An American Spirit

During its pre-World War I heyday, classical music in the United States produced a multitude of distinguished orchestras in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York and Philadelphia led by world-class conductors; a couple of opera companies in New York and Chicago stocked with the world’s great singers; and a community of critics in New York and Boston unsurpassed abroad. An American school of composers, based in Boston, was nascent but vigorous. A visiting composer, Anton Dvorak in New York, provoked vibrant debate over the proper sources of an indigenous musical culture with its own American accent. Music reigned as “queen of the arts.” Future developments were eagerly awaited.

Then came the Great War. A phobia against all things German--cultural, intellectual, scientific--condemned the German-born and -trained musicians who had dominated American concert life. To an amazing degree, the subsequent search for an American musical identity was pursued from scratch. The search’s major embodiment in high-culture circles, Aaron Copland, was a modernist, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., schooled in France, with no use for precursors aspiring to Beethovenian uplift or flaunting Romantic Leipzig and Stuttgart pedigrees. Even if he had not been late to discover Charles Ives, even if he had managed to appreciate George Chadwick (like Ives, a turn-of-the-century American nationalist), Copland was looking for something different. As the inter-war “dean of American composers,” he--not Ives, not Chadwick--came to embody the American composer “come of age.” More than any other serious musician, he defined the project of creating a fresh American voice, a vigorous and unpretentious American sound.

The obstacles confronting this enterprise were formidable. Not only did Germanophobia foreclose roots in the past, but a continued influx of powerful musical immigrants--first from Russia, then from Europe--competed with contemporary native talent. Postwar New World audiences, expanded by the new middle classes, were eclectic, unschooled and overly susceptible to foreign glamour.

Copland’s attainments as symbol, spokesman and composer, as Howard Pollack’s invaluable new biography, “Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man,” makes clear, were a complex product of intellect, temperament and personality. He was a tenacious cultural nationalist. He hungered for a usable past. He sought an indigenous cultural community. He condemned the obsession with European masterpieces.

At the same time, Copland was singularly equable. He seemed immune to anger or jealousy. He inspired trust. The Copland personality was direct, affirmative, energized--”American.” In fact, he himself characterized American music as “plain and bare,” invested with “simplicity and naturalness” and “optimistic vitality.”

Copland’s “Billy the Kid” and “Appalachian Spring”--and countless other works less well-known--fulfill this prescription. Compared with Chadwick’s Germanic musical furnishings with their rich upholstery or the grand rhetoric and riotous eclecticism of Ives’ musical pageantry, the Copland style is clean, even austere, yet conveys a homespun warmth. Even when not applied to cowboy tunes or Shaker hymns, its hardness and precision evoke the open space, urban intensity and rhythmic vigor of American life.

Leonard Bernstein (whose American voice, unlike Copland’s, can sound vulgar) once cannily extolled Copland as “plain, plain, plain!” And yet--another source of his wide appeal--Copland’s plain-spoken manner was notably free-spirited. At various times, he praised or promoted (and Copland was an influential essayist and presenter) the music of Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslawski, Toru Takemitso and Iannis Xenakis. He was, Pollack informs us, relaxed about his homosexuality. Even his relatively compact musical output--clearly and copiously described in this book, if not with much flair or originality--was more varied in genre and style than we tend to realize.

And Copland was a political free spirit. Here, especially, Pollack unearths an important part of the Copland story not previously told. Copland’s Norton lectures of 1952 espoused social responsibility: “The artist should feel himself affirmed and buoyed up by his community. In other words, art and the life of art must mean something, in the deepest sense, to the everyday citizen. When that happens, America will have achieved a maturity to which every sincere artist will have contributed.”

Though he never joined any political party, Copland was committed to serving “everyday citizens.” Throughout the ‘30s, he was thick with communists and “fellow travelers.” He supported the Communist presidential ticket in 1936. He presided over a Marxist-leaning Young Composers Group. At a 1934 all-Copland concert at the Pierre Degeyter Club, an offshoot of the American Communist Party, he proclaimed the need for the contemporary composer to identify “with the great masses of the proletariat.” He was even, in 1953, hauled before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, on which occasion he avoided naming names and smoothly circumvented questions about having been a “communist sympathizer.” (“I have never sympathized with communists as such,” was one typical Copland response.)

This sidebar to the Copland career illuminates both the man and the artist. Pollack depicts Copland applying a timely passion for social justice with more prudence and aplomb than some of his colleagues. He also charts the impact of leftist thought on Copland’s music, beginning with the 1934 workers’ song “Into the Streets May First,” which won a contest sponsored by the New Masses. Copland later disowned his “communist song” as “[t]he silliest thing I did.” Pollack comments: “But at the very least, the song revealed his own solution to the problem that so baffled the [Composers Collective], that is, how to create music that would be both revolutionary--or at least fresh and modern--in style and yet appropriate to mass taste and abilities.”

Copland also produced a highly accessible 1935 children’s opera, “The Second Hurricane,” modeled somewhat after the Lehrstucke (teaching plays) of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill. His appropriation of folk songs in such works as “Billy the Kid” (1938) and “Rodeo” (1942) was, again, stimulated by proletarian sympathies. In wartime, Copland’s political identity took the form of a wholesome and declamatory patriotism, variously manifest in “Lincoln Portrait” (1942), “Appalachian Spring” (1943-44) and the tub-thumping “Third Symphony” (1944-46).

Copland’s extensive catalog of music for film also fits this picture of the composer’s sense of utility, his common touch. Copland wanted nothing to do with the Hollywood styles of Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, with the Romantic harmonies and Wagnerian leitmotifs of their music for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Gone With the Wind.” Scoring a pair of Lewis Milestone films adapted from books by John Steinbeck (whom Copland admired), he adroitly applied his repertoire of spare gestures, hard sonorities and dance rhythms to “Of Mice and Men” (1939) and “The Red Pony” (1948). Like Copland’s western ballets, this music influenced the sound worlds of Hollywood Westerns to come.

For William Wyler’s “The Heiress” (1948), Copland furnished a particularly subtle, psychological score whose integrity was violated by maudlin interpolations by another hand. In all, he provided music for 10 films, balancing the dictates of art and the marketplace. Pollack summarizes: “Copland’s movie career--while perhaps unexceptional in the context of world film history--proved unique in the States; he became by far the most distinguished American-born composer to work so extensively and successfully in Hollywood. This says much about his character, his abilities, and his aspirations.”

Copland wrote eloquently of the challenge of mediating between democracy and art. “The radio and phonograph have given us listeners whose sheer numbers in themselves create a special problem,” he commented in 1943. The “job of the ‘40s,” he resolved, was to “find a musical style which satisfies both us and them.” In “Our New Music” (1941), he argued that the new audience presented “the most exciting challenge of our day”:

“The question is: can we composers write a music that will be of interest to these hitherto untouched millions of listeners, and if so, what manner of music shall it be? . . . One thing is certain: the new musical audiences will have to have music that they can comprehend. That is axiomatic. It must therefore be simple and direct. But there is no reason why it should not be a music that exploits all those new devices discovered during the first years of the 20th century. Above all, it must be fresh in feeling. . . . To write a music that is both simple and direct and is at the same time great music is a goal worthy of the efforts of the best minds in music.”

Copland was not alone in thus aligning himself with the earthiness of the Jazz Age, with the socially committed art of the Depression, with the patriotism of wartime. Yet far from gravitating to contemporary American music, the new listeners Copland courted had essentially been seduced by Beethoven and Toscanini. And future American composers, far from becoming populists, would increasingly follow Schoenberg’s dictum that “all I know is that [the listener] exists, and insofar as he isn’t indispensable for acoustic reasons (since music doesn’t sound well in an empty hall), he’s only a nuisance.”

Even Copland was using 12-tone techniques by 1950, only to be dismissed as a has-been by ivory-tower types he had attempted to discourage. Concurrently, his rate of production declined, and what music he did complete failed to penetrate the permanent repertoire. Pollack mounts a painstaking defense of such late works as “Connotations” (1962) and “Inscape” (1967). But it remains equally plausible to infer that absent the challenges of securing an American style and serving a new audience, Copland lost the sense of mission that fired his creativity through World War II.

The timing of the new Pollack biography is doubly felicitous. Not only does it celebrate the imminent centenary of Copland’s birth in 1900 but, with the waning of the high modernists who once dismissed him, Copland is due for a balanced and comprehensive reassessment. What kind of musical figurehead was he? How effectively did he combat the Toscanini cult, the music appreciation movement and other Eurocentric distractions? How meaningfully did he interact with the important jazz styles of the inter-war decades? How good a composer was he, stacked up against his leading European contemporaries (one of whom, Shostakovich, pursued a comparable political-artistic agenda)? Finally, how does he figure into the larger sweep of American concert music, its fractured evolution and conflicted relationship to Old World parents?

These are issues Pollack does not completely address. But he furnishes a necessary starting point for their proper investigation. The energies of American musicologists remain overly ensnared by European topics and composers. American cultural historians regularly ignore the complex and fascinating saga of our musical high culture. Perhaps this book will make a difference.