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Nov. 2, 2012
Life, work of Copland
Turning Point Ensemble performs icon’s music.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Nov. 14 marks the 112th anniversary of the birth of Aaron Copland. He died in 1990, leaving behind him a life marked by significant achievement and an enduring influence on American classical music.
By any standard, Copland must be considered among the foremost American 20th-century classical music composers, along with George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, notably, all Jews. They were not only American by the circumstance of birth, but, more important, through their deliberate choice in expressing their musicality by using distinctly American idioms, each one leaving an indelible mark on the history of American classical music and, perhaps as important, contributing to the easing of the often arbitrary line drawn between classical and popular compositions.
Nothing could better exemplify this than the music Copland composed for the ballet Billy the Kid, which opened in New York in 1939. Billy (actually, William H. Bonney) had, evidently, been an unconscionable outlaw whose life story, with the evident evaporation of its dreary facts and the same romanticizing process that transformed Robin Hood, had much earlier become an American folk hero. Copland certainly, for purposes of depiction, used the myth surrounding Billy rather than his actual career, but this is often how “heroes” enter the realm of enduring folklore – largely as inventions, becoming acceptable, even praiseworthy archetypes. As Copland later acknowledged, Billy was his most highly acclaimed work. When asked in an interview how he, a New York Jew, who had, moreover, been bar mitzvahed, could write an unmistakably Western ballet, Copeland quite simply, and accurately, cited his imagination. But it was evidently more than that. Almost all of Copland’s music is distinctively American, not only in his choice of subject, but in its sounds.
While a surfeit of talent, even genius, is behind the musicality of this trio of Gershwin, Copland and Bernstein, whose works by no means exhaust the repertoire of American music, in all genres, written by Jews, their acknowledged Jewishness must have played a role. Much of it very probably derived from the gratitude they must have felt for the security, opportunities and dignity afforded them in the United States, especially when, at the same time, there were antisemitic depredations taking place elsewhere, unprecedented in their scope and brutality.
Soon after Billy, Copland wrote another America-inspired piece, Fanfare for the Common Man, which evidently expressed his populist views and was several times used to open Democratic Party national conventions. In 1977, Copland, continuing in this Americana vein, wrote A Lincoln Portrait, an orchestral work that included the spoken recitation of some of Lincoln’s greatest orations. Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, also evidently inspired by American regional cultures, followed.
Yet, these works, in which Copeland skilfully incorporated unique themes and sounds, rises far above the level of program music; each has become an American, even world, classic. Because of the universalism of his work and its distinctly national themes, Copland is still known as “the dean” of American composers.
Copland was born in Brooklyn to a family originally with the name Kaplan. His father ran what was then known as a dry goods, or general, store. As is true of many great musicians and composers, his talent surfaced early. At 11, he devised the scenario and a music fragment of an opera. He took music lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn and thereby got a thorough grounding in the classic repertoire. Playing in an ensemble, in what later became known as the Big Band era, and concentrating on what was known as swing, Copland was also thoroughly exposed to the contemporaneous American popular musical idiom. He later went to study, as did many other eminent musicians and composers of the post-First World War era, with Nadia Boulanger, in Paris. After even the earliest exposure, she recognized his enormous talent.
When Copland returned to America, he was brimming with self-confidence. Receiving two Guggenheim fellowships and traveling to Mexico, he subsequently wrote El Salón Mexico, a piece that is still performed. During the Second World War, he wrote his Third Symphony, which became the most popular American symphony of the century. And his In the Beginning, based on Genesis, is considered a masterpiece among modern choral works.
Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, which had been scheduled for the 1953 inaugural concert for President Eisenhower, was withdrawn because of Copland’s alleged left-wing politics. During the McCarthy period, he was, indeed, summoned to appear before a congressional committee hearing, where he denied ever having been a communist. Nonetheless, he was subjected to being blacklisted. Unaware, as most left-wing sympathizers had been, of the dreadful depredations and murders of the Stalinist period, Copland had, indeed, supported pro-Soviet causes. Yet, he publicly deplored the threats made to Shostakovitch and other Soviet luminaries, and resigned from a number of organizations he thereafter considered politically hypocritical.
Although Copland stopped composing, he continued writing extensively and lecturing on music. In the last decades of his life, he spent much of his professional time conducting. His inspiration for composing, as he himself said, had been turned off “like a faucet.”
After Copland died of Alzheimer’s, in the most definitive biography of him, he is described as gay, something he had managed, during his lifetime, to keep “in the closet.”
Copland expressed marked admiration for jazz, evidently a large influence on his music, as it had been for Gershwin and Bernstein. In an analogue of the expression of a prophet being without honor in his own country, it was not until Copland heard jazz – in post-First World War Europe – that he permitted it to penetrate his compositions, later incorporating Latin dance music and American folk tunes into his compositions. He even wrote a clarinet concerto for renown swing virtuoso Benny Goodman.
Like some other important composers, Copland saw writing for film as a challenge, but he had first to overcome the cutting of his scores. His music for the film adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1939) earned him an Academy Award nomination. While he had some complaints about scoring for films, he ultimately became one of Hollywood’s best-paid composers. His last composition, Three Latin American Sketches, was completed in 1972.
During his long life, Copland had successful careers, not only as a composer, but as a music critic, teacher, conductor and critical observer. He stands out iconically as a fixture of distinctly American music that is universal enough to be played by orchestras all over the world.
Copland in Vancouver
Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble will be performing two of Aaron Copland’s early masterworks: Sextet, for clarinet, piano and string quartet from 1937, and Vitebsk (Study on a Jewish Theme), composed in 1929. The Nov. 14 and 15 performances at the Telus Studio Theatre of the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts will celebrate the centenary of Copland student Barbara Pentland, with the first professional performance of The Lake, her one-act opera composed in 1952. As well, Grammy-nominated Dave Douglas will première Ascendant, a work dedicated to Copland’s memory. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit turningpointensemble.ca.
Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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