushed to the sidelines of our culture, we can hear in Copland’s words that we were not the first generation to feel that ours was becoming a hopeless cause. Copland escaped the vacuum without sacrificing the depth and integrity of his musical approach. Appalachian Spring may be a more accessible work than the Dance Symphony, yet its musical construction is just as sound and sophisticated and integrated as anything by Berg or Brahms, never mind the rest of his own music. He literally wrote the soundtrack for the country’s modern history. If only the country we’ve become were as loving, as humble, as charitable and as hopeful as the one he imagined for us.c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
Copland made a conscious choice to turn toward a more accessible idiom for the good of his fellow citizens. A choice he made knowing that many of his fellow citizens would never entirely accept him as one of their own. In the early years of his American project, he agonized over the distance between musicians and society, saying in 1933-
Which may also be true when you discussing his major America-themed music of the 1930’s and 40’s, but was not always true throughout his career. In fact, in works like the Second Symphony, Connotations, Vitebsk and Statements, Copland could be thorny, frenzied and abstract. He had a profound understanding of, and respect for, all the techniques and approaches of the early 20th Century, and in Connotations even used his own 12-tone system. Bernstein himself often said there were two Coplands- the loving grandfather of “American” American music, and the forbidding Old Testament prophet who wrote Inscape. Aaron the prophet could write music that was as forbidding and foreboding as anyone’s.
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