Frontier Figures
Page 38
By the early 1930s, the advice that Copland had been receiving privately from his colleagues began to find its way into print. In 1930, Theodore Chanler, a fellow member of the Boulangerie, undertook one of the first substantial articles devoted to the composer. After Copland sent Chanler scores of his most recent works, he received a letter of thanks and a glib warning: “I finally started writing the article yesterday. Having no idea what I was going to say it came as something of a shock to me when I found myself positively roasting you. I hope you won't be annoyed. I've decided that your style is full of impurities. So there.”20 This accusation became the negative refrain in Chanler's otherwise complimentary text, initially published in The Hound and Horn (1930) and later anthologized in Henry Cowell's collection American Composers on American Music (1933). Stating from the outset that Copland's “architectural sense is in advance of his sense of style, which is still impure,” Chanler deflated even his most enthusiastic praise with expressions of regret that Copland's own voice was insufficiently audible: “The zest which he manages to instill into certain rather jaded jazz motifs, the skilful disposition of the material, the humor and perfect timing of contrasts…save [the Piano Concerto] from being in any sense a pastiche, though one is aware of potentialities in Copland, not realized here, of achieving a more fruitfully personal style.”21
Chanler's objections soon found a more potent mouthpiece in Virgil Thomson, whose contribution on Copland for Modern Music's “American Composers” series began with a notable overstatement: “Aaron Copland's music is American in rhythm, Jewish in melody, eclectic in all the rest.” Later passages expand and clarify this pithy opening without retracting it:
Today we ape Stravinsky. Yesterday it was Debussy. Before it was Wagner. Copland's best recommendation is that he is less eclectic than his confrères. I reproach him with eclecticism all the same…. He has truth, force, and elegance. He has not quite style. There remain too many irrelevant memories of Nadia Boulanger's lessons, of the scores of Stravinsky and Mahler and perhaps Richard Strauss…. It is a source of continual annoyance to me that his usefulness and his beauty are not fully achieved because he has not yet done the merciless weeding out of his garden that any European composer would have done after his first orchestral hearing.22
In Thomson's eyes, Boulanger's careful curriculum had left Copland with an awkward multiplicity of idioms. If Harris ignored his teachers and struck out prematurely on his own, Copland was too diligent. Finishing off his article with a ringing reversal of Harris's reception, Thomson declared: “The music is all right but the man is not clearly enough visible through it. An American certainly, a Hebrew certainly. But his more precise and personal outline is still blurred by the shadows of those who formed his youth.”23
In addition to the implications of artistic immaturity or unnecessary reliance on European models, there may have been another specter haunting some of those critics who focused on stylistic eclecticism as Copland's most significant shortcoming. As much of Thomson's acerbic essay makes clear, Copland's jazzy eclecticism resonated with certain perspectives on American Jewish cultural identity—embraced by some and disparaged by others.24 Rosenfeld and Sessions mention Copland's religious background rather casually when explaining his melodic habits and his receptiveness to jazz (HP, 518-31). Copland himself participated in similar stereotyping; he referred to Darius Milhaud's “profound nostalgia” and “a deep sense of the tragedy of all life” as evidence of his “Jewish blood” and cited the composer's “violence” and “logic” as indications of his “Jewish spirit.”25 Thomson made even heavier weather of Copland's Jewish melos (“When he sings it is as wailing before the wall”) and stern Hebraic nature: “He is a prophet calling out her sins to Israel. His God is the god of battle, the Lord of Hosts, the jealous, the angry, the avenging god…. The gentler movements of his music are more like an oriental contemplation of infinity than like any tender depiction of the gentler aspects of Jehovah.”26
Many writers had less flattering agendas when they discussed Jewishness in the arts. Commercial and cosmopolitan connotations plagued Jewish creators trying to succeed in an age devoted to authenticity. Associated in the popular press with the music of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood, Jewish composers' efforts could easily be branded as inauthentic (or insidious) attempts to assimilate (or to corrupt). In the 1920s, for example, at the height of American anti-Semitism, Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent voiced this view: “In this business of making the people's songs, the Jews have shown, as usual, no originality but very much adaptability…which is a charitable term used to cover plagiarism, which in its turn politely covers the crime of mental pocket-picking. The Jews do not create; they take what others have done, give it a clever twist, and exploit it.”27 Such brazen accusations still resonate very faintly in Harris's later condemnations of the city composer, the arranger, the musical journalist.
Though speaking from a profoundly different perspective—as a practicing Jew and an authority on Jewish music—Lazare Saminsky reiterated many of these themes in his treatment of composers like Copland, whom he considered contemptibly “Judaic” rather than rooted in the ancient “Hebraic” tradition. Defining the “Judaic” as an assimilationist idiom, “folksong born in the latest ghetto,” “orientalized,” and “showing an abundance of borrowed and neutralized traits,” he observed: “It has emanated from an alien corner, acquired by the Jewish racial psyche; it flows from the mental agility, the calamitous gift of alert self-adaptation to a new cultural quarter.”28 In Copland's case, “self-adaptation” betrayed itself in the composer's chameleon style. By 1934, Saminsky admitted that he had made up his mind, at least temporarily: “I am sorry to profess an eradicable conviction that Copland is of an observing, an absorbing nature, rather than a creative one.”29
The concept of absorption took on more frightening resonances than creative bankruptcy for those critics worried about the national love affair with African American music. In the United States, there was no more intense locus for anxiety about stylistic eclecticism than the noisy collision of black and white represented by jazz. MacDonald Smith Moore has identified a broad spectrum of writers who linked Jews with “the success of jazz” and “the fusion of jazz and classical music,” primarily for racial reasons.30 As “rootless” cosmopolitans, Jews shared jazz's urban taint; as “Orientals,” their racial profile fell between Negro and Anglo. They were cultural middlemen, uniquely situated to perform the anarchic alchemy between “high” and “low” art so well represented by Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue or Copland's Music for the Theatre. John Tasker Howard was only one among dozens of contemporary critics who saw both Tin Pan Alley and jazz as “Jewish interpretation[s] of the Negro.” Rosenfeld and, later, Wilfrid Mellers echoed Isaac Goldberg's hypothesis that “the ready amalgamation of the American Negro and the American Jew goes back to something Oriental in the blood of both.”31
As we saw in Henry Cowell's approach to Harris's music, many observers held strong views about the detrimental effects of mingling jazz and classical composition. Though Cowell would later espouse friendship with Copland based on their shared commitment to modern music, in 1930 he was ready to dismiss Copland and Gershwin in a single breath. In a series of articles written for Melos, he claimed that it was “a pair of sophisticated Parisians” who had led young American composers to cast their lot with jazz—an amalgam of the Negro's syncopation and rhythmic accents as modernized by “‘Tin-Pan-Alley'-Jews.”32 Cowell contended that Copland's Piano Concerto had improved jazz by analyzing and experimenting with its musical elements. But he remained convinced that such music could never fully represent the “true America” because it lacked the Anglo-Saxon character represented by Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles. Daniel Gregory Mason—more vehement in his condemnations of jazz and more virulent in his rhetoric—openly discussed “the insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity.” In labeling Copland “a cosmopolitan Jew,” Mason meant to position him on the dark side of
a battle between “Oriental extravagance” and “the poignant beauty of Anglo-Saxon restraint.” Incensed by Jewish “eroticism,” “pessimism,” and “superficiality,” Mason sounded an alarm: “Our public taste is in danger of being permanently debauched…by the intoxication of what is, after all, an alien art.”33 For him, Copland's jazzy modernism and stylistic wandering represented more serious sins than youthful epigonism: they were the sounding embodiment of racial miscegenation.
Whether Copland's Jewish identity served as a banner or a stigma, it was not an identity that could be easily escaped. Perhaps this is what Nadia Boulanger meant when she apparently remarked that Harris would go further than Copland as a composer because he was not “handicapped” by being a Jew.34 Whether her words reflect a sober awareness of prejudice in the world or a sobering reflection of the anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent in interwar Paris, they nonetheless show the power of race and religious creed to determine attitudes even among friends.35 Copland was well aware of the potential limitations of being a “Jewish composer.” In 1939 he warned the young Leonard Bernstein about the dangers of sounding too Jewish: “People are certain to say—‘Bloch’” (HP, 522), he wrote, citing perhaps the most potent example of the ways in which racial/religious stereotypes could shape a composer's reputation.36 But unlike Ernest Bloch, Copland was not, in the end, trapped by his Jewish identity. On the contrary, while never disavowing his heritage, he sidestepped it so completely that audiences today are often unaware that Copland did not begin his career as a “common man.”
With this in mind, let us return to one of the most pregnant passages in Thomson's 1932 article, his striking assertion that “[Copland's] music is all right but the man is not clearly enough visible through it.” This compositional disappearing act stands in sharp contrast to Harris, who won praise or blame for allowing his “personality” to overshadow his attention to musical detail. With such comparisons in mind, it is tempting to read even more into Thomson's claim. Not only did Copland lack Harris's imposing physicality, he also lacked Harris's aggressive masculinity. This masculinity, so important to the self-image Harris fostered and so much a part of the Depression-era mythology of the American West, would have been hard for many to reconcile with the conceptions of Copland-as-Jew or Copland-as-homosexual. If Copland's music indeed rendered his physical person invisible, one may legitimately wonder (as Thomson does not) whether this obfuscation is a sign of success or failure—whether concealing one's personality or background might sometimes be strategic. Harris eagerly invited the concertgoing public to hear autobiography in his works, but Copland had myriad reasons for discouraging such attempts, especially after he turned toward rural Americana. For Copland, identification with the American folk was at best implausible; instead, he claimed the populist's privilege of appealing to, and even serving them through his music.37
MUSIC FOR RADIO
Copland's first populist scores arrived in the mid-1930s with El Salón México, the children's opera The Second Hurricane, and the radio piece that CBS asked him to write as part of their Columbia Composers' commissions. Together, they illustrate the stylistic turning point that would become the most significant of Copland's changes in musical vocabulary, one that he once described as an “imposed simplicity”—a newly accessible style inspired by the desire to reach new audiences through new media. Though he came to regret the label, the ideals behind it were part and parcel of Copland's aesthetic, as Elizabeth Bergman Crist has aptly observed: they were part of the composer's lifelong commitment to progressive politics encapsulated in “the cultural work of the left-wing social movement known as the Popular Front.”38
Curiously, Copland was not among those composers originally chosen by CBS to participate in their project. George Gershwin apparently turned down the job, leaving a slot open for Copland, who found the commission attractive for reasons that were not merely monetary. As he famously remarked in his autobiographical essay “Composer from Brooklyn,”
During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer…. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.39
Though Copland put his own spin on composing for the general public, he had substantial help in framing composition for radio as a uniquely populist genre. In an outpouring of public comment similar to that which greeted the advent of the phonograph, composers and commentators speculated on the role the new medium would play in American musical life. Few advocates were more impassioned than Davidson Taylor, the head of CBS's music division and the man responsible for the network's commissioning scheme. Writing in 1936, Taylor hailed radio's emerging role as music patron: “Potentially, indeed, the radio companies are the Brandenburgs, the Haffners, and the Esterhazys of today, since they have the funds, the orchestras and the audiences.”40 In his article, “Coming—The Mass Audience,” Marc Blitzstein presented the other side of the cultural coin, positioning radio and other new media at the forefront of an audience-driven socio-musical revolution: “The great mass of people enter at last the field of serious music. Radio is responsible, the talkies, the summer concerts, a growing appetite, a hundred things; really the fact of an art and a world in progress. You can no more stop it than you can stop an avalanche.”41 For his part, Copland offered a more practical message about the responsibilities that composers owed to their expanding public. Speaking on the air in 1940, he observed: “The radio and the phonograph and the movies have broadened the democratic bases of music so suddenly that composers have been taken by surprise…. It is our job to give these new listeners a music that is fresh, direct, simple and profound. I can think of no better program for the composer of today.”42
It was no accident, then, that the CBS commissions were slated for performance on a series titled “Everybody's Music”43—and no accident that this series was chosen as the site for a unique experiment in audience participation. Even before Copland was asked to change the name of his Radio Serenade to Music for Radio, CBS was already contemplating how best to exploit the public relations potential of its commissioning project. “One caution,” wrote Deems Taylor (then the network's “Consultant on Music”) in the letter offering Copland the job, “Please do not release any publicity on this thing that we are doing. We want to wait until we have all the acceptances in and then break a big story all over the country.”44 Copland's name was not at the top of the commissioning list, yet a two-page advertisement in Radio Daily featured his score as its chief exemplar shortly after the premiere: “This is a final rehearsal, in a CBS studio, for the world-premiere of Aaron Copland's work, ‘Music for Radio.' Its first performance wrote a new chapter in the history of serious music. For it belonged entirely to the radio audience; coming immediately to the whole of our people.”45
The project was a staggering success for CBS, eliciting more than a thousand responses from every part of the United States—a scope that is all the more startling given that the sole prize offered was the composer's manuscript score. Copland's piece had been framed as an homage to modern technology, and it exhibited twentieth-century timbres ranging from vibraphone, saxophones, and unusual brass mutes to solos at the microphone. But apart from its association with the radio medium, Copland's piece was a virtual Rorschach test for audience members. At least two intrepid listeners seem to have grasped the peculiarity of the task at hand. One apparently preferred to retain the title “Music for Radio.” Another felt it necessary to explain his suggestion, “Notes in Search of a Program”; according to a letter from Davidson Taylor to Copland, his analysis went something like this: “a bunch of notes get together, deciding to be music. They go along enthusiastically for a while, then consternation overcomes
them: my God, they have no program! What are they doing, being a piece of music without a program? They try several programs, none of which seems to fit. Then they strike out again without having found one, and at length they are satisfied just to be a piece of music.”46 In addition to these self-conscious responses, more than 150 suggestions were sent to Copland in Mexico. A representative selection of these entries reveals their striking diversity.47
Journey of the British Patrol across Arabia The Melting Pot Indecision
A Song of the Mechanical Age Thoughts while Strolling A Day's Work
Trip through a National Park Lilacs in the Rain Farewell Amelia
New Mexican Village The Seraphic Triumph Airline Fantasy
Adventures in the Life of a Robot Dawn in the Jungle Sedative
An American Pippa Passes Sundayschool Carnival Oriental Fantasy
Early Morn in Bagdad The Peasant's Fantasy Gypsy Caravan
Sunday Night in Manhattan On Set in Hollywood Metropolis
Futile Search for Order out of Chaos Commuters' Odyssey Cliff Dwellers
The Majestic Mississippi Caprices of the Sea Urban Nocturne
Autumn of the American Pioneer Agitation of the Masses The Jungle Storm
Marconique Melody in the Air Peace Conference San Francisco
The Inca's Prayer to the Sun God A May of Victory Subway Traveller
Marconi's World Message A Psalm of Modern Life The Attack
Tower and Turrets of the Mystic City of Sound Calling All Nations Driving the Herd
Whims and Cries from the Great Tribulation Night in the City 1938