1.

Lincoln Portrait (1942) Aaron Copland

 Written by Copland as part of the WWII patriotic war effort.
o Asked to write a musical portrait of an ‘eminent American.’
 Originally, Copland wanted to portray Walt Whitman.
 Includes narrated excerps of Abraham Lincoln.
 Quoted original folk songs of the period, including Camptown Races and
Springfield Mountain.

Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) Aaron Copland

 Premiered on March 12, 1943

o Copland, “I [am] all for honoring the common man at income tax time.”
 Fanfare was also used as the main theme of the fourth movement of Copland’s
Third Symphony.

Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943) Paul Hindemiith

 Originally was going to write a ballet based on the music of Weber.

 Salvaged sketches of the ballet to use for an orchestral work.

 First performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur

Rodzinski on January 20, 1944.

Suite Française (1944) Darius Milhaud

 Written specifically for American school ensembles

 The five movements of the suite are named after the French provinces in
which American and Allied armies fought to liberate France during WWII.
o Normandy
o Brittany
o Ile de France
o Alsace-Lorraine
o Provence
 The folk songs from these provinces are incorporated into the piece.
 Premiered by the Goldman Band in 1945

Russian Christmas Music (1944) Alfred Reed

 Commisioned to write a piece of ‘Russian music’ to improve Soviet-American

relations.
 Originally was supposed to be Prokofiev’s March, Op. 99, but it was
discovered that the work had already been performed in the US.
 One movement with four sections
o Carol of the Little Russian Children
 Based on 16th century Russian Christmas carol
o Antiphonal Chant
 o Village Song
o Cathedral Chorus

Ebony Concerto (1946) Igor Stravinsky

 Composed for clarinet and jazz band.

o Written for Woody Herman and his orchestra.
 Stravinsky, "a jazz concerto grosso with a blues slow movement."

Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (1949) Leonard Bernstein

 Written-out jazz composition based on the union between classical music

and jazz.
 The first two movements follow the structure of the classical forms, but are
still sounds in a jazz style.
 Written for Woody Herman’s big band.
o The big band disbanded before the premiere.
 Premiered on October 16, 1955 as part of Bernstein’s tv show, “The World of
Jazz” with Benny Goodman.
o Bernstein revised the score in 1952 from its original instrumentation.

Concerto for Alto Saxophone (1949) Ingolf Dahl

 One of the greatest works in the saxophone repertoire.

 Written on request from Sigurd Rascher.
 Before its publication in 1980 it was ‘secretly’ revised many times depending
on the current performer’s abilities or the composer’s changing ideas.
 Later on some of the material removed during revisions was used in Dahl’s
Serenade for Band.

La Fiesta Mexican (1949) H. Owen Reed

 Based on Aztec, Roman Catholic, mariachi, and other forms of music the Reed
heard while in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and Chapala, Mexico.
 Subtitled “A Mexican Folk Song Symphony for Concert Band.”

Suite of Old American Dances (1949) Robert Russell Bennett

 Includes Cake Walk, Schottische, Western One-Step, and Wallflower Waltz.

Ucla.edu centerforjazzarts.org
neh.gov The Secret Life of The Original 1949
timreynish.com Saxophone Concerto
windrep.org of Ingolf Dahl
windband.org By Paul Cohen
npr.org Yale.edu
salisburysymphonyorchestra.org Rutgers.edu
"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history."

That is what he said. That is what Abraham Lincoln said.

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration
will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us
down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power
and bear the responsibility." [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

He was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in Illinois. And this is what he
said. This is what Abe Lincoln said.

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is
piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we
must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save
our country." [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

When standing erect he was six feet four inches tall, and this is what he said.

He said: "It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong,
throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says 'you toil and work and earn bread,
and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king
who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor,
or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same
tyrannical principle." [Lincoln-Douglas debates, 15 October 1858]

Lincoln was a quiet man. Abe Lincoln was a quiet and a melancholy man. But when he
spoke of democracy, this is what he said.

He said: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea
of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no
democracy."

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of these United States, is everlasting in the

memory of his countrymen. For on the battleground at Gettysburg, this is what he said:

He said: "That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that
these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new
birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people
shall not perish from the earth."
 After news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had circulated throughout the country, the
conductor André Kostelanetz wrote to Jerome Kern, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron
Copland with a commission. He hoped for three works that would have “a correlated
idea in that they are to represent a musical portrait gallery of great Americans.”
Kostelanetz suggested George Washington, Paul Revere, Walt Whitman, Robert
Fulton, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth as suitable subjects to memorialize in music.
Thomson chose Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York City, along with the
journalist Dorothy Thompson, his colleague at the Herald Tribune. Copland proposed
Walt Whitman. But Kern had already selected Mark Twain, and because Kostelanetz
did not want two writers in the group of three portraits, Copland turned to Lincoln.
Whitman and Lincoln were hardly random choices: They dominated the historical
imagination of the Left—Communists, Democrats, and Popular Front alike. Both men
were embraced as representatives from the American past of contemporary and
democratic values. And both were associated with the Civil War, opposed to slavery,
and committed to preserving the Union.
The sixteenth president was also coupled in the public mind with Roosevelt, who
turned to Lincoln early and often during his twelve years in office. In a 1934 “Fireside
Chat” on the role of government in the regulation of capitalism, Roosevelt quoted
Lincoln to urge management and labor to support recovery programs of the New Deal.
“I believe with Abraham Lincoln,” he asserted, “that 'the legitimate object of
government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but
cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual
capacities.'”
Once the United States had entered the war, Lincoln became a touchstone of
authority for the administration as it worked to clarify the aims of the war effort, justify
the mobilization, prepare the public for a protracted struggle, and console a nation in
mourning. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Office of War
Information produced posters with a quote from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
intended to motivate Americans to war as much as to commemorate the dead: “. . .we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
As a potent symbol in wide circulation, Lincoln was a fitting subject for Copland's
musical portrait, which he began to write in late February 1942. Unlike Thomson and
Kern, who composed purely instrumental portraits, Copland wrote for speaker and
orchestra.
As Copland explained, he chose passages not for their familiarity—although the
Gettysburg Address is used at the end—but for their contemporary relevance. All of
his selections evoke the political and moral challenges to American democracy posed
by slavery in the Civil War and fascism in World War II. The narration for Lincoln
Portrait speaks eloquently on the subject of slavery, but it also can be seen to reflect a
contemporary concern for economic justice and to support the international fight
against fascism. In the manuscript drafts for the narration, Copland cobbled together
the following from an 1860 letter that Lincoln wrote to his friend Henry Asbury and an
address Lincoln delivered that same year at the Cooper Union in New York City: “The
fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or
even one hundred defeats. . . . Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith
let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Copland quotes Lincoln to
cast the Civil War as one battle in a continuing struggle for freedom.
Copland quotes music as well as text in Lincoln Portrait, setting two traditional
American tunes: the eighteenth-century ballad “Springfield Mountain” and Stephen
Foster's minstrel song “Camptown Races.” First to appear is “Springfield Mountain.”
The tune and its setting exemplify Copland's pastoral idiom. The arching disjunct
melody is set above a conjunct bass line; the harmony is diatonic; the texture
homophonic, even chorale-like; and winds predominate. These musical codes evoke
nostalgia, a longing for home tinged with a sense of loss. In one musical phrase,
Copland establishes a sense of Lincoln's time and place, long ago in rural America.
After the introduction of “Springfield Mountain,” the key suddenly brightens to E
major, the tempo quickens, and a new theme appears. Fragments of “Camptown
Races” are altered and abstracted, but the melodic and rhythmic profile of the tune
remains recognizable. High-spirited and rough-hewn, like the young Lincoln of
popular memory, “Camptown Races” appears only in this first purely instrumental
section. It does not return in the section with the narrator, who assumes the voice of
President Lincoln, and if the exuberance of the tune is associated with youth, its
disappearance might signal maturity. In his choice and setting of these tunes, Copland
captures the two sides of Lincoln as portrayed in Carl Sandburg's biography: the
solemn wartime president and the humble “rail splitter” from the backwoods. After
each melody is presented separately, the two are brought together in counterpoint,
offering a complete musical portrait of Lincoln as man and president. Then the speaker
enters, who intones, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”
Throughout the section with the narrator, Copland's original text seems to
recapitulate the contrast and combination first presented by the purely instrumental
themes. The simple, even folksy, descriptions of what Lincoln looked like, of where he
was born and raised, are paired with a more stately and formal declaration that
repeatedly introduces Lincoln's words and so serves as aural quotation marks: “This is
what he said, he said . . .” The phrase recalls a similar formulation—“And God said,
saying . . .”—that appears frequently in the Hebrew Bible. Surrounded by Copland's
text, Lincoln's own words sound both human and divine, pragmatic and idealistic.
Many people have narrated Lincoln Portrait since the premiere in 1942. The first
was Williams Adams, a radio actor well known for portraying FDR on the series
March of Time, which, like the movie newsreels, dramatized current events.
Who reads the text, and how it is read, necessarily influences how the piece is
perceived. The presence of General “Stormin” Norman Schwarzkopf enhances the
image of Lincoln as a wartime leader. James Earl Jones emphasizes the threefold
repetition of “people” in the final line—“of the people, by the people, and for the
people”—and in stentorian tones exhorts the listener to action with the righteous anger
of an abolitionist. Nebraskan Henry Fonda, on the other hand, carefully measures his
intonation to capture Lincoln's humanity.
Another notable narrator was Coretta Scott King, who read the text in May 1968 in a
memorial concert for her slain husband. In the 1950s, Copland witnessed “a fiery
young Venezuelan actress” narrate a performance in her home country. After the final
lines “the audience of six thousand rose to its feet as one and began shouting so loudly
that I couldn't hear the end of the piece.” The military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez
was deposed shortly thereafter, and Copland was “later told by an American foreign
service officer that the Lincoln Portrait was credited with having inspired the first
public demonstration against himÑthat in effect, it had started a revolution.”
The context in which the work is peformed also matters. During the spring of 1942
as Copland was composing Lincoln Portrait, Kostelanetz recalled that “our nation was
in one of the darkest days in its history.”
Our Pacific Fleet had been all but destroyed. MacArthur, driven from
Manila, was making a last-ditch stand on Corregidor. In Europe, our allies
were beaten or facing defeat. France had fallen, Britain was reeling under a
hail of fire bombs, and Russia was fighting at the gates of Moscow. Copland
finished the rough sketch around Lincoln's birthday, reworked and polished
it that disastrous spring.
Kostelanetz continued, “by the time Copland finished it in April, the tide was
starting to turn in the Pacific. . . . Americans were breathing a bit easier.” Just before
the premiere on May 14 of that year, the United States scored a victory in the Battle of
the Coral Sea, and Lincoln Portrait was met with loud applause. “Lincoln's warnings
fell on victory-deadened ears,” according to the conductor.
 But the fortunes of war were to turn again. When Kostelanetz led another
performance on July 15, it was clear to all Americans that the war would be long, hard,
and costly. The narrator was Carl Sandburg; the First Lady and members of the
Roosevelt administration were in attendance. Kostelanetz noted that “it had sunk in
that in Europe we were in a war that saw no end. Hitler stood astride a continent and
was reaching over Africa, perhaps the world. . . . America was grimly determined—but
the road ahead was bloody and dark.”
“Even as I raised my baton,” he remembered, “President Roosevelt was in
conferences with Admiral King and General Marshall to chart our course.” On this
occasion, Copland's music and Lincoln's words “sounded with a terrible new clarity,”
the conductor remarked. At the end of the performance there was silence.
Only in the wake of victory does Lincoln Portrait seem to trumpet that victory. In
the midst of World War II, at a time when the Allied position was especially weak, it
represents something more like hope on the verge of a breakthrough. Copland's music
stands at odds with the historical moment of its enunciations, promising deliverance
from its present circumstances and resounding defiantly from the depths of despair.
This difference between hope and celebration, between solidarity and authoritarianism,
is measured by the different responses of audiences during the war. Following Allied
success, Lincoln Portrait was met with applause; it tipped toward an authoritarian
grandeur that hallows victory in order to forget the hallowed dead.
But at a time of defeat and uncertainty, Lincoln Portrait meant something else entirely.
After the Allied setbacks in 1942, it was met with charged silence. The final sforzando,
C-major triad was a wordless voice of providence and hope issued from an outdoor stage,
some five hundred yards away from the Lincoln Memorial.