Issue Four

There was a distinct feeling of unhappiness, even hostility, in New York’s old Aoelian Hall that afternoon in 1925. The traditional Sunday afternoon concert-goers used to communing with the great composers of the past had been rudely disturbed. Walter Damrosch, having just led the New York Symphony in a new work by an unknown American composer, sensed the simmering discontent of his public. In an effort to lighten the angry mood, he turned to the audience. “If a young man can write like that at the age of twenty-three”, he said, “in five years he will be ready to commit murder!” Thus began the career of the warm and gentle man acknowledged today as perhaps the single most important figure to whom our country has given birth.

Born a hundred years ago in Brooklyn, Aaron Copland was a first generation American. Both of his Jewish parents were born in Lithuania, and his father Harris Kaplan had come to this country by way of England, where an immigration official mistook the name for Copland. Copland it remained, and became the name of the small department store the family owned on Washington Avenue. The business occupied the first three floors and the family of seven lived on the floor above. The youngest of five children, Aaron did not receive much encouragement in terms of music from his family. Basically unmusical, his parents finally consented to give their youngest son piano lessons; later in life, Copland laughingly supposed that his parents indulged him in his musical notions because they had already exhausted themselves and their ambitions with their first four children.

Piano lessons were only the beginning for the young man. He began to compose, drawing the music staves by hand since he was not aware that one could buy printed music paper. He pursued the study of harmony with Rubin Goldmark, a strict Austrian traditionalist, but searched out and studied forbidden scores of Debussy, Ravel and other modernists in the Brooklyn Library without his knowledge.

Copland never attended college (although he held over thirty honorary doctorates at his death), but there was never any question that he would go to Europe; all serious American musicians of the time did. The turning point in his life was the summer of 1920 when he knocked on the door of Nadia Boulanger’s apartment in Paris and asked her to become his teacher, beginning an extraordinary life-long musical relationship. Copland once wrote, “No one to my knowledge had ever before thought of studying composition with a woman... The world has never produced an important woman composer; no one thought that a woman could possibly hope to teach composition.” Years later, Copland was to acknowledge as the most important event of his life “my introduction to Nadia Boulanger and her acceptance of me as a pupil.”

As Boulanger’s student, Copland reveled in the heady artistic environment of Paris in the 1920’s, counting as friends Stravinsky, Prokofiev, “Les Six”, the famous group of French radical composers, George Antheil and James Joyce. Stravinsky’s music in particular left a deep impression–its leanness, clarity and rhythmic vitality would be translated into the American accent that became part of the inimitable Copland sound.

It was through Mademoiselle Boulanger that Copland received his first “big break.” She was coming to the United States for a tour as an organist, and asked her young pupil to write a piece for her to play with the New York Symphony. Copland, terrified at the prospect, pointed out that he had never attempted a piece of symphonic dimensions, knew nothing about the organ, and had never heard a note of his own music actually played by an orchestra. “Never mind,” said Mlle. Boulanger.

  Copland wrote his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. It was performed, and it provoked Damrosch’s aforementioned remarkable outburst. Perhaps there is nothing like notoriety to spur a budding career. The newspapers covered the story in depth, and even evoked comparisons between Copland and Gesualdo, a sixteenth-century “modernist” who had progressed from dissonant music to actual murder. The musical public began to know Copland’s name; he started to receive small grants and awards; he made news by taking American critics to task for not supporting American music.

Copland himself was undergoing striking and important changes. As fascinated as he had been with French and Russian music, he began to feel a calling to express his own American dream. He strongly resolved to foster a distinctly American voice for new music. Copland infused his music with specific traits that are inherently American: jazzy rhythms, bold and arching melodies, folk tunes, homespun wit, widely spaced sonorities, clear and vivid colors, collage structures-all evoking the bustle of the city and the lonely expanse of the plains. As his Argentine friend Alberto Ginastera wrote: “Copland created American music in the same way Stravinsky did Russian music, or Falla, Spanish, or Bartok Hungarian.”

In the Thirties, Copland became absorbed in writing music that would communicate to an ever wider public; that period saw the beginning of a style that was to produce “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” “Quiet City” and “The Red Pony.” Listening to his warm and sweeping vistas of the West, it is hard to believe that Copland basically spent his entire life in New York City, so natural and beguiling is his music of far away places. He was able to show very clearly that “modernism” and popular appeal were not mutually exclusive. His scores are bursting with melody, charm and direct communication, but under the surface are sophisticated, complex, dissonant and asymmetrical. This remarkable man, driven by an overwhelming desire to reach a new public for music, pursued a singular goal: “to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” It is a tribute to Copland’s genius that this decision resulted in no lessening of the quality of his music but in a marked heightening of his impact on the public. In a rich variety of styles and idioms–from jazz to folk songs to infectious rhythms to breathtaking luminosity, whether unashamedly tonal or clangorously dissonant–Copland evolved a striking personal style, a stunning blend of the cerebral and the popular melded into one unmistakable musical personality. In doing so, he touched a chord in the American psyche reached by no other classical musician this country has produced.

“American music is different because of Aaron,” said composer Elliott Carter. In this he was referring not only to the profound influence Copland’s music has exerted on his colleagues, but also to his impassioned championing of American composers. Copland’s prodigious energy as a concert organizer and promoter of the new music of others was nearly as valuable a part of his legacy to American music as the paramount importance of his compositions. He worked tirelessly to create concert series of new music, to publish American scores, to forge a vibrant community of composers, and to further the cause of the American composer in a time when the juxtaposition of the words “American” and “composer” seemed unthinkable. Copland taught, lectured, wrote books, spoke out powerfully on behalf of new music, finding financial resources to help the careers of such musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Roy Harris and many others. A kind and gentle patriarch, Copland nourished the musical culture of his time to the extent that it is impossible to think of American musical life without him.

Like most composers, Aaron Copland met his share of resistance. What was most painful to him was that significant criticism came from some of the colleagues he sought so much to help. In the 1960’s, with the ascendancy of a more severe and academic kind of contemporary music, Copland’s style was attacked by many in the musical intelligentsia as simplistic and old-fashioned. Scorn and derision were hurled at his disarming nationalistic voice, his appealing lucidity. In 1970 his good friend Leonard Bernstein recalled, “One of the sadnesses I remember in recent years occurred at the premier of Copland’s ‘Inscape,’ when he said to me, “Do you realize that there isn’t one young composer here, there isn’t one young musician who seems to be at all interested in my music.” Nevertheless, Copland himself continued to explore new vistas as a composer. Possessing a boundless curiosity, he expanded his compositions into twelve-tone experiments.

In hindsight one can see the modernist neo-classicism of his youth, the vibrant Americanism of his best-known middle period, and the dodecaphonic explorations of his later years as part of a wonderful whole. Copland’s musical integrity underscored every note he wrote, and his breadth of vision and warmth of spirit ennobled and united even Germanic serialism with the all-American hoe-down.

Determined as he was to bring American music to maturity, Copland at his death in 1990 considered the job far from finished. To his final days he continued to be disturbed by a general lack of interest in American contemporary music. “One of the primary problems for the composer in America is to achieve integration, to find justification for his life of music in the life around him,” he said. “The artist should feel himself affirmed and buoyed by his community. In other words, music must mean something, in the deepest sense, to the everyday citizen. When that happens, America will have achieved a true artistic maturity.”

His words are as compelling today as they were forty years ago. And his music remains just as relevant. The filmmaker Spike Lee, who used Copland’s music in the soundtrack for “He Got Game,” when asked, “Why Copland?” responded, “When I listen to his music, I hear America.” Its freshness, acuteness, lean elegance, rhythmic vigor, spare harmonic beauty and effortless authenticity make Copland’s the finest body of music our country has produced, a musical voice that has been accepted ever since as quintessentially American. His jazzy rhythms, asymmetrical meters, spiky orchestrations, angular melodies, sonorities as wide open as the plains, his transparent and luminous textures, his grassy golden colors, his unpatronizing use of folk tunes and cowboy songs, his sturdy harmonies that suggest hymns played in frontier churches, his essential modesty and egalitarianism have made him not just an American composer, but the American composer.

The Copland centenary year of 2000 witnessed a bright plethora of performances of his oeuvre of some one hundred works. This “simple and great man in our midst”, as Virgil Thomson called him, has so profoundly touched our national culture that this temporal landmark, rather than presenting a national obligation, simply serves as yet another reason for the joyful celebration of the uncommon man who was Aaron Copland.