MUSIC REVIEW : Pretty Photos Are an Insult to Pops Concert : ‘Photochoreography’: Copland music takes a back seat as pictures offering a narrow, distorted ‘portrait’ of America are projected onto large screen.

A tri-panel projection screen was tautly wired across the front expanse of the San Diego Symphony’s SummerPops stage at the Embarcadero Marina Park.

The 42-foot screen may not have blocked the sound of the orchestra Wednesday night, but it literally forced the music to take a back seat.

For a significant portion of the program, titled “Musical Pictures,” series of photographs were projected above and in front of the musicians and conductor Murry Sidlin.

James Westwater, who calls himself a “photochoreographer,” was present to synchronize his slides to Aaron Copland’s music, including two popular works commissioned for dance companies in the late Thirties and early Forties--the “Billy the Kid Suite” and “Appalachian Spring.” Westwater’s photos and his button pushing to music had nothing to do with dance, however.

The program blurb hailed the event as a “portrait of the United States with an evening of music and pictures in celebration of America . . . .”

Visually translated, this became a portrait of land that is either farmed, ranched, abandoned or left untouched in pristine glory. Fade-ins and fade-outs of deserted churches, country roads, cemeteries, of forests, wildflowers, snow scenes, and sunsets were interspersed with sequences of folks working on tractors in the fields or rounding up the herd on horseback. All the hard-working Americans were white men. White wives cooked and cared for the kids.

This restricted, chauvinistic view of America is the same one that Madison Avenue once used to promote the sale of greeting cards, cigarettes and beer, and it has also long been the tool of politicians. But it’s an American lie, and Wednesday’s program had the flavor of a desperate public relations campaign.

Before the program ended, Sidlin asked his audience to applaud the generosity and wisdom of the program’s underwriter, Chevron, our arts “collaborator in the scheme of keeping civilization with a noble, high ideal.”

Westwater’s calendar-style panoramic shots were often pleasing for their clarity and crisp, gold-light landscapes. But it’s stretching the point to absurdity to call, as Midlin does, this effort of timing six projector carousels to music a “performing art.”

Sidlin does not need postcards to help him engage listeners. His delivery is humorous and informative. His hick-twang rendition of “Get Along Little Dogey,” for example, during his brief preview of folk tunes Copland used in “Billy the Kid,” brought a cheer from the orchestra and chuckles from the audience.

The orchestra doesn’t need such inflation either. The details and clarity of Copland’s style of orchestration were undoubtedly lost at the outdoor bayside site, as were the quiet subtleties of “Appalachian Spring” and spooky chill of the penultimate segment of “Billy the Kid.”

But there’s no reason to believe that this program, rounded out with Copland’s “Outdoor Overture,” orchestral excerpts from his only opera “The Tender Land,” and a short, bright work by one of Copland’s students, William Schuman, could not stand alone on the quality of the music and performance.

Adding music to visuals is one thing--Copland wrote eight film scores in Hollywood. But adding visuals to music, after the fact and without the composer’s participation, is risky.

By doing so, music is given a subjective message it does not inherently possess. In the case of “Musical Pictures,” the message was narrow, anachronistic and insulting.