Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  PART FIVE

  Aaron Copland

  From Orient to Occident

  Jody lay in his bed and thought of the impossible world of Indians and buffaloes…. He wished he could have been living in the heroic time, but he knew he was not of heroic timber…. A race of giants had lived then, fearless men, men of a staunchness unknown in this day. Jody thought of the wide plains and of the wagons moving across like centipedes. He thought of Grandfather on a huge white horse, marshaling the people. Across his mind marched the great phantoms, and they marched off the earth and they were gone.

  —JOHN STEINBECK, THE RED PONY

  11

  _______

  The Saga of the Prairies

  THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

  Late in September 1936, the Columbia Broadcasting System offered Aaron Copland his first radio commission. Along with five other composers—Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and William Grant Still—Copland crafted a piece to fit the network's basic guidelines for length (less than thirty minutes) and instrumentation (fewer than thirty-seven players).1 Many years after the fact, Copland recalled his excitement at composing for this new medium, claiming to have written “in a style designed to bridge the gap between modern composition and the need for a wider public.”2 His initial title for the work, Radio Serenade, was abruptly altered to the even more neutral Music for Radio, thanks to a clever public relations move by radio officials: to increase audience interest, listeners would be asked to send in their suggestions for more descriptive subtitles. Over a thousand entries were collected from across the country, including “Cliff Dwellers,” “The Inca's Prayer to the Sun,” “Machine Age,” “Marconi's World Message,” “Subway Traveler,” “Oriental Phantasy,” “Boy Scout Jamboree,” “Journey of the British Patrol Across Arabia,” “Adventures in the Life of a Robot,” and “Futile Search for Order Out of Chaos.” The composer telegraphed his response to CBS: “HAVE READ ALL TITLE SUGGESTIONS STOP ASTONISHED AND DELIGHTED BY NUMBER AND VARIETY STOP NO ONE TITLE COMPLETELY SATISFACTORY STOP ACCEPT GLADLY AS IMAGINATIVE SUBTITLE SAGA OF THE PRAIRIE STOP CLOSE RUNNERS UP PRAIRIE TRAVEL STOP JOURNEY OF THE EARLY PIONEERS STOP AMERICAN PIONEER” (VPAC1, 255). Thus did Aaron Copland christen his first work for national broadcast, one of his first with a descriptive title invoking Americana. After all, he reflected, “I had used a cowboy tune in the second of the four sections, so the western titles seemed most appropriate. (The piece, of course, had been composed entirely on West 63rd Street in New York City)” (VPAC1, 255).

  There is more to this story than Copland's recollections suggest. The folklike melody that serves as the work's second theme was not originally identified as a cowboy song, and Copland scholars have not found this tune in any of the composer's usual folk music sources.3 Although the composition of the piece may have taken place mostly in New York, Copland had already left for Mexico (apparently via Hollywood) before it was complete (VPAC1, 255, 265, 270-71). He also neglected to mention that some of the material for the work was drawn from a piece with a definite (and politically controversial) program. Indeed, the real saga of Music for Radio draws together a number of the narrative strands that will inform this discussion of Copland: his ambivalent stance toward folk music; the promises and perils of populism during the 1930s; the curious circumstances that allowed his westernness to emerge almost exclusively in response to outside influences instead of personal inclinations; and the ironies that surface when one attempts to map biographical or geographical fact onto popular and critical reception.

  Here we will examine the process by which Copland's westernness replaced his more contentious leftism, overshadowed his overt engagement with African American musical materials, and won nationwide popularity for a composer who might otherwise have been marginalized on the basis of his Russian-Jewish heritage or his homosexuality. The conjunction of whiteness, masculinity, and the West that was so significant a part of Harris's appeal had different but still powerful implications for Copland. The aggressive heroes and rugged landscapes of the West helped balance (veiled) allusions to his homosexual preferences, deflecting interest away from his Jewish, cosmopolitan background and focusing it on an Anglo, western mythology that was rapidly becoming a favorite arena for representations of American identity in the mass media. Stylistically speaking, Copland's westward turn softened his jazzy modernism into an all-purpose Americanism steeped in nostalgia and helped recuperate the left-wing overtones of his “pioneer” populism by channeling them into domestic settings more acceptable to the conservative establishment and the listening public. The musical vocabulary associated with Copland's idealizations of frontier America, though in part shared with (or borrowed from) his contemporaries, also offered a disarmingly concrete resolution to those pursuing the chimeric “Copland style.”

  THE “BROOKLYN STRAVINSKY”

  The ready availability today of diverse musical idioms may make it difficult for us to recapture the angst with which Copland and his contemporaries addressed questions of personal style. Though trends in composition had changed radically since the fin de siècle, the rhetoric used to describe the creative process was slow to catch up, clinging instead to romantic notions of originality, creative consistency, and an easily recognizable individual “voice.”

  As we have seen, faith in the tremendous value of “personality” had spurred the early acclamation of Harris, by Copland and others, despite concerns about his technique. George Antheil's revealing, if somewhat eccentric, recollections further suggest how strongly Copland's appreciation of Harris was linked to the question of individuality. Antheil recalled Copland's admiring words for Harris's Third Symphony: “It is honest, sincere…. you can open any page of it and say, ‘Here is Roy Harris.' His music is always written in his own style, nobody else's…. You must always know whether or not this page of music belongs to this or that composer; that comes before everything—excepting, of course, sincerity.”4 Antheil distanced himself from these views, comparing the presence of an individual idiom to an irritating radio advertisement. But Copland remained committed to audible individuality when making aesthetic judgments. Even when his opinion of Harris cooled, his faith in “personality” remained. Such strong feelings from the typically reserved Copland are an indication that by 1941 he bore the scars of his own battles between style and technique. While Harris had been described as possessing an incorrigible sincerity, simultaneously in need and in danger of acquiring technique, Copland's early reception marked him as a skilled craftsman still searching for his own personal voice.

  From the start, Copland may have been susceptible to charges of stylistic imitation because of his famous teachers: Rubin Goldmark and especially Nadia Boulanger. Even if he avoided bringing more adventurous compositions to Goldmark, Copland seems to have adopted certain aspects of the older composer's outlook, including an appreciation for craftsmanship and an openness to outside stimulus. True to the Germanic and central European heritage of his musical family, Goldmark emphasized the importance of rigorous study and polished technique, especially when it came to form. In fact, when Copland revealed his hope of joining his friend Aaron Schaffer in France, Goldmark urged him to remain in New York to solidify his technique and to perfect his mastery of sonata form. Even after his protégé had left the New York nest, Goldmark continued to advocate his views on the saving grace of form: “I hope you will make some more progress in the Sonata form. Don't get to despise this, even if you should fall into the hands of some radicals.” In Goldmark's musical universe, acquiring the basics through careful study was the proper preparation for “doing anything you like afterwards.”5

  Goldmark encouraged his students to broaden their realm of experiences and to gain competence in a (limited) plurality of compositional styles. While Farwell urged Harris to write from within, Goldmark favored European study, “especially when taken at an impressionable age.” “I am sure it will broaden you and be of great value to you,” he wrote, “part
icularly if you make use of all your faculties to absorb and digest.”6 Goldmark was particularly delighted when his pupil wrote from Paris that he was planning to spend the summer in Germany. “You are certainly making the best of your European sojourn,” he wrote. “I think it was very wise of you to go into Germany for a while, even tho' its musical lustre may be dimmer for one who has sat at the feet of ‘Les Six.'…It is a good thing for a well-rounded musician to gain experience in many lands, and absorb what they can give him.”7

  If Germany and France were the sanctioned sites for the “impression,” “absorption,” and “digestion” that Goldmark favored, what of the United States? When questioned about this in 1914, Goldmark protested: “I believe that too much stress is laid on the negro and Indian aspects of the question.”8 But no matter what he chose to preach, Goldmark practiced a musical nationalism that he may well have learned while studying with Dvoͅák at the National Conservatory. African American materials inform Goldmark's “Gettysburg” Requiem (1919) and Negro Rhapsody (1923); Native American references are prominent in the Hiawatha Overture (1900) and The Call of the Plains (1916, orch. 1925). Copland was ambivalent about Goldmark's potential influence, especially in the realm of Americana. “I never remember his discussing the subject of nationalism or folklorism,” he recalled, “and he certainly never suggested them to me as possible influences” (VPAC1, 27-28).9 Yet he could hardly have helped but notice that a New Yorker could profitably imagine the American heartland in works like Goldmark's piano suite Prairie Idylls (1915).10

  Copland's recollections of Goldmark remained mostly fond, but when it came to Boulanger, Copland was a real American disciple. Dozens of composers—Harris among them—went to study with Boulanger at Copland's recommendation, and he was proud of this legacy. Like Harris, Copland was profoundly impressed by Boulanger's musical facility, but unlike the self-proclaimed “autodidact,” he also affirmed the importance of “technical mastery” and the relatively benign influence of having models to follow. He recalled: “‘To study music, we must learn the rules,' she would say. ‘To create music, we must forget them’” (VPAC1, 62-63). In the summer of 1932, more than a decade after encountering Boulanger, Copland had occasion to voice his continued approval for his mentor's methods as he argued with Virgil Thomson about whether their friend Paul Bowles should study composition with Boulanger or Paul Dukas. Copland defended Boulanger's sometimes overbearing approach in a letter to Thomson: “I'm all for the teacher influencing the pupil…the pupil should swallow it whole for a time and if he has any guts he'll throw them overboard soon enough” (HP, 184).

  Scholars have identified several resonances of Boulanger's teaching in Copland's music. First is the pedagogue's concept of la grande ligne, or as Copland later described it, “the sense of forward motion, of flow and continuity in the musical discourse” (VPAC1, 67)—ideals that have much in common with Harris's concept of “autogenetic” or organic melody. By contrast, Copland seems to have considered this aspect of Boulanger's pedagogy worthy but perhaps a bit old-fashioned.11 Later in the paragraph cited above, he observed that “much has happened in music since those years, and perhaps Boulanger's theories seem outdated” (VPAC1, 67). Second, and more important for Copland's stylistic trajectory, was the value Boulanger placed on fluency in a broad range of musical idioms. Many members of the Boulangerie have spoken of the historical breadth they gained from her commitment to contemporary music—not just the works of her friend Stravinsky, but also Les Six, Mahler, and to a certain extent, Bartók. At the same time, Boulanger's historical-analytical teaching style fostered an intimacy with the music of the past through weekly assignments that included orchestrating older works, experimenting with the formal conventions of different eras, and participating in concerts of early music. Hard on the heels of Copland's contrapuntal Passacaglia (1922), a genre that Boulanger required of her students, came the asymmetrical meters of his Rondino for string quartet (1923), and the ballet Grohg (1924-25), which combines impressionist and expressionist elements, Stravinskian octatonicism and polytonality, microtones, and jazz polyrhythms (HP, 85).

  Perhaps the most significant of Boulanger's bequests to Copland was his engagement with the music of Stravinsky.12 Critics of every decade have commented on the Russian composer's influence. In 1953, Arthur Berger wrote dismissively of this tendency: “One sometimes spoke in [the 1920s] of a ‘Brooklyn Stravinsky.' Today this seems curious, with both composers better known.”13 Yet in his memoirs of the 1980s, Copland endorsed and intensified the comparison with candor and sophistication. Characterizing Stravinsky as “the hero of my student days,” he readily admitted an influence in such areas as “rhythmic virtuosity,” “bold use of dissonance,” and “unusual instrumental combinations.” More significantly, Copland claimed: “I was particularly struck by the strong Russian element in his music. He borrowed freely from folk materials, and I have no doubt that this strongly influenced me to try to find a way to a distinctively American music.” But Copland reserved his most powerful rhetoric for a different evaluation of the Stravinskian legacy: “The most important thing for me,” he wrote, “was that Stravinsky proved it was possible for a twentieth-century composer to create his own tradition” (VPAC1, 72-73). While Copland's rhythmic ingenuity and free adaptation of folk materials were crucial to the success of his music during the 1930s and 1940s, it is this sense that a composer could “create his own tradition” that had the greatest impact on Copland's western works.

  “ECLECTIC IN ALL THE REST”

  Creating his own tradition was not something that Copland could accomplish overnight. In contrast to Harris, who had substantial critical help in identifying his musical mission, Copland encountered many obstacles. The diversity apparent in his early works left friends and critics wondering which musical elements were evidence of imitation and artistic immaturity and which ones could be considered “sincere.”14 Immediately after his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (in which stylistic ties to Boulanger were reinforced by the work's dedication and by Boulanger's physical presence as the soloist) came a work in a radically different vein: Music for the Theatre (1925). Copland had returned to New York in June 1924, a mere three months after Paul Whiteman's notorious “Experiment in Modern Music” had given birth to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and although Music for the Theatre did not have the same kind of advertising, it represented a related but less popular “experiment.” The first work commissioned by the League of Composers, it was premiered by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Koussevitzky, to whom the work was dedicated. In addition to exhibiting one of the composer's first allusions to an existing popular melody (“The Sidewalks of New York”), the work remains remarkable for its brash use of jazz idioms, especially in the “Dance” and “Burlesque” movements. Together with the Piano Concerto (1926), Music for the Theatre provides the musical embodiment of Copland's early writings on jazz, which reveal both his fascination with jazz rhythms and his limited appreciation for the emotional scope of African American music.15

  Not everyone was pleased with Copland's solution. Some praised his inventiveness, but Copland also drew fire from conservative critics, who disparaged his flouting of concert hall decorum, and more surprisingly, from many of his friends, who worried that he might appear too “commercial” or too narrowly identified with New York.16 Harris, for one, cautioned Copland against these dangers in a letter written while the Piano Concerto was still in progress: “A word of warning to you—dear brother Aaron—the Jazz idiom is too easily assumed and projected[—]as a serious expression it has nearly burned out already I believe. Either you must chuck it or carry it to ad infinitum—or ad nauseam (which shall I say)—Beware for that new piano concerto which so many Copeland [sic] enthusiasts are waiting for—Don't disappoint us with jazz—(Have I been harsh—if it might seem so—it is only because I have such belief in your integrity—outside the jazz idiom)” (emphasis in the original).17 That same year, Roger Sessions expressed simil
ar concerns, objecting vehemently to Copland's claim that Music for the Theatre was his most “characteristic” work. It was that assertion, Sessions wrote, “combined with what you said about being a ‘New York composer' etc. [that] led me to wonder whether you were not—temporarily, no doubt—going off on a vein which was smaller than your truest one.”18

  Copland's answers to these letters were circumspect, but his subsequent scores may represent a response in their own right.19 After the Piano Concerto, his next large-scale composition was the 1928 piano trio Vitebsk (Study on a Jewish Theme), and it was dedicated to Harris. While Vitebsk preserved and even intensified the dissonant language of his jazz-based works, Copland changed the frame of reference by aligning its quarter tones not with the jazzy realm of the “blue note,” but with the vocal inflections of Hasidic song. Vitebsk won approval from Harris, but its overt Jewishness remained rare in Copland's oeuvre. Instead, Copland's next compositions—including the Symphonic Ode (1929), Piano Variations (1930), and Short Symphony (1933)—sported a style that Sessions would have endorsed: dissonant, tightly constructed, and arguably free of explicit national or ethnic markers.