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Notes on the Program

By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair

E specially in his later years, the appellation

“Dean of American Composers” became
so insistently used as to seem almost a part of
Aaron Copland’s surname. Copland surely
deserved the title for many reasons, among
which was that, as he himself put it, he could
serve as “a good citizen of the Republic of
Music.” During World War II, he produced
several works that were specifically and obvi-
ously related to the war effort. One of these,
Fanfare for the Common Man, came into being
through a commissioning project initiated by
the conductor Eugene Goossens, then music
director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orches-
tra. He asked 18 composers to write fanfares
for brass and percussion. “It is my idea,” he said,
“to make these fanfares stirring and significant
contributions to the war effort.” The new works
were all ready for the Cincinnati Symphony Or-
chestra to include one as the opening item on
each of its concerts during the 1942–43 season.
For a while Copland considered naming his
piece Fanfare for the Spirit of Democracy, Fanfare for
a Solemn Ceremony, Fanfare for the Day of Victory,

Fanfare for the Common Man

Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, with Harp and Piano
Aaron Copland
Born: November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York City

Died: December 2, 1990, in Peekskill, New York

Works composed and premiered: Fanfare for the Common Man,

composed in 1942; premiered March 12, 1942, in Cincinnati, Ohio,
by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Goossens, conductor.
Concerto for Clarinet, composed from September 1947 to October
1948; premiered November 6, 1950, in a broadcast from the NBC
Studios in New York, NBC Symphony, Fritz Reiner, conductor, Benny
Goodman, soloist

New York Philharmonic premieres and most recent

performances: Fanfare for the Common Man, premiered May 14,
1959, Leonard Bernstein, conductor; most recently played by
Members of the Philharmonic on May 15, 2014, at the dedication of
the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, Philip Smith, conduc-
tor. Concerto for Clarinet, premiered June 19, 1969, at the Garden
State Arts Center, Holmdel, New Jersey, Aaron Copland, conductor,
Benny Goodman, soloist; most recently performed June 1, 2013,
Alan Gilbert, conductor, Mark Nuccio, soloist

Estimated durations: Fanfare for the Common Man, ca. 3 Aaron Copland
minutes; Concerto for Clarinet, ca. 16 minutes

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Fanfare for our Heroes, Fanfare for the Paratroops, or
Fanfare for Four Freedoms, the last being a bow to
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union
Address. In the end he settled on a title that was
at once general and specific. “It was the com-
mon man, after all, who was doing all the dirty
work in the war and the army,” he would later
explain. “He deserved a fanfare.” Following its
premiere, in Cincinnati on March 12, 1942, the
Fanfare’s memorable contours became instantly
popular. The piece continues to be heard regu-
larly either in its stand-alone form or in its adap-
tation in the finale of Copland’s Third
Symphony. Arrangers have found it irresistible,
and it has been repurposed as the theme song
for the Omnibus television series in the 1950s, as
a jazz number for Woody Herman’s Thundering
Herd, as entrance music for a Rolling Stones
show, and as a fantasy for the rock group Emer-
son, Lake & Palmer.
Shortly after the end of the war, two leading
jazz clarinetists approached Copland separately
about composing a concerto: Woody Herman
in the summer of 1946, Benny Goodman in
early 1947. Goodman became the successful
suitor, offering a very substantial fee of $2,000,
and Copland spent more than a year working
Sources and Inspirations
Copland initially viewed his Fanfare for the Common Man as nothing more than a bit of occasional music that
would be forgotten once its occasion was past. But in the summer of 1946 he found himself revisiting it as he
30 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
on the piece, from September 1947 through
October 1948. The poignantly beautiful first
movement of the Clarinet Concerto came to
him easily; in fact, its central section was already
mostly written, being a recasting of music com-
posed in 1945 for the film The Cummington
Story. What would happen beyond that stymied
him for a while, but finally he created a fast sec-
ond movement to counterbalance the lan-
guorous first, drawing on South American
popular music as well as North American jazz.
Some of this finale’s material is introduced by
the solo clarinet in a substantial cadenza that
connects the two movements, a section that
Copland pointed out, “is not ad lib as in caden-
zas of many traditional concertos; I always felt
there was enough room in interpretation even
when everything is written out.”
The Broadway show Strike Up the Band by
George Gershwin was based on a George S.
Kaufman story that takes a cynical look at why a
nation might choose to wage a war. The United
States levies a tax on the importation of Swiss
cheese; the Swiss protest; an American cheese
magnate offers to underwrite an American war
against Switzerland so long as it will be named
put together the finale of his Third Sym-
phony, which opens with this same
music “in an expanded and reshaped
form” (as he explained). As it happens,
the principal theme of that symphony’s
second movement was also recycled,
being derived from music Copland had
sketched, and then abandoned, in con-
nection with Goossens’s wartime fan-
fare project.
Members of the New York Philharmonic
perform Fanfare for the Common Man,
conducted by Principal Trumpet Philip Smith