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Aaron Copland: The Sound of the American Soul
It was after attending a recital by Jan Ignacy Paderewski at age fifteen that Aaron Copland’s desire to become a composer became real. He first tried to learn composition through correspondence. Then he took theory and composition classes with Rubin Goldmark, who had studied with Johann Nepomuk Fuchs in Vienna and with Antonín Dvořák. Like most composers from his generation, Goldmark deeply admired the German music tradition. Nevertheless, he heeded Dvořák who, in an 1893 article published in the New York Herald, declared that the future of music in America was tied to the music sung by black people. In his Negro Rhapsody (1912), Goldmark tried to express a conception of nationalism by making references to African American music. His referential composition process had an impact on the young Copland, fueling him to realize the historical significance of his country’s early aspirations to a musical identity. Four years under the tutelage of Goldmark, from 1917 to 1921, taught him solid composing technique and knowledge of the great Romantic repertoire, but it did little to open his mind to broader and newer musical landscapes. Copland nevertheless enriched his musical background by assiduously attending concerts and operas performed in Manhattan, where he heard pieces by Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. He was also influenced by popular music played in the cosmopolitan Brooklyn of his childhood, including blues, ragtime, and the jazzy accents of Tin Pan Alley songs.
The pieces Copland composed while studying with Goldmark continue the academic path traced by his teacher, as exemplified in the Romantic aesthetic of the Piano Sonata (1921). Copland is bolder and more original in other pieces for piano such as Three Moods (1920-1921), in which he uses jazz idioms for the first time, and The Cat and the Mouse (1920), a piece undoubtedly inspired by Debussy. Copland did not show these pieces to Goldmark for fear of receiving negative feedback. This need to free himself from the grip of his teacher — whose importance Copland nonetheless recognized as critical in his training as a composer — is similar to Charles Ives’s attitude toward his teacher Horatio Parker. During Copland’s student years, Ives was relatively unknown. Copland had once seen the score of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata on Goldmark’s piano, but Goldmark had warned his young pupil against the dangerous influence of such a work on a young creative spirit. Copland thus was left to build his own conception of what it meant to compose authentic American music, in complete ignorance of Ives’s essential input. When he finally came across Ives’s music much later, the encounter was something close to a revelation: “There we were in the twenties searching for a composer from the older generation with an ‘American sound,’ and here was Charles Ives composing this incredible music — totally unknown to us!”1
In the fall of 1921, Copland moved to Montmartre with Harold Clurman, his colleague and a future theater director and critic. He frequented museums and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore, then a privileged hub of exchange for intellectuals. He attended numerous concerts and ballet performances where he heard the various avant-garde musical trends of the capital. The premiere of Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde on 25 October 1923 by the Swedish Ballet deeply impressed him, particularly for Milhaud’s use of jazz idioms. Jazz musicians, who could be heard in Parisian bistros where American artists and intellectuals met, further spurred Copland’s interest in this music, which he had not until then considered as an important element in the future of American music. Boulanger encouraged him on this path and taught him to make use of jazz and popular music, which made up the very essence of his country’s musical heritage.
He returned to New York in June 1924. There, he finished the score for his first orchestral work, Grohg, a ballet project he had started in Paris. He also composed Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), a work in a hybrid style. It shows the influence of Arthur Honegger, of traditional Jewish music — particularly in the delicate and melancholic melodies of the Prelude and the wild dance rhythms of the last movement — and of jazz, with rhythms that allude to the Charleston. The influence of jazz is more obvious in Music for the Theatre (1925, for small orchestra), a piece steeped in the Broadway spirit, as well as in the Piano Concerto (1926), whose polyrhythmic and polytonal sections dumbfounded the audience attending its premiere. When Copland returned to his home country, Rhapsody in Blue had just premiered on 12 February 1924, and the work had had the effect of a bomb. Even if Copland later denied that he had been under the spell of George Gershwin — who for a time became his rival within the “highbrow jazz” scene (also labeled “sophisticated jazz” for “intellectuals”) — it is likely that Gershwin’s scandalous success had an impact on Copland’s decision to further his pursuit of symphonic jazz. The way certain European composers such as Milhaud had intuitively grasped the interest of jazz, as well as the growing competition among American modernists over how to make use of this fashionable genre, also had an impact on Copland’s positioning as a composer. He barely hid his opportunistic stance when he shared, some years later, how he had been
preoccupied with the idea of adding to the great history of serious music something with an American accent, and jazz seemed to be a comparatively simple way of introducing the American note in an authentic way. […] It was an easy way to be American — quickly American — in a way that the world could recognize as American.2
Copland’s interest in jazz remained intact throughout his career. In the late 1930s, he nursed a deep admiration for Duke Ellington, whom he considered to be “the master of all,” and, in the 1950s, he especially liked Lennie Tristano, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Billy Taylor. At the request of Benny Goodman, Copland composed his Clarinet Concerto (1947-1948), a work in which one can hear jazz swing. The music he composed in 1961 for Jack Garfein’s film Something Wild (which he reused in Music for a Great City, 1964) shows the influence of cool jazz. However, reflecting on his Piano Concerto from the late 1920s, Copland declared that he had already reached the limits of what he could do with jazz, whose emotional potential he considered too limited. While his Symphonic Ode (1927-1929) for full orchestra also contains elements of jazz, they are discreet and do not form the primary source material of the piece.
His Piano Variations (1930, orchestrated in 1957), are based on an eleven-measure theme containing a four-note series (E, B-sharp, D-sharp, C-sharp) that also generates the harmonic material of the work. This new composition process is an attempt to find another artistic path through exploiting dissonance. The Short Symphony (1932-1933) further develops the harmonic language and rhythmic complexity of the Variations. While these pieces were well received by a niche audience from the avant-garde, they were met coolly by the public, prompting Copland to reconsider the value of music written for and by the elite. He questioned the radical attitude of the vanguard and eventually concluded that the golden age of pioneers and experimentalists was a thing of the past.
The challenge was to break free from the aesthetic ghetto of modern art music and reach out to a broader audience, all the while using modes of expression that were in tune with the contemporary moment: that of the Great Depression. Copland and an increasing number of other American artists and intellectuals were realizing the severity of the political and economic situation. Like him, these intellectuals often had affinities with the Communist Party and became active in a left-wing social and political movement known as the Popular Front.
For Copland, communication with this broader audience had to be done through what he called an “imposed simplicity.” He founded it on a strong diatonic melodic language that often included American folk songs like the cowboy songs heard in his ballet Billy the Kid (1938) or South American songs like the Mexican melodies in his orchestral piece El Salón México (1932-1936). This musical language also used three-note chord harmonies, sharp dance and song rhythms, the suppleness of prose declamation, and an eschewing of formalism in favor of easily perceptible musical structures. This “imposed simplicity” proved Copland’s desire for aesthetic accessibility: the work needed to be equally artistic and functional. This creative attitude, which is reminiscent of the German Gebrauchsmusik, led him to broach, over the 1930s and 1940s, a wide array of musical genres and forced him to keep in mind the general democratization of culture through the emergent broadcast media: the cinema, the radio, and, later, television.
Starting in 1937, work in Hollywood enabled Copland to achieve his goal: with cinema, he could reach a broad audience all the while maintaining his own musical language. His feature film scores show an exceptional mastery of, and novel approach to, the genre. Among his films are Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Red Pony (1948) — both based on John Steinbeck and directed by Lewis Milestone — as well as The Heiress (1948), based on Henry James and directed by William Wyler. Unlike other composers, notably Max Steiner, who wrote scores in a lavish neo-romantic style, Copland kept his scores in the background of the action and used it subtly to underline the psychological state of the characters. Only at specific moments did he write music that was more at the forefront: usually at the end of a scene. This more imposing voice was meant to strengthen the emotional content of the interaction on the screen.
His first opera, The Second Hurricane (1936), was composed for a high-school ensemble — a choice that reveals how important Copland considered youth education. His second opera, The Tender Land (1952-1954), he initially composed for television, but producers rejected it, and in the end it premiered onstage. His links with members of the theater scene, and most particularly with the Group Theatre, led him to compose numerous stage music works including, notably, Irwin Shaw’s Quiet City (1939). Copland also contributed to the rise of American ballet through his collaboration with great choreographers such as Agnes de Mille for Rodeo (1942) and Martha Graham for Appalachian Spring (1943-1944).
In 1949, Copland set foot back in Europe after a twelve-year absence. In Paris, he met Pierre Boulez. He was fascinated by Boulez’s Seconde sonate pour piano, a piece that undoubtedly motivated him to renew his writing for the piano in his Piano Fantasy (1957). He also met René Leibowitz and Olivier Messiaen, and he visited Pierre Schaeffer’s studio for musique concrète. Copland was also interested in Anton Webern’s late works, as well as in the music of Frank Martin and Luigi Dallapiccola — two composers who had turned to serialism. These encounters led him to reconsider his musical language. Unable to ignore the input of the European avant-garde, he decided to adopt Arnold Schoenberg’s composition method and make it his own. According to Copland, “twelve-tonism” was “nothing more than an angle of vision. Like a fugal treatment, it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking […] It is a method, not a style; and therefore it solves no problems of musical expressivity.”3 He meant to use serialism in a more supple and spontaneous manner than Schoenberg. Copland saw it as a way to update his harmonic language, without abandoning tonality altogether.
Copland’s Piano Quartet (1950) uses a single eleven-note series that, as with Schoenberg, has a harmonic function. However, unlike Schoenberg, Copland wrote tuneful melodies and only rarely used the series in its entirety. Moreover, the series he used — a derivative of his music for the film The Red Pony — could generate several diatonic motives. A similar impression of tonality persists in the three other pieces he composed using series. In Piano Fantasy, he used the last two notes of a ten-note series to secure a tonal center. In Inscape (1967, for orchestra), the opening eleven-note chord and the introductory dissonant harmonies are followed by consonant chords. His use of the series was a way for him to translate into music the drastic changes of a post–World War II society that were evolving further under the tension of the Cold War. In composing Connotations (1962, for orchestra), Copland shared how he meant to express “something of the tensions, aspirations and drama inherent in the world today.”4 His experimentation with the series did not, however, divert his attention from popular music sources, as can be heard in the two song collections Old American Songs (1950 and 1952), as well as in Emblems (1964, for wind orchestra), which makes reference to the hymn “Amazing Grace,” to jazz, and to Latin-American music.
In the early 1970s, Copland stopped composing. By his own account, he had ceased to find inspiration, and he decided to focus on his career as a conductor. He led with an open mind, conducting composers as varied in their approach as Iannis Xenakis, Tōru Takemitsu, and Witold Lutosławski, as well as some of his own compositions. His rich musical legacy conciliated art and popular music, without ever falling into the lures of seeking popularity, and it succeeded in presenting before the whole nation the sound of the American soul.
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