The Copland Paradox

In April 1991, a memorial concert was held for Aaron Copland, who had died
Dec. 2, 1990, less than three weeks after his 90th birthday. It appeared that
every American composer within reach of Lincoln Center in New York
attended. Sitting far in the back of Alice Tully Hall, even John Cage and Merce
Cunningham had tears in their eyes.

Forty-seven years earlier, Cunningham had been the young dancer in Martha
Graham’s company who created the role of the revivalist preacher in
“Appalachian Spring,” Copland’s famous ballet. But that had been his farewell
performance with Graham, and he hadn’t had anything to do with Copland or
his music since. Cage had operated on a different (and often opposing)
musical shore from Copland’s for half a century. Yet these two lifelong avant-
gardists made no effort to hide their affection for an American populist.

Copland was the first, the only and probably the last American classical
composer upon whose greatness and importance everyone could agree.

His 100th birthday is Nov. 14, and the celebration has taken on something of
an iconic status. If we fall into the temptation to look back at the 20th century
as the American century, Copland, born as it began, becomes a ready symbol
for a nation coming of age.

Copland defined what we have come to think of as a distinctive and singular

American sound. He was our supreme nationalist composer, the voice of
cosmopolitan and cowboy, evoker of the brute dynamism of the big city and
mystical expanse of the prairie’s wide open space. And he was, of course,
superpatriot, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “Lincoln
Portrait.”

Yet the great irony of Copland was that he was none of those things, really–
not cowpoke or big-city sophisticate, and certainly no common man. His
politics were far enough left of center that they got him in trouble with Joseph
McCarthy. He grew up on what he described as a drab street in Brooklyn over
the family store. His ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower–his
parents emigrated from Poland and Lithuania. Jewish and gay, he readily
identified with outsiders.

A plain-spoken and genial man who was generous to a fault, Copland lived
unpretentiously. He did not appear to be complex or conflicted. And conflicted
he probably wasn’t, but complex is another matter. He created an American
voice–immediately recognizable (sometimes by as little as a single chord) as
his and also as our nation’s–out of the true American Babel. He drew from any
number of sources that included the latest techniques from Paris, the folk
music of Mexico, South America and the U.S., the Eastern European Jewish
song of his parents’ roots, and particularly the jazz that seemed to him to
supply his native and beloved New York with all its energy.
Jewish song is not always apparent in Copland’s prairie pastorales, nor jazz in
the prickly abstract Modernist music that he wrote as a young man making a
name for himself. Copland could be a severe composer who believed fewer
notes were better, but these disparate elements can be found underlying
nearly everything he wrote. And it is that that makes it possible for so many
disparate listeners to think of Copland as their own.

In Spike Lee’s tribute to basketball, the film “He Got Game,” Copland’s music
is lovingly featured on the soundtrack. Strange as it is to see hip-hop kids or
prison inmates shooting hoops accompanied by “Appalachian Spring,” Lee’s
logic proved unassailable. “When I listen to [Copland’s] music, I hear
America,” the director said when the film was released in 1998. “And
basketball is America.” Copland, the film unequivocally asserts, also got
game.

This accessibility and familiarity make it almost too easy to commemorate

Copland as the composer who made something for everyone. It is no stretch
for orchestras, chamber series or soloists to program Copland. And there
cannot be many non-operatic music institutions or schools that won’t have
joined in with a least a little something of Copland’s before the year is out. In
Los Angeles, the main events are clustered around the birthday next week.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays an all-Copland program this afternoon,
while tonight the Pacific Symphony begins an eight-day Copland festival
centered on Copland’s Hollywood connection as an Academy Award-winning
film composer. Monday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella
concert is a Copland tribute. The Long Beach Symphony will perform
Copland’s Third Symphony on Nov. 18. The Los Angeles County Museum of
Art’s Monday Evening Concerts series began its season last month with a visit
by musicians from New York’s Copland House, an institute based in
Copland’s Hudson River residence and devoted to his music.

Much of this activity focuses only on Copland’s middle, populist works, from
the 1940s or thereabouts. That makes sense for Los Angeles audiences
because those were the years when Copland had a local connection through
his film work, producing such extraordinary scores as those for “Of Mice and
Men,” “Our Town” and “The Red Pony.” The Pacific Symphony festival advisor,
Joseph Horowitz, writes in the program book that Copland’s film music, which
began with “The City,” a 1939 documentary on the New York World’s Fair,
“played a pivotal role in the evolution of Copland’s American musical
vocabulary.”

Horowitz is surely correct that writing for film helped Copland find the mass-
market voice that ultimately became the musical voice of America. And it
does, on the surface, seem as though Copland’s entry into Hollywood
represented a stylistic about-face. In the ’20s and ’30s, Copland was
considered ultramodern for his use of aggressive dissonance, spiky rhythms
and abstract forms. He was also called rude, because he brought jazz into the
concert hall, where prim audiences felt it had no business. In a recent large-
scale biography of Copland, Howard Pollack carefully explores the many
different aspects of Copland and finds a paradox in music that embodied
Modernism and populism.

His most telling anecdote is a Hollywood one. Once, while working on a

picture, Copland encountered Groucho Marx at a concert where some of the
composer’s piano music was performed. Only knowing Copland’s populist
side, Groucho expressed surprise at the music’s uncompromising modernity
and formalism. Copland cheerfully explained that he had a split personality.

“That’s OK,” Groucho told him, “as long as you split it with Sam Goldwyn.”

And that is exactly what Copland did on a very large scale. With his typical
generosity, he split his musical personality among many constituents. It was
his economy of means, his ability to distill a style to its core elements (a jazz
lick to a single rhythmic figure, a melancholy melody to just a couple of notes)
that often made each work seem as if it represented only one thing. Cowboy
ballets were about cowboys; “Appalachian Spring” suggested that place and
that season; the abstract pieces were edgy, non-narrative constructions of
musical architecture; “El Salon Mexico” transported the listener south of the
border; the Clarinet Concerto, written for Benny Goodman, defined classical
swing.

But that single emphasis never told the whole story. By distilling a style,
Copland, a formalist at heart, created elegant, malleable musical building
blocks that he used to synthesize his American voice. The Shakers in
“Appalachian Spring” don’t exactly shimmy or cantillate, but listen hard and
you might hear an echo of jazz dance and a hint of Copland’s own ethnic
roots.

Writing “Appalachian Spring,” Copland restricted his thoughts to formal dance

and, specifically, Graham’s individual style. His working title was “Ballet for
Martha.” It was only after the music was written that Graham came upon the
phrase, Appalachian spring, in Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge.” She used it
simply because she liked the way it sounded.

Nor did Graham initially have a clear idea of the narrative. Cunningham has
said that she only offered him a vague notion of his character as perhaps a
preacher, farmer, devil or something else. He worked from the nature of the
music, not the character, when he invented a dance for the revivalist. Then,
upon seeing Cunningham’s choreography, Graham then said she knew in
what direction to proceed. Yet a great many listeners will always treasure
“Appalachian Spring” for its incredible power to summon a specific
atmosphere. And who is to say that they are wrong? The music, with its
structural purity and built of the distillations of many cultures, become an
auditory mirror for every listener.

Therein lies Copland’s greatness, not as a composer who tells the listener
what to think or how to feel, but a composer who allows the listener to bring
him or herself to the music. This is the essential Americanness, the
democracy of Copland’s music.
*

As the outsider from Brooklyn, Copland rejected the pushy German influence
that dominated art music in the America of his youth. He took the radical step
of looking to France instead. He learned from Nadia Boulanger, with whom he
studied in Paris, not a style but a technique. He came away from her with the
capacity to organize materials, and the materials he chose were often those
that struck him close to home.

Copland’s early scores were the loud and brash enthusiasms of a young man
absorbing the energy of the city. An early champion was the Russian music
director of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. And Copland once said
that polite Boston society accused Koussevitsky of championing Copland just
to give a bad name to American music.

If Copland’s early Modernism initially made him unpopular with conventional

audiences, his seemingly radical swing toward a populist style in the late ’30s
was initially damned by many of his early supporters as a sellout. The shift
was shocking but not necessarily retrogressive. Copland was always in one
sense radical and in another conservative. His first-period music paraded its
dissonances and spiky rhythms, but it was conventionally constructed of
sonata forms, variations, passacaglias. Likewise, Copland always took the
pulse of people. However abstract the music, it knew jazz’s lilt and
syncopations; it also often displayed the melancholy, soulful song of Jewish
music.

Copland’s motivation for the popular pieces, beginning with “El Salon Mexico”
in 1938, was progressive politics. During the Depression and the beginning of
world war, Copland, along with many New York artists and intellectuals,
identified with the plight of the worker. And he often expressed that through
the application of a subversive element in his popular scores. “Billy the Kid”
glows with a near-mystic aura given to this societal outsider.

There was musical subversion as well. Whenever Copland used folk tunes
(real or invented) or other popular musical devices, his musical structures
remained rigorously complex and interesting. One can listen to “El Salon
Mexico” a hundred times and still be surprised.

Copland changed with the times. His populism was part of that, and so was
his return to a more Spartan Modernist style in the ’50s, influenced by, of all
things, the 12-tone method. But again, Copland was also Copland, which
meant he was recognizable as himself yet a representative of more than one
thing. Twelve-tone pieces such as the Piano Quartet or even the daunting late
orchestral works, “Inscape” and “Connotations,” can sing sad songs or speak
with the rhythmic snap we readily recognize.

The real paradox of Copland is not in his music as much as in the ways it was
sometimes misunderstood. That reached its most absurd proportions when a
performance of the “Lincoln Portrait” was canceled at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
inauguration in 1953 because Copland had been called up before the House
Un-American Activities Committee. The composer handled himself brilliantly
before his questioners, sidestepping answers by acting the country bumpkin
and indicting no one. Ike was widely criticized for the inauguration debacle, an
America seen as too silly to celebrate it greatest composer.

The “Lincoln Portrait” is now an appropriate staple of official Washington. But

we still have a problem when it comes to a complete celebration of Copland if
we insist on seeing his vision as simplistic schoolbook Americana, music for
the land of the good and brave. That it is, but the reason it speaks so
effectively is because Copland includes all of us in that vision.