AARON COPLAND (1900-1990)

This biographical sketch is being written to accompany a one off single lecture by
Matthew Taylor on Copland, which coming at the beginning of the festive season, will
be concentrated on three of his most joyous works, all ballets, Billy the Kid,
Appalachian Spring and Rodeo. They together with Fanfare for the Common Man and
such film scores as The Red Pony formed the nucleus of his later more populist
style following his earlier years of modernism, a voice which became as inimitable to
Americana as was Pomp and Circumstance to Britain.
Copland was not the first in time. He was beaten to the post by George Gershwin
(1898-1938) and followed by David Diamond (1915-2005) and Leonard Bernstein, born
1918 and who died in 1990 just two months before his master, Copland. There were
others but what is interesting about these four is that they were all Jewish born in
America of immigrant parentage, three of them in New York and Bernstein, also on the
east coast, in Massachusetts. Add to that, that two of them, Copland and Diamond,
were gay, Bernstein was a bit of one and a bit more of the other and no-one is quite
certain about Gershwin as he remained an undeclared bachelor, but who cares!
I wrote once a note on Mendelssohn and the emergence of the Jewish composer in
which I set out a whole list of Jewish composers who came on the scene once
emancipation had taken place. What you may find interesting from this article is that
these four Jewish musketeers demonstrate a period when America opened its
seaports and anchorages, especially Ellis Island, for everyone and they demonstrate
what compositional talent a land of opportunity can produce. Whether any of this
sentiment might appeal to Donald Trump remains a matter of conjecture.
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn into a family which had Lithuanian origins, the
youngest of five children. His father was Harris Morris Copland, and had made his
way via Scotland where he had lived and worked for a couple of years or so to earn
enough to pay for his onward boat fare to the US. The original family name was
Kaplan but there is some doubt as to whether Harris Copland adopted it whilst in
Britain or later when arriving in America. Copland himself had been unaware of this
until told years later by his parents who had never mentioned it before but he was
under the impression that the change had occurred at Ellis Island during the
immigration process when an official had bestowed the name. If you think this
sounds a bit odd, I can assure you that this procedure could well have happened on
their landing in Britain. My own great grandfather who arrived in this country in 1880
was from the Russian Pale whose surname was Louria. Not knowing how to spell it
the immigration people said call it Lewis. I was brought up in South Wales and I
was appalled to learn that my so Welsh name did not originate from the Swansea
Valley. My father, who ought to have qualified to be editor in chief of the Apocrypha,
once told me of a Jewish immigrant who had ended up with a Scottish name! He had
had some unpronounceable Polish name with three zs and the officials decided to
name him, Pollack. Three tables later he was asked again for his name which by then
he had quite forgotten. He responded in immaculate Yiddish Ah, schn vergessen
which was how he came to acquire the name of Shaun Fergusson!
The Copland family lived above the parents' shop in Brooklyn, H.M. Copland's,
(which Copland described as "a kind of neighbourhood Macy's"). Most of the children
helped out in the store. His father was a proud American and voted Democrat. The
family were regulars at their local synagogue, where Aaron celebrated his Bar Mitzvah
presumably aged 13. Theirs was not a particularly musical family. Copland's father
had no musical interest. His mother played the piano and arranged for music lessons
for her children. His oldest brother Ralph was more advanced musically than his
parents and proficient on the violin. His sister Laurine, a student at the Metropolitan
Opera School, gave Copland his first piano lessons and generally supported him in
his musical education. He would go on to attend the local Boys' High School. Apart
from some opera scores which Laurine brought home, most of his early exposure to
music was at Jewish weddings and ceremonies. One thing of which you can be sure
is that Aaron Copland had a recognizable degree of natural talent but he was no
Mozart.
From 1913 to 1917 he took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn, who taught him the
standard classics. Copland's first public music performance was at a Wanamaker's
recital. John Wannamaker was a store owner who opened his New York Store in 1896
and a large annexe in 1902 in which he had installed a 1500 seater auditorium with a
massive pipe organ. This was followed by the opening of a further store in
Philadelphia, later becoming Macys, containing an even more mammoth pipe organ,
the worlds largest. In canine comparison, the Wurlitzer at the Tower Ballroom in
Blackpool is but a pup. In New York, daily free recitals took place but dont get me
wrong, the young Copeland was playing the piano, not the organ.
By the age of 15, after going to a concert by Paderewski, the famous composer-
pianist and later prime minister of Poland, Copland decided it was going to be a
composers life for him. He first undertook a correspondence course and then took
formal lessons in harmony, theory, and composition from Rubin Goldmark, a noted
music teacher and composer (who had given George Gershwin three lessons).
Goldmark, with whom Copland studied between 1917 and 1921, was conservative in
his musical tastes but, nevertheless, he gave his new pupil a solid grounding,
especially in the Austro-German tradition. Copland recognized this when he recorded
that so many musicians have suffered through incompetent teaching.
Copland continued his musical development by going to concerts and the opera and
through contact with a circle of musical friends. Once he had graduated from high
school, he began playing with dance bands. of the immediate post 14-18 war era.
Continuing with his musical education, he received further piano lessons from Victor
Wittgenstein, a well known pianist (but no relation of Paul Wittgenstein the one armed
Austrian pianist).
Copland was deeply fascinated by the Russian Revolution of 1917. He himself was
only 17 at the time and it brought about a rebuke from his father who had no time for
the Russians, Bolshevik, Menshevik, Tsarist, Red, White or whatever. It is an early
sign of Coplands political leanings. He would go on to develop friendships with
people with socialist and communist tendencies but would not be quite so friendly
later on with Senator Joe McCarthy
Now there arose the question of which way forward. His father wanted him to go on to
college but Copland had his eyes elsewhere, Europe and particularly France. This was
the place for an aspiring composer to be, the war over and a new world in music back
in the old world with Stravinsky at the helm with neo-classicism and the exciting fun
world of the Groupe des Six. There was nothing like it back home. An advertisement
for a new summer school for American musicians at the Fontainebleau School of
Music, sponsored by the French government, spurred Copland on still further. With
his mother's backing the family allowed him to give Paris a try first. It would only be
for a year after all. He left for France in 1921 and stayed three years. He did not take
to the tuition at Fontainebleau, a bit too much like Goldmark, but there was one
teacher there to whom he switched, Nadia Boulanger. If he had had any initial
reservations, they were soon to be dispelled. She recognized his talent straight away.
Boulanger had as many as 40 students at one time and maintained a regimen that all
had to follow. Copland found her incisive and quickly able to detect and correct
problems, an intellectual Amazon as he described her. Her principal base for most
of her life was her flat in Paris, from where she taught for almost seven decades until
her death at the age of 92. Apart from Copland, here are just a few of her many pupils,
Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, John Eliot Gardiner, Elliott Carter, Dinu Lipatti, Igor
Markevitch, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Idil Biret, Daniel Barenboim, Philip Glass
and Piazzolla.
Along with his studies with Boulanger, Copland took classes in French and
frequented the English-language bookstore where expatriate American writers were
known to gather. The list of names with whom he rubbed shoulders reads like a
typical Penguin Books description for the Paris of the 1920s: Ernest Hemingway,
Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound; artists included Picasso, Chagall, and
Modigliani; writers and intellectuals such as Proust, Paul Valry, Sartre, and Gide, the
latter being Coplands favourite. During his stay in Paris, Copland began writing
musical critiques, the first being on Gabriel Faur whom he described as a neglected
master and the greatest French composer. He reckoned the leading French modernist
of the day was Milhaud whose Saudades do Brasil with its depiction of Rio streets
had been written in 1922. Its south American rhythms would influence Copland, as
would the jazz Milhaud employed in his ballet, La Cration du Monde Copland realized
that the Europeans were using jazz as the latest form of modern expression and that
innately it ought better to come from the pen of an American composer such as
himself in his quest for a new national form of expression. His French stay ended in
1924 with a commission by Nadia Boulanger to write an organ concerto for her to play
which turned into his organ symphony. This work received its first performance in
1926 with the New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch and with
Boulanger the soloist. Against the background of his better known later works, the
organ symphony is not yet Copland in full bloom but its middle movement is jazz
influenced whilst it ends with typical Copland vigour.
He was now back in America, optimistic as to the future and seeking to make his way
as a serious composer as compared to George Gershwin who was already a showbiz
millionaire and now making his way to Paris and Nadia Boulanger who said there was
nothing she could teach him.
Copland had to manage fairly frugally relying on money from small commissions,
some teaching and lectures, a bit like Matthew Taylor if you think about it, as well as
two Guggenheim fellowships. He rented a studio apartment in an area of New York
City close to Carnegie Hall, where he would live for some thirty years till the mid-
fifties. Moving from the Roaring Twenties into the Depression, he began to gain
wealthy patrons who promoted performances of his music and publication of his
works. Amongst these was Serge Koussevitzky, the wealthy music director of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra and champion of new music. Koussevitsky would be
very influential in Copland's life, second only after Boulanger. He would perform more
of Copland's music than any other American composer of the time.
During the twenties, following his return from Europe, he was searching to find his
own voice as well as creating music with a distinctive American identity. The years
from 1924 to 1940 cover two distinct periods, socially, politically and musically. First,
up to the Wall Street crash it was the roaring twenties, the Charleston and all that jazz
but Copland was a modernist and moving from using jazz as an idiom of expression.
His music was accessible to the enlightened few but not the masses who might catch
up with him later on. There was one composer who had achieved this aim already, a
composer with his own voice who could speak for America, Charles Ives. But Ives,
who was as modern as any, was not known. He wasnt a pro but a successful top
executive in insurance and a gifted amateur composer as a sideline. His music was
virtually impenetrable. He composed from as early as the 1890s until 1919 when he
suddenly stopped for no good reason except that he could write no more. Yet he
lived on till 1954. His style is difficult to define and is inimitable. His works like
Washingtons Birthday and Decoration Day written by 1909 contain musical
descriptions of events, mosaics with veiled scraps and snapshots of scenes, stuck
together like collages. Through the mists of his music one can make out distant
references to Sousa like marches or the Campdown Racetrack five miles long. Ives
music was as avant garde as Stravinsky, unknown, but he spoke for America as did
Stravinsky for Russia in the Rite of Spring. If I seem to digress, it is because Charles
Ives had become a figurehead in some way for Aaron Copland.
In 1929 Copland had written and had performed his Symphonic Ode followed in 1932
by his Short Symphony, modern works but out of keeping with changing times. With
the Wall Street Crash and the Depression public mood shifted and modernism ceased
to be the order of the day. In the thirties Copland gathered round him other emerging
American composers, now mainly neo-romantic, such as Roger Sessions, Roy Harris,
Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston, and established himself as their spokesman. They
were searching to express an Americanness, which did not necessarily rely on jazz as
a clich. Essentially, national expression and modernism do not go hand in hand. In
old Europe national expression would rely on traditional or folk song sound. America
had been searching for something like it and Dvorak seemed to have done something
for them with his New World Symphony and the American Quartet back in 1893. Post
first world war there was less point in dressing up the Star Spangled Banner in atonal
clothes.
Copland in the 1930s was becoming an established composer but a long way yet
from finding that new voice, what I describe as his Simple Gifts style by which he is
best now known. He began shifting to something more simple in order to allow for
wider appeal. He found this in writing music for theatre, films and radio and in writing
music for young audiences including a student opera, The Second Hurricane. He was
without knowing it following a similar trend to that of Prokofiev who at that time was
then visiting the Soviet Union before finally returning there in 1936. The films and
plays for which Copland wrote music were socially relevant and through them he
met several major American playwrights, including Thornton Wilder, William Inge,
Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, and for all of them he considered or worked on
projects. He also became closely associated with the Group Theater including such
figures as Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg to whom he was able to give musical advice.
The 1930s also saw Copland donning the gown of an academic and writing on music
theory.
During the Depression years, Copland travelled extensively in Europe, Africa, and
also Mexico where he formed a lasting friendship with the Mexican composer Carlos
Chvez. It was during his first visit there in 1932 that Copland was taken to a Mexican
dancehall where he observed and heard various forms of Mexican dance. (One
commentator reckoned it was a figment of the Copland imagination because no-one
has located that dance hall. You only have to listen to El Salon Mexico to disabuse
the author). This eleven minute work which was not completed until three years later
was inspired by a three part dance hall, one for people dressed conventionally, one
for people dressed in overalls and one for those barefoot where there was a sign not
to throw cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies dont burn their feet. The work was
inspired by the place rather than the music played there but in the end Copland
produced what he described as a potpourri of three Mexican tunes. Not only did the
work produce a Latin American sound but also that it was necessary to go back to its
basic roots to do so.
In 1938 his travels brought him to London which was hosting the International Society
for Contemporary Music. He was seeking to have El Salon Mexico played and it was
there that he met the 25 year old Benjamin Britten who was seeking to get his
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge played. Britten invited Copland to his house at
Snape in Suffolk for the weekend where the two got on famously. They found lots in
common including their similar left wing leanings. Britten was becoming restless with
the state of British music and Copland suggested he move to Hollywood where there
was plenty of money to be made. Britten did go to America but not to the Hollywood
studios. Copland had only just set out on that route and was soon to be seen near
the Oscar carpet. Interestingly, one of the works Britten first wrote after arriving in
Canada was his American Overture, lost and forgotten for many years, which oddly
enough sounds more like Copland than even Copland himself did at the time.
So, as the sun goes down in the west, we come to the start of the Copland Hollywood
music career. The first three films were:-
1. The City, (1939) a documentary set in different times and places describing
in sequences various cities in different epochs, each with different social
settings and finishing with an optimistic future.
2. Our Town (1940) which got nominated an Oscar for best film score
3. Of Mice and Men, absolutely true to the novel of John Steinbeck, set against
the drought and dustbowl of the American West during the depression
Already at the same time as his student opera, The Second Hurricane, Copland had
composed "Prairie Journal" for radio broadcast on CBS. This was one of his first
pieces to convey the landscape of the American West.
And now this what we have been waiting for. From out of these varied aspects there
was emerging that broad Copland sound, the big America of the grand frontier which
would give birth in late 1938 to his ballet Billy the Kid. This, along with El Saln
Mxico, achieved his first widespread public success. Billy the Kid and the others
established him as an authentic composer of American music in much the same way
as Stravinsky's three great pre-first world war ballets established him as the
composer of Russian music. It was music, sometimes open prairie, sometimes folksy,
other times as in Rodeo, based on cowboy songs like those in the black and white
movies or else inspired by the barn dances and square dances of the wild west. In
contrast came the more gentile home spun simplicity of Appalachian Spring.
The very success of these works left other composers somewhat sceptical and
suggested Copland was pandering to the masses. Even David Diamond, a dyed in the
wool romantic accused Copland of selling out to which Coplands answer was that a
composer does not lose his artistic integrity through reaching to a mass audience.
Billy the Kid was written for the Ballet Caravan and first performed in Chicago. Billy
was a folk hero, born 1859 and shot dead aged 22 by a real life sheriff. He was a
gunfighter operating in the Old West and not a very appetising character - he is
known to have killed eight men, starting off at 12 years old. He got jailed for stealing
and was made an outlaw after escaping. After a series of murders he was sentenced
to hang, escaped jail killing two sheriffs men in the process and was hunted down at
night by the posse and shot dead. In 1943 Howard Hughes made a film about Billy,
The Outlaw introducing the sultry Jane Russell, who left post war male British
cinema goers drooling over her exposure. I was about 11 at the time and was most
disappointed wondering what all the fuss about. Probably the British Board of Film
Censors had cut the sexy bits. It was a case of loss of expectation
The version we usually hear is a concert suite, about two thirds of the original, but I
am fortunate in having a recording under Leonard Slatkin of the complete original. It
starts with Open Prairie to announce its Western setting. This might well have been
influenced by The Plow that Broke the Plains written in 1936 by Virgil Thomson.
However if you like the big screen and the big Western sound track there happens to
be a much earlier precedent written by none other than Frederick Delius as early as
1902. At that time he would not have even visited the flicks, the first cinema theatre
being the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh opened in 1905. Despite this it sounds as if
Delius were writing for the big Technicolor cinemascope screen. Its title is co-
incidentally Appalachia and I urge you to listen to it. You can virtually taste the
popcorn. Returning to Billy the Kid, the remainder illustrates various episodes in his
short life. He kills his mothers murderer, he kills the land agent, he cheats at cards,
he kills his jailer, he finds refuge with his sweetheart and there is a big shoot out.
Coplands version outfires and eclipses Gunfight at the OK Corral. Interspersed into
the score are various cowboy songs, Old Paint, The Old Chisholm Trail, Git Along
Little Dogie and the Dying Cowboy.
Better known is the ballet, Rodeo which was the first work choreographed by Agnes
de Mille for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which had moved to America during
World War II. Agnes was from a theatre family and was a niece of Cecil B de Mille.
She had originally wanted to be an actress, but was told that she was "not pretty
enough", so she turned her attention to dance which, at this time, was not considered
a viable career option by her parents, who refused. It was only when her younger
sister was prescribed ballet classes to cure flat feet, that Agnes joined her.
It was Ballet Russe that commissioned the relative obscure de Mille to be given
overall creative control of Rodeo, possibly because they might have thought her
name might be an in for their company into Hollywood! It was she who chose Copland
as the composer, having been impressed by Billy the Kid. At first Copland was
reluctant to compose yet another Cowboy ballet, but was persuaded by De Mille that
Rodeo would be quite different in character to Billy. De Mille herself played the lead,
and the premiere at the Met in October 1942 received 22 curtain calls. It was attended
by Rodgers and Hammerstein, who approached de Mille afterwards seeking her to
choreograph their proposed new musical, Oklahoma!
The ballet itself leans more towards the American musical than does Billy which is
more like musical melodrama, but a dern sight better than Puccinis Girl from the
Golden West . Rodeo, like Billy the Kid, has cowboy and folk songs. Old Paint
appears again but it has been pointed out that the dance tunes are written in their
pure state without being dressed up. The story is about the cowgirl who can ride a
bucking horse but of course is still not as good as the men, you bet. Nor is she
pretty enough (sounds like Agnes de Mille) for the Wrangler. When the lady belles
arrive for the barn dance all dressed up, our heroine gets herself powdered up and
returns in a frilly dress and with bows in her hair. Now she is a wow but goes instead
for the Mr Nice Guy and not the Wrangler. Not exactly Tristan and Isolde stuff.
Copland reduced the ballet into a suite of four episodes. Again, I am fortunate to have
the original which contains a bar room piano, an out of tune upright honkytonk. The
music is brimming with American dance, the barn dance, square dance, honour your
pardners, honour your corners and you do the dos-y-dos. Its reduction into four
movements makes it a kinda symphony, the titles being Buckaroo Holiday; Corral
Nocturne; Saturday Night Waltz and Hoe Down.
The third great ballet, Appalachian Spring, is not based on cowboys but on the early
pioneers in American history, in particular the sect known as the Shakers, not to be
connected with rattle and roll. Martha Graham and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,
dancer and patron, commissioned a ballet with "an American theme in 1942, but not
finished till 1944, with Graham dancing the lead role. Eventually there would be four
versions. The original was scored for a chamber ensemble of thirteen instruments.
The best known is the orchestral version scored in 1945.
Copland's inspiration came from a book, The Gift to be Simple, based on songs,
dances and rituals of the American Shakers. For starters, he had no title for the work
and so it was referred to as simply "Ballet for Martha". It was only shortly after its
first performance that Graham suggested Appalachian Spring as a title, a phrase
taken from a poem by Hart Dane, O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge
Now if ever there were a work which can so vividly depict its subject, it would be
Appalachian Spring. Cant you just smell the scent of spring and see those
Appalachian Mountains? It comes as a shock therefore to learn that the last laugh
was by Copland himself because he had composed the music without knowing what
the actual title was going to be. The power of auto suggestion is not only captured by
the beauty of the non-existent Appalachians in his music but also that the word
"spring" in the Crane poem alludes to not the springtime season but a water spring.
The story tells of the celebration in Pennsylvania following the building of a new
farmhouse by a group of 19th century pioneers. The principal characters are a bride, a
groom, a pioneer woman and a preacher and has been described as a parable for the
finding of a new land. The music itself sounds like all that you would imagine it to be
and in keeping with homespun and simple and all the adjectives commonly ascribed
to it. During the mid-19th century, they they celebrated the Era of Manifestations
producing period dances, drawings, and gift songs inspired by spiritual revelations.
They became known for their own weaving, furniture design and craftsmanship. The
Shakers were an offshoot from the Quakers and themselves, a sect which believed in
the Second Coming. Marriage was not forbidden but they believed primarily in strict
celibacy, as a result of which multiplying became quite difficult. The ballet ends with a
setting of the well known shaker hymn The Gift To Be Simple. From all of that one
should perhaps have given the ballet the title of No Sex Please. We are American,
but Appalachian Spring better fits the bill.
The 1940s remained productive and his Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common
Man became patriotic standards. The Fanfare was written in 1942 at the behest of the
English conductor, Eugene Goosens, then conductor of the Cincinnati Orchestra.
Goosens had commissioned fanfares from English composers during the first world
war and sought to do the same with American composers during World War Two.
Various heroic titles were mooted by Goosens but Copland came up with Fanfare for
the Common Man following a speech by Roosevelts vice president Henry Wallace
proclaiming the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man". The first performance
was on 12 March, which that financial year happened to be income tax day for the
common taxpayer. The Fanfare has been played all over the world, most notably at
the inaugural meeting of the United Nations and particularly at Charlton Athletic
whose fans include my two fanatical offspring. Copland then incorporated it into his
third symphony. This is a loud symphony for a large orchestra where Copland goes
over the top. It particularly attracts showy conductors. Bernstein would leap up in the
air whilst Andrew Litton, all seventeen stone of him or thereabouts, seemed to me to
be in danger of crashing through the floor of the rostrum.. This work benefits from a
degree of restraint. The Clarinet Concerto in 1948, was a quieter affair, the solo
clarinet, accompanied by only strings, harp, and piano. It was Benny Goodman the
king of swing, who commissioned it. Copland finished the 1940s with two more film
scores, one for William Wyler's The Heiress and the other for the film The Red Pony,
again an adaptation of a John Steinbeck novella, this time about a gift to a young boy,
Jody Tiflin, of a horse. The setting is Jodys fathers ranch in California. The simplicity
of the story is matched by the music much in the same way as in Prokofievs Peter
and the World.
As easily as Copland had slipped on his populist dungarees for the 1940s, so it was
that he would don a more academic garb with the onset of the next decade, the
Eisenhower years. In 1950, he got granted a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome.
The previous year he had met Pierre Boulez which caused him to revive his earlier
experimentation with atonality and the avant garde. In Rome, he composed his Piano
Quartet, adopting serial technique. In contrast, he also wrote two sets of Old
American Songs, the first set dedicated to Benjamin Britten and performed by Britten
and Pears. This was a folksy hangover whilst he was now moving back into the camp
of modernism and experimentalism. Back in 1929 he had written his Piano Variations
based on a note row. Now in 1957 he arranged them as the Orchestral Variations.
They are not easy listening. Stark, uncompromising and dissonant are adjectives not
associated with Copland. Lennie Bernstein recalled that he had known the piano
version as modern and prophetic. I knew them backward and forward and used to
play them at parties, emptying the room by the dozen.
From 1952 Copland became one of the targets of McCarthys senate committee. This
had been set up in the Truman years and it continued into Eisenhowers first term in
tandem with the investigations by the separate House Unamerican Activities
Committee. Copland became one of the targets for the FBI in the red scare. He had
been known to be a communist sympathiser over a long period. Over 150 artists
became black listed by HUAC because of their communist associations. No-one
could have demonstrated themselves as more American than had Copland in his
music. In 1942 he had written his Lincoln Portrait incorporating the Gettysburg
speech. This was planned to be played at Eisenhowers inauguration ceremony in
January 1953 but because of his affiliations it was hastily withdrawn by HUAC.
Copland was cross examined about his lecturing abroad and his connections with left
wing organizations and events. McCarthy was clearly oblivious to the fact that
Copland's works themselves were a portraiture of American values. He probably had
never heard any of them anyway. Nor did the committee take on board that Copland
had campaigned since 1950 against the persecution of Shostakovich and other Soviet
artists. Appalled he had resigned his membership affiliations. In his 1954 Norton
lecture, he asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet Communism deprived artists of
"the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong." Apart from the red scare against
communists there was also the lavender scare against homosexuals who were seen
as carrying a contagious disease and a security risk to the state. Copland had had a
number of relationships but he had kept a low profile on this aspect of his life and it
was obviously not on his dossier.
Moving into the fifties and beyond Copland began returning to his earlier modern
laeanings Tastes were changing and Copland was seeking more abstract forms of
composition. His fellow composers had viewed him as dumbing down. There was a
move, as with William Glock at the BBC, primarily towards the promotion of the avant
garde. Copland however was never into electronic music, stating it was hard work
already establishing what he wanted to express and that composition could not be left
to chance. His own music had now become more discordant, jagged and dissonant,
there is no doubt. In the early sixties he wrote an orchestral work, Connotations,
which is difficult. Jacqueline Kennedy was in the audience and went back stage to
meet Copland after the performance. He wrote that she was as white as a sheet and
dumbstruck. All she could say was Mr CoplandMr Copland. Of course, there
are some more amenable works of the period such as Dance Panels, ballet music but
a ballet without a story, just abstract movements. It has touches of the old Copland
but lacks the same joy and verve. Music for a Great City was commissioned by the
London Symphony Orchestra but it started life as film music and sounds like it. It is
violent and harrowing and it is the New York Skyline it represents, not London, even
now. His last major work was Inscape, in 1967, written in twelve tone but somehow
combines something of the old Copland, not very much.
In his later years, Copland travelled a lot, having taken up conducting his own works
and particularly the promotion of the works of his fellow American composers. I was
fortunate enough to see him conduct at the Albert Hall a concert including El Salon
Mexico, Bernsteins Candide overture and Roy Harriss symphony No 3.
Through the 1980s his health deteriorated and he died of Alzheimers disease in 1990,
aged 90,
As to his domestic life, he had several same sex partners at different times. His
relationships were medium term but constant. When the more intimate side of them
came to an end he would remain on close friendly terms with each of them.
He did not maintain his Jewish religious upbringing. Whilst conscious of his roots he
was a declared agnostic. He was sympathetic to the fledgling State of Israel but more
likely in relation to its pioneering characteristics such as the kibbutz, similar maybe to
those of the Shakers in Appalachian Spring. His music has no Jewish hallmark and
seems more Christian in its feel, albeit of the non-conformist variety. I cant help
associate Appalachian Spring with Kelloggs Porridge Oats and the Quaker man on its
cardboard box.
In the end, it is his music by which he is remembered particularly that of the 30s and
40s. For his later works I have yet to come to terms. For me it is not yet a question
of the jury being out. Aaron Copeland relied on his audience catching up one day. At
the moment, as Barak Obama might say, I remain at the back of the queue or, as
Matthew Taylor might say, The Penny (or is it the Dime?) has Yet to Drop.