Fanfare for an Uncommon Man

Amid all those hours of Ken Burns’ “Jazz” lately heating up PBS, KCET has found one for Aaron Copland Sunday night at 10. “Copland’s America” may come a bit after the fact of the composer’s centennial last year, but the timing is nonetheless excellent; it reminds viewers that American music--even jazz--is a vaster enterprise than Burns’ series can possibly reveal.

But then Copland, too, is a vast subject. “We are Copland,” the composer David Del Tredici says near the beginning of the documentary. By this, I think he means not just that Copland provided a template for a younger generation of composers to follow, but that he invented a sound that speaks so directly to the American spirit that a great many of us identify profoundly with it.

Copland’s America is thus our America, and the documentary takes a stab at demonstrating how and why that is. It offers a potted biography, showing the composer in the ‘20s and early ‘30s as a young man from Brooklyn who--having picked up the latest modern style of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel in France--controversially inserted hot jazz into the concert hall. In so doing, Copland fashioned a hard-edged, dissonant, rhythmically aggressive, ultra-modern music that proved a much more daring kind of concert music than what Gershwin was attempting in the period.

Caught up in the patriotic fervor of the late ‘30s, as America lifted itself out of the Depression, Copland developed a vernacular style and celebrated the country as a mystical place of wide open spaces and idealistic outsiders in the ballets “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring.” And he worked in Hollywood, scoring such American-themed movies as “Of Mice and Men” and “Our Town.”

Later, he returned to Modernism, incorporating the 12-tone series in his works. By the ‘60s, his composing had slowed to a trickle. He said the ideas stopped flowing. The composer John Corigliano states in the film that America no longer presented itself to Copland with the same optimism. Del Tredici explains the real cause--”Alzheimer’s was slowly progressing.” Copland died in 1990.

The other talking heads are conductor Jonathan Sheffer, Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack and the composer Elliot Goldenthal. Much of what is said is unimaginative (Corigliano describes Copland’s ballet scores as “jewels of Americana.”) But Del Tredici is perky and insightful. For instance, while there is no mention of the Jewish streak that can be heard in most of his music or his identification with society’s outsiders, Del Tredici has an amusing observation that maybe Copland’s connection to cowboys was “because he was a gay man and they were a sort of macho ideal.”

For a fuller portrait of Copland, the filmmakers would have done well to have started with Del Tredici and then expanded to a broader and more representative range of musicians, scholars and critics. A Copland documentary without Mi

chael Tilson Thomas should have been unthinkable, as it should have been without John Adams, who is so often called the Copland of our day, or the writers and musicians closest to Copland, particularly Philip Ramey and Vivian Perlis.

Much of “Copland’s America,” in fact, revolves around a concert that Sheffer and his Eos Ensemble, a New York chamber group that puts on interestingly themed programs, did last year investigating Copland’s lesser-known film music. This allows for some striking excerpts from several obscure films, including the utopian documentary, “The City” made for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and a nutty Hollywood Bolshevik musical, “The North Star.” But it also puts emphasis on minor Copland.

To coincide with the film, Telarc is release a fascinating CD, “Celluloid Copland” of Sheffer conducting the film scores that have never before been recorded. Having Eos also responsible for the playing on “Copland’s America” further limits the musical excerpts to works suitable for a chamber orchestra (except for the odd clip of Copland conducting a full orchestra). Thomas Hampson steps in to sing, and magnificently, “The Boatman’s Dance.” There is a marvelous clip of Copland rehearsing at the piano his Clarinet Concerto with the New York Philharmonic clarinetist Stanley Drucker. Attention is also riveted by several other clips of Copland and of Bernstein.

“Copland’s America” is yet another missed musical opportunity by PBS. The network broadcast a much more comprehensive portrait of Copland a number of years ago on the American Masters series. Meanwhile, Sheffer’s investigation into the obscure films is a fetching subject, and simply concentrating on that might have presented a valuable companion film to the existing documentary. Still, with all that jazz on the air, it’s good to have Copland in the picture. American music as we know it could no more have existed without Copland than without Armstrong, Ellington, Davis or Coltrane.

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“Copland’s America” can be seen Sunday at 10 p.m. on PBS.