Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Sylvan Midsummernights Meditations Escape from the City Equinox

  Transatlantic Liner Ascending Ambrose Channel Music for Radio Spiritual Ecstasy

  The possibilities ranged from total abstraction to astonishing specificity, encompassing both rural and urban imagery from around the globe. Copland could hardly have wished for a greater range of choices, yet he was not entirely satisfied. After selecting “Saga of the Prairie” as the winning entry, Copland and Taylor decided to retain Music for Radio as the main title, giving the colorful caption the status of “subtitle.”48 The eventual designation Music for Radio: Saga of the Prairie thus encapsulates quite nicely the tension between modern technology and romantic nostalgia inherent in both the rhetoric of the commissioning process and the expressive and melodic surface of the piece.

  One week before the premiere, CBS issued a press release announcing that the piece “had a program, or scenario, that not even its composer…ventured to interpret” and that the composer was “putting it up to the audience” to name the composition. In fact, the network noted, the winning title would be the one that “is most successful in telling Mr. Copland what his music is” (HP, 311). This peculiar view of artistic agency might be explained away as savvy advertising. But in the strange case of Music for Radio, the advertisement itself could be considered “amazing but true.” Although it is unlikely that any listener could truly have told Copland “what his music is,” the piece actually did have a scenario that Copland chose not to interpret.

  Many of the melodies and textures that eventually found their way into Music for Radio appear in sketches (preserved at the Library of Congress) for a choral setting of Langston Hughes's poem “The Ballad of Ozie Powell.” The text appeared in the short-lived left-wing journal The American Spectator in April 1936, and it pays tribute to one of the so-called Scottsboro Boys: nine black boys falsely accused of raping two itinerant white prostitutes on a train in northern Alabama in 1931.49 They barely escaped the lynch mob before entering the judicial system: eight were sentenced to death, and the various legal battles that ensued left them in prison anywhere from six to nineteen years before they were released. During the trials, obtaining the release of the Scottsboro boys became a rallying cry for Communists worldwide, but especially for the American Communist Party, which raised money and wrangled with the NAACP over control of the legal defense. Hughes visited Ozie Powell and the rest of the Scottsboro Boys in prison and wrote the “Ballad of Ozie Powell” when his name resurfaced in the news after an altercation in which he slashed a sheriff's throat and was shot in the head.50

  Copland began sketching his setting of Hughes's poem in mid-December 1936 (about eight months after the poem was published and almost three months after receiving the CBS commission). The most complete, and presumably latest, layer of sketches include at least some vocal parts and scattered piano accompaniment for most of the couplets. The sketches exhibit a refrain structure clearly drawn from the poem, but modified by omitting some of the refrain lines (“Ozie, Ozie Powell”) in the latter half of the poem in several places where they are not required by sentence syntax.

  COPLAND: BALLADE OF OZZIE POWELL

  Red is the Alabama road

  Ozzie, Ozzie Powell

  [Redder now where your blood has flowed]51

  Ozzie, Ozzie Powell

  Strong are the brass and steel the gates

  Ozzie, Ozzie Powell

  The high sheriff's eyes are filled with hate

  Ozzie, Ozzie Powell

  The high sheriff shoots And he shoots to kill

  Ozzie, Ozzie Powell

  The laws a Klansman with an evil will,

  Nine old men in Washington

  never saw the Sheriff's gun

  aimed at Ozzie Powell

  EXAMPLE 42. Copland's sketches for “Ballade of Ozzie Powell” (December 1936-January 1937, Copland Collection, Library of Congress)

  Nine old men so rich and wise

  Never saw the Sheriff's eyes

  stare at Ozzie Powell

  But nine black boys they know full well

  What it is to live in Hell

  Don't they Ozzie Powell

  The condensed refrain structure dictated the form of Copland's choral setting: each instance of the text “Ozzie, Ozzie Powell” is declaimed using a particular melodic contour and echoing texture (example 42), suggesting a religious litany or ritual incantation. In addition, the constricted marchlike theme introduced in bar nine of the sketches seems to take its inspiration from the tragic traveler on the “Alabama road” whose real imprisonment finds a haunting homology in the melody's inability to break free from the narrow confines of a minor third. Both these motifs are strongly tied to the text and the message of the poem, and both appear prominently in both the sketches and the published score of Music for Radio (example 43). Although the material associated with the repeated cry “Ozzie, Ozzie Powell” has lost its function as a refrain, it still punctuates Music for Radio periodically and audibly. Some of these references are quite literal, even replicating the quasi-antiphonal texture of the “Ballade” sketches. While other instances may be more subtle—for example, when the “Ozzie” motif infiltrates the violin line at measures 264-70—Ozie Powell remains a palpable presence in Copland's Music for Radio.

  As Howard Pollack has observed in his biography of Copland, “It seems significant that [Music for Radio], widely considered the first of the composer's Western works, should have in its background, if not in its very genesis, a choral work about racial injustice in the rural south” (HP, 313). The significance of this transformation is worth exploring in greater detail. What did it mean when Copland shifted his attention away from Ozie Powell? Copland neither finished the choral setting nor made any allusion to Hughes or Scottsboro in the title or program note for the radio commission. Perhaps he became frustrated by the rigid refrain structure of Hughes's poem. Maybe the pressure of the radio commission did not allow him to complete this piece as he would have liked; although he started the “Ozzie Powell” sketches after receiving the network's offer, it cannot be determined whether he began the “Ballade” with CBS in mind. But one thing can be said for certain: as the network's deadline came and went, the “Ozzie Powell” sketches were absorbed into Music for Radio in such a way that a thousand listeners could devise a thousand wildly divergent interpretations of the work, their imaginations unfettered by inconvenient texts or uncomfortable political references.

  EXAMPLE 43. Music for Radio (published as Prairie Journal), mm. 75-86, woodwinds and brass (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1967; with annotations from the “Ozzie Powell” sketches)

  Looking back on the rapidly changing politics of the 1930s, one might think that the Scottsboro case would have proved too historically contingent or too ideologically charged to be an effective program for the radio. Copland does not seem to have shared this view. In his essay “The Composer and Radio,” he devoted his most effusive language to the idea that radio was an ideal medium for exactly this kind of potent message. The impetus to communicate with “the widest possible audience,” he noted, “is not without its political implications…for it takes its source partly from that same need to reaffirm the democratic ideal that already fills our literature, our stage, and our screen. It is not a time for poignantly subjective lieder but a time for large mass singing. We are the men who must embody new communal ideals in a new communal music. And the radio is the natural outlet for that new music.” Copland knew that even such lofty aims were not guaranteed to be above critical reproach, and he felt compelled to point out that his interest in connecting with audiences “should by no means be confused with mere opportunism. On the contrary, it stems from a healthy desire in every artist to find his deepest feelings reflected in his fellowman.”52

  Copland's continued commitment to progressive politics has been expertly documented by Bergman Crist, and his leftist ties easily spanned the years before and after Music for Radio. His own mass song, and his revi
ew of the first Workers' Songbook were unabashed in their embrace of proletarian sentiments. And The Second Hurricane, which actually kept Copland from finishing his radio commission on time, carried a strong didactic message about cooperative brotherhood. But when Copland turned his attention to Music for Radio, he effectively erased a far more controversial program—one that had been openly co-opted by communist agitators—in favor of imagery dictated neither by his own aesthetic intent nor by his political conscience. Literally (through the title contest) and figuratively (through the melting away of racial tension into a nostalgic national unity), Music for Radio gained a different kind of radical import through its deference to its listeners. In a way that Copland could never have imagined, it became a work that told the public precisely what it wanted to hear.

  The fact that the erasure of Ozie Powell coincided with a westward reorientation and an embrace of rural Americana reveals several things about the cultural cachet of westernness during the Great Depression. When Ruth Leonhardt of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, sent in the winning subtitle, she was reacting to what she called the “typically American” sound of Copland's score, and as the symbol of that American sound she chose “the intense courage—the struggles and the final triumphs—of the early settlers, the real pioneers.”53 It was not the dreary Dust Bowl migrations, and certainly not the “Ballad of Ozie Powell,” but the experience of pioneering that captured Leonhardt's imagination, and eventually Copland's too. With his move from “Ballade” to “Saga” came a transformation in storytelling mode—from lamenting an individual or regional plight to celebrating a triumph of nation building, from the actual Ozie to the legendary pioneers, from the urban to the rural, from a contemporary climate of racial and political conflict to an imaginary era of unity and resolve. This interpretation situates Music for Radio as one moment among many in American history when a turn toward the West coincides with a turn away from black-white racial tension. Just as westward expansion was driven in part by the antebellum desire to keep a balance of free and slave states, so western imagery and the myth of conquest could serve as a positive replacement for unsettling depictions of civil strife and the realities of interracial coexistence.

  Given this history, it is not hard to hear “Ozie Powell” whispering from within the pages of Music for Radio, offering an eerie counterpoint to the “saga of the prairie.” But of course no one was in a position to hear it this way in 1937—with the possible exception of Copland himself and any friends who might have seen his sketchbook. Instead casual listeners and committed critics were faced with a piece that displayed two fairly distinct moods: the kinetic energy of its opening bars could easily be linked to Copland's existing modernist works, but the pastoral strains of its midsection seemed to suggest something new.

  For those reviewers inclined to view Copland as the “Brooklyn Stravinsky,” the subtitle “Saga of the Prairie” was merely a distraction. The initial bars (example 44) would have confirmed the expected Stravinskian echoes through their superimposition of mildly irregular accent patterns over a steady pulse and layered texture above a bass ostinato (mm. 18-23). In one of the earliest reviews, before the “saga” subtitle was added, critic Moses Smith argued that passages like these represented the young composer at his best: “For this listener the more characteristically Coplandesque (or should it be ‘Coplandish'?) portions are the fast parts, except for a few sequences that are a little too baldly Stravinskian and even Respighian. Particularly striking were the very opening measures. The nervous, fitful intensity of the rhythm…[is] quite worthy of the composer of ‘Music for the Theater' and the Piano Variations.”54 Certain members of the general public responded to such musical features with urban titles, but neither they nor Smith could have noticed that the melodic skeleton of the first two bars [D-C-D-A] is identical to the motivic contour originally associated with the utterance “Ozzie Powell.”

  Instead, many listeners took note of the gentle tune that marks the work's central section.55 They suggested such titles as “Lilacs in the Rain” or (one of Davidson Taylor's least favorite entries) “Sedative.” Once the “saga” subtitle was in place, however, the narrow range and regular unfolding of the melody began to garner meanings more appropriate to the western backdrop that had suddenly fallen behind it. In retrospect, it became a cowboy song (example 45). If its cowboy origins were verifiable, the tune would be the first memento of Copland's cowboy career and powerful evidence that the composer's interest in the West arose independently of Lincoln Kirstein or Agnes de Mille. But the cowboy pedigree is at best unlikely. Though never an entirely reliable witness, the eccentric Oscar Levant was probably on the mark in 1940 when he remembered Copland's surprise at the work's apparently western connotations.56

  EXAMPLE 44. Music for Radio, mm. 1-5

  EXAMPLE 45. Music for Radio, mm. 96-106

  The melody appears without text or comment in the sketches of the “Ballade of Ozzie Powell” and the first draft of Music for Radio. In Copland's pencil and ink manuscripts, it appears with the designation “Cl[arinet] 1, subtone (at the mike)”—marking one of the few moments where modern technology might have come to the forefront of the soundscape. After the title contest had reached its Americana conclusion, a program note for the piece (almost certainly by Copland) posited that “the second theme…has an American folk-song quality” and that the work's subtitle “emphasized a certain frontier atmosphere derived from the nature of the themes themselves.” The published score indicated that the melody should be played “simply, in the manner of a folk song.” By the mid-1950s, when Copland's name could not be dissociated from his successful frontier ballets, Julia Smith remarked in her biography that the “folklike” theme of the central section was “presented in the manner of a cowboy song.”57 Thus granted the authority of print, the cowboy allusion stuck, and even though Copland protested against the “corny” title in a letter to Eugene Ormandy in 1958, he dubbed the score Prairie Journal some ten years later.58

  In evaluating the contrast between the folklike central section and the motoric opening, Moses Smith noted: “The quieter parts are more sentimental. This is not written with any derogatory intent, but simply to question the lasting qualities of the music, which would not be apparent on first hearing.”59 Ironically, it is exactly these “sentimental” parts that seem to have had the staying power Smith valued. Whether folk-based or not, the pastoral central section foreshadows Copland's later and most famous works. At the time, however, its melodic warmth clearly took many of his contemporaries by surprise. Judging from his repeated protestations, even Davidson Taylor seems to have been a little uneasy about Copland's new tunefulness: “Did you actually try to be popular?” he queried. “It's none of my affair, but I'm curious about it. Did you actually try to be popular in ‘The Second Hurricane'? Anybody who can write as good tunes as you can ought to write good tunes. Your tunes sound sincere to me. ‘Music for Radio' sounds sincere. I believe it is. I think you have imposed upon yourself some limitations of simplicity in both works, but I believe that you really care about simplicity. Am I near the facts?” Taylor also conveyed a reaction from his friend Vittorio Giannini: “He was much interested and said, ‘It doesn't sound as Aaron Copland use[d] to sound. I am not sure, but perhaps he is more natural now and more himself than he has ever been before.' He liked the piece. Maybe you'd prefer for him not to like it, but he's in what I consider good company.”60

  Like Taylor, some critics readily convinced themselves of Copland's change of heart. Especially after 1938 and the success of Billy the Kid, reviewers confronting Music for Radio saw the earlier work as a turning point. In 1939, for example, Marion Bauer could look back at the “amiable effects” and “straightforward melodies” of Music for Radio as signs that “Copland's new style may have been creeping up gradually on the public.”61 The critical unease had apparently not been laid to rest even in 1942, when Charles Mills hastened to reassure the readers of Modern Music that this “popular and amusing score, c
ommonly supposed to be a concession to mass appeal” was really “a completely honest and natural expression of the composer.”62

  Of course others would never be convinced by Copland's assimilation of the pastoral, and it is no surprise to find Lazare Saminsky among them. Given his deep-seated distrust of Copland's “Judaic” tendencies, he remained skeptical of the composer's sincerity and withering in his critique of what he considered blatant commercialism. Reviewing a concert performance of Music for Radio in the summer of 1941, he ridiculed the “prairie” subtitle and complained: “[Copland] everlastingly changes his style, his palette, his composer's technique and his advertising technique, too; and although he is always on the rostrum in one capacity or another, no one knows what it is he really stands for. His orchestral Music for the Radio, sometimes given a patriotic name as Saga of the Prairies, which it is not, is painted in faint Slavonic colors. It is far below Copland's best.”63 From Saminsky's perspective, the “pranks of polytonal jazz” and the “wistful, earnest and delicate slow melos of [Music for the Theatre”] represented “the best and the Jewish Copland.”64

  Saminsky's voice was extreme, but that does not mean that his objections were ignored—or that his opinions found no echo in more moderate voices. Recall John Tasker Howard's assertion that Harris's Scotch-Irish ancestry enabled him to depict “the prairies and vastness of the West” while Copland's “Russian-Jewish” heritage allied him with “the sophistication of the cosmopolitan cities on the seaboard.”65 The fact that so many listeners today associate the “Copland sound” with America's wide open spaces tells us something about the success of the overtly western works treated in the chapters that follow. Copland's astonishing ability to escape the stereotypes that vexed his early career also suggests a fundamental change in both critical and popular understanding of stylistic “authenticity.” For unless one is willing to exaggerate the influence of his mother's early years in Texas, Copland made his mark on the West with little recourse to autobiography or “heritage.”66 Instead, his approach to this brand of Americana was channeled through the media of modern technology and guided by the rhetoric of the political left.