The Copland Paradox

In April 1991, a memorial concert was held for Aaron Copland, who had died Dec. 2, 1990, less than three weeks after his 90th birthday. It appeared that every American composer within reach of Lincoln Center in New York attended. Sitting far in the back of Alice Tully Hall, even John Cage and Merce Cunningham had tears in their eyes.

Forty-seven years earlier, Cunningham had been the young dancer in Martha Graham’s company who created the role of the revivalist preacher in “Appalachian Spring,” Copland’s famous ballet. But that had been his farewell performance with Graham, and he hadn’t had anything to do with Copland or his music since. Cage had operated on a different (and often opposing) musical shore from Copland’s for half a century. Yet these two lifelong avant-gardists made no effort to hide their affection for an American populist.

Copland was the first, the only and probably the last American classical composer upon whose greatness and importance everyone could agree.

His 100th birthday is Nov. 14, and the celebration has taken on something of an iconic status. If we fall into the temptation to look back at the 20th century as the American century, Copland, born as it began, becomes a ready symbol for a nation coming of age.

Copland defined what we have come to think of as a distinctive and singular American sound. He was our supreme nationalist composer, the voice of cosmopolitan and cowboy, evoker of the brute dynamism of the big city and mystical expanse of the prairie’s wide open space. And he was, of course, superpatriot, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “Lincoln Portrait.”

Yet the great irony of Copland was that he was none of those things, really--not cowpoke or big-city sophisticate, and certainly no common man. His politics were far enough left of center that they got him in trouble with Joseph McCarthy. He grew up on what he described as a drab street in Brooklyn over the family store. His ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower--his parents emigrated from Poland and Lithuania. Jewish and gay, he readily identified with outsiders.

A plain-spoken and genial man who was generous to a fault, Copland lived unpretentiously. He did not appear to be complex or conflicted. And conflicted he probably wasn’t, but complex is another matter. He created an American voice--immediately recognizable (sometimes by as little as a single chord) as his and also as our nation’s--out of the true American Babel. He drew from any number of sources that included the latest techniques from Paris, the folk music of Mexico, South America and the U.S., the Eastern European Jewish song of his parents’ roots, and particularly the jazz that seemed to him to supply his native and beloved New York with all its energy.

Jewish song is not always apparent in Copland’s prairie pastorales, nor jazz in the prickly abstract Modernist music that he wrote as a young man making a name for himself. Copland could be a severe composer who believed fewer notes were better, but these disparate elements can be found underlying nearly everything he wrote. And it is that that makes it possible for so many disparate listeners to think of Copland as their own.

In Spike Lee’s tribute to basketball, the film “He Got Game,” Copland’s music is lovingly featured on the soundtrack. Strange as it is to see hip-hop kids or prison inmates shooting hoops accompanied by “Appalachian Spring,” Lee’s logic proved unassailable. “When I listen to [Copland’s] music, I hear America,” the director said when the film was released in 1998. “And basketball is America.” Copland, the film unequivocally asserts, also got game.

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This accessibility and familiarity make it almost too easy to commemorate Copland as the composer who made something for everyone. It is no stretch for orchestras, chamber series or soloists to program Copland. And there cannot be many non-operatic music institutions or schools that won’t have joined in with a least a little something of Copland’s before the year is out. In Los Angeles, the main events are clustered around the birthday next week. The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays an all-Copland program this afternoon, while tonight the Pacific Symphony begins an eight-day Copland festival centered on Copland’s Hollywood connection as an Academy Award-winning film composer. Monday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella concert is a Copland tribute. The Long Beach Symphony will perform Copland’s Third Symphony on Nov. 18. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Monday Evening Concerts series began its season last month with a visit by musicians from New York’s Copland House, an institute based in Copland’s Hudson River residence and devoted to his music.

Much of this activity focuses only on Copland’s middle, populist works, from the 1940s or thereabouts. That makes sense for Los Angeles audiences because those were the years when Copland had a local connection through his film work, producing such extraordinary scores as those for “Of Mice and Men,” “Our Town” and “The Red Pony.” The Pacific Symphony festival advisor, Joseph Horowitz, writes in the program book that Copland’s film music, which began with “The City,” a 1939 documentary on the New York World’s Fair, “played a pivotal role in the evolution of Copland’s American musical vocabulary.”

Horowitz is surely correct that writing for film helped Copland find the mass-market voice that ultimately became the musical voice of America. And it does, on the surface, seem as though Copland’s entry into Hollywood represented a stylistic about-face. In the ‘20s and ‘30s, Copland was considered ultramodern for his use of aggressive dissonance, spiky rhythms and abstract forms. He was also called rude, because he brought jazz into the concert hall, where prim audiences felt it had no business. In a recent large-scale biography of Copland, Howard Pollack carefully explores the many different aspects of Copland and finds a paradox in music that embodied Modernism and populism.

His most telling anecdote is a Hollywood one. Once, while working on a picture, Copland encountered Groucho Marx at a concert where some of the composer’s piano music was performed. Only knowing Copland’s populist side, Groucho expressed surprise at the music’s uncompromising modernity and formalism. Copland cheerfully explained that he had a split personality.

“That’s OK,” Groucho told him, “as long as you split it with Sam Goldwyn.”

And that is exactly what Copland did on a very large scale. With his typical generosity, he split his musical personality among many constituents. It was his economy of means, his ability to distill a style to its core elements (a jazz lick to a single rhythmic figure, a melancholy melody to just a couple of notes) that often made each work seem as if it represented only one thing. Cowboy ballets were about cowboys; “Appalachian Spring” suggested that place and that season; the abstract pieces were edgy, non-narrative constructions of musical architecture; “El Salon Mexico” transported the listener south of the border; the Clarinet Concerto, written for Benny Goodman, defined classical swing.

But that single emphasis never told the whole story. By distilling a style, Copland, a formalist at heart, created elegant, malleable musical building blocks that he used to synthesize his American voice. The Shakers in “Appalachian Spring” don’t exactly shimmy or cantillate, but listen hard and you might hear an echo of jazz dance and a hint of Copland’s own ethnic roots.

Writing “Appalachian Spring,” Copland restricted his thoughts to formal dance and, specifically, Graham’s individual style. His working title was “Ballet for Martha.” It was only after the music was written that Graham came upon the phrase, Appalachian spring, in Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge.” She used it simply because she liked the way it sounded.

Nor did Graham initially have a clear idea of the narrative. Cunningham has said that she only offered him a vague notion of his character as perhaps a preacher, farmer, devil or something else. He worked from the nature of the music, not the character, when he invented a dance for the revivalist. Then, upon seeing Cunningham’s choreography, Graham then said she knew in what direction to proceed. Yet a great many listeners will always treasure “Appalachian Spring” for its incredible power to summon a specific atmosphere. And who is to say that they are wrong? The music, with its structural purity and built of the distillations of many cultures, become an auditory mirror for every listener.

Therein lies Copland’s greatness, not as a composer who tells the listener what to think or how to feel, but a composer who allows the listener to bring him or herself to the music. This is the essential Americanness, the democracy of Copland’s music.

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As the outsider from Brooklyn, Copland rejected the pushy German influence that dominated art music in the America of his youth. He took the radical step of looking to France instead. He learned from Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris, not a style but a technique. He came away from her with the capacity to organize materials, and the materials he chose were often those that struck him close to home.

Copland’s early scores were the loud and brash enthusiasms of a young man absorbing the energy of the city. An early champion was the Russian music director of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. And Copland once said that polite Boston society accused Koussevitsky of championing Copland just to give a bad name to American music.

If Copland’s early Modernism initially made him unpopular with conventional audiences, his seemingly radical swing toward a populist style in the late ‘30s was initially damned by many of his early supporters as a sellout. The shift was shocking but not necessarily retrogressive. Copland was always in one sense radical and in another conservative. His first-period music paraded its dissonances and spiky rhythms, but it was conventionally constructed of sonata forms, variations, passacaglias. Likewise, Copland always took the pulse of people. However abstract the music, it knew jazz’s lilt and syncopations; it also often displayed the melancholy, soulful song of Jewish music.

Copland’s motivation for the popular pieces, beginning with “El Salon Mexico” in 1938, was progressive politics. During the Depression and the beginning of world war, Copland, along with many New York artists and intellectuals, identified with the plight of the worker. And he often expressed that through the application of a subversive element in his popular scores. “Billy the Kid” glows with a near-mystic aura given to this societal outsider.

There was musical subversion as well. Whenever Copland used folk tunes (real or invented) or other popular musical devices, his musical structures remained rigorously complex and interesting. One can listen to “El Salon Mexico” a hundred times and still be surprised.

Copland changed with the times. His populism was part of that, and so was his return to a more Spartan Modernist style in the ‘50s, influenced by, of all things, the 12-tone method. But again, Copland was also Copland, which meant he was recognizable as himself yet a representative of more than one thing. Twelve-tone pieces such as the Piano Quartet or even the daunting late orchestral works, “Inscape” and “Connotations,” can sing sad songs or speak with the rhythmic snap we readily recognize.

The real paradox of Copland is not in his music as much as in the ways it was sometimes misunderstood. That reached its most absurd proportions when a performance of the “Lincoln Portrait” was canceled at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953 because Copland had been called up before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The composer handled himself brilliantly before his questioners, sidestepping answers by acting the country bumpkin and indicting no one. Ike was widely criticized for the inauguration debacle, an America seen as too silly to celebrate it greatest composer.

The “Lincoln Portrait” is now an appropriate staple of official Washington. But we still have a problem when it comes to a complete celebration of Copland if we insist on seeing his vision as simplistic schoolbook Americana, music for the land of the good and brave. That it is, but the reason it speaks so effectively is because Copland includes all of us in that vision.