Copland’s Model of Independence

Nov. 14 will be the 100th birthday of Aaron Copland. And although the celebratory year is still young, it is already in full swing in Copland’s hometown. The New York Philharmonic got a jump on the party and performed the majority of Copland’s orchestral music in a series of concerts in the fall. In Los Angeles, we will presumably have to wait until closer to the actual birthday for events courtesy of the Pacific Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, neither of which has announced details of its plans.

It is likely that the typical tributes to the composer, whose music has come to typify the essence of the American style, will offer some sort of survey of the work. Carnegie Hall, on the other hand, tried something a little different over the weekend. In a Saturday symposium and a Sunday afternoon concert by the American Symphony Orchestra, it examined a small series of concerts that Copland and Roger Sessions began in the spring of 1928.

There were eight Copland-Sessions Concerts in America and two in Europe over three years. They were modest events, poorly attended and belligerently reviewed when not ignored altogether in the press. They didn’t cause much of a splash. Few of the works performed, by more than 30 composers, made it into the repertory.

Nevertheless, the Copland-Sessions Concerts became the model for how independent-minded young American composers might act. In the ‘20s, new music in New York was primarily in the hands of two competing organizations, the League of Composers and the International Composers’ Guild, and both emphasized established, mostly European names such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg. There was little room in them for Copland’s twentysomething generation, so, declaring that “the day of the neglected American composer is over,” he and Sessions devised their own series, in various venues around town.

The concerts empowered American composers, and that sense of empowerment never went away. John Cage devised avant-garde concerts with colleagues in the ‘40s and ‘50s; Philip Glass and Steve Reich produced their own concerts together in the ‘60s; CalArts graduates formed the Independent Composers Assn. in the ‘70s; three composers just out of Yale started the still-vital Bang on a Can Festival in New York a dozen years ago.

At Carnegie Hall on Saturday, Arthur Berger, a composer born in 1912 and befriended by Copland early on, described the Copland-Sessions Concerts as producing “an underground camaraderie” among composers. That sense of camaraderie appears to be what gave the series its impact. And that came principally from Copland. Yale historian Vivian Perlis, who co-authored Copland’s two-volume oral history-memoir, quoted Virgil Thomson on Copland’s attitude about his fellow composers: “Don’t treat them as rivals in a shell game, but as members of a Fifth Avenue merchants association.”

The Copland-Sessions Concerts were, in fact, all about Copland and only a little about Sessions (indeed, Perlis shared the anecdote about the woman who came up to Copland at one program and told him how much she enjoyed his “sessions”). Sessions--four years Copland’s senior and a composer of sterner, more Germanic music than the Francophile Copland--was in Europe during the planning of the presentation of most of the concerts. There was some consultation, but mails were slow and it was primarily Copland’s show.

The kind of show it was demonstrated that Copland’s gift to us was not just his own work but his vision that American music should represent the vastness of the country. The programs look wonderful. Thomson’s first important Gertrude Stein setting, “Capital Capitals,” had its premiere on the series. The West Coast was represented by Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, Adolph Weiss and by Los Angeles pianist Richard Buhlig. The first piano sonatas by Sessions and Roy Harris were given their first performances. Room was found for foreigners living in America, and one was Italian composer Nino Rota. Mexican composer Carlos Chavez was a favorite of the series. Experimental films by Ralph Steiner were shown with scores by Colin McPhee and Marc Blitzstein.

Copland, of course, needed help--financial and administrative--to bring these concerts about, and that, too, was amazing. Behind the concerts were several remarkable volunteer women. As Perlis explained, this was an age when women were not supposed to accept money for work, and so the likes of Claire Reis (whom Perlis described as the last of the great hostesses), Minna Lederman (editor of the journal Modern Music) and patron Mary Churchill made the whole enterprise possible. Today, Perlis noted, such women would be CEOs, and it is a curious irony that American music owes such a debt to pre-feminist society.

On Sunday afternoon, the American Composers Orchestra included on its program Copland’s Short Symphony, written in 1931 (the last year of the Copland-Sessions Concerts), and Sessions’ Third Symphony, completed in 1957. The Short Symphony is Copland’s first masterpiece, a work that combined his still Modernist spirit with the urban rhythms he heard all around him. Sessions’ symphony is thick, heavy, lumbering, complicated, serious and exceedingly authoritative music; and it shows why he has never had Copland’s public. Dennis Russell Davies conducted both with a tremendous sense of power and conviction.

In addition, he also gave New York its belated premiere of George Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique” in its original form. This half-hour of clangor for an array of synchronized player pianos, bass drums, xylophones, bells, whistles, sirens and an airplane propeller was a scandal in Paris in 1924 and a flop at Carnegie in 1927. But Antheil had never been able to properly synchronize the pianos, and had to compromise with live players (one of whom was Copland at the first Carnegie performance). Now with the help of computer technology it can be done as intended.

It is empty music, but the noise and sense of occasion is fun. On Sunday, its greatest value was to further demonstrate that there was an indomitable spirit and energy among American composers in the late ‘20s, and that we have Copland to thank for channeling that spirit and energy in such a way that it has been with us ever since.