Frontier Figures
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Communal Song, Cosmopolitan Song
COPLAND ON THE LEFT
At a time when Russian-Jewish immigrants were considered America's most likely Bolsheviks, Copland's voluntary association with the left probably came as no surprise. Elizabeth Bergman Crist has detailed the prevalence of communist and socialist ideals among Copland's associates and has persuasively situated Copland's own activities within the purview of the Popular Front.1 For my purposes, the most notable aspects of Copland's political engagement are the geographical settings that agitated his political conscience and the impact that leftism had on his views about folk music. As Bergman Crist has shown, Copland seems to have developed many of his populist ideals while visiting Mexico in the fall of 1932. He was deeply influenced by the example of his friend and colleague Carlos Chávez and by the opportunities offered under the country's quasi-socialist government, confiding in Chávez that he was “a little envious of the opportunity you had to serve your country in a musical way” and praising the Mexican composer's rapport with audiences.2 Equally distant from factories and sweatshops, Copland's most active engagement with communism occurred in rural Minnesota, where he gave an impromptu speech at a meeting of farmers near Bemidji. Copland's friend Harold Clurman noted this as a departure from the usual pattern when he wrote to congratulate Copland on his political awakening: “Some people go east to the U.S.S.R. to become ‘radicalized' but you went west to the U.S.A.”3
Back in New York, Copland's musical attitudes were shaped in part by his involvement with the Composers' Collective (established by Cowell and Charles Seeger as a branch of the American Communist Party's Workers' Music League). He shared their early ambivalence toward folk sources, considering the “large mass singing” of the international workers' chorus (not the folk song of rural localities) to be the appropriate proletarian antidote to the “poignant subjective lieder” of the bourgeoisie. When Copland's setting of “Into the Streets May First!” won the New Masses song contest in 1934, folk qualities were far from the judges' list of criteria. And although the title of The Young Pioneers (1935)—Copland's contribution to a collection of children's piano pieces—might seem in retrospect to be crying out for a folk interpretation, Copland was probably motivated less by the title's pastoral connotations than by its association with the Soviet youth organization of the same name. Gradually, however, under the revised Popular Front slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism,” Copland joined most of his leftist contemporaries in embracing folk song as the true music of the people.4
The advocacy of Seeger and Elie Siegmeister solidified Copland's already substantial interest in popular culture and folk song. As Pollack has noted, it may also have channeled this interest in new directions: “The Popular Front's emphasis on Anglo-American folklore undoubtedly fostered a growing familiarity with and receptivity toward that particular repertoire” (HP, 280). Copland's first experiment with Anglo folklore appeared in The Second Hurricane, when high school students, stranded during their rescue mission, muster their courage by singing “The Capture of Burgoyne.” Copland borrowed the eighteenth-century song almost literally from S. Foster Damon's Series of Old American Songs (1936), making few changes to the tune or the text (HP, 308). More interesting is the song's placement in the operetta shortly after the solo for the only African American character, Jeff. Jeff's jazzy number and the rousing British ballad sung by the teenagers are separated by a memorable soprano solo sung by Queenie, a student selected for the trip because of her nursing skills. Despite this lyric interlude, the musical contrast between “Jeff's Song” and “The Capture of Burgoyne” strongly suggests that Copland was more comfortable with the syncopated idiom that had characterized his earlier music than with the foursquare rhythms of the British tune.
Copland had already tried to reconcile his interest in African American music with the rhetoric of folk-based musical nationalism. In 1925, around the time of Music for the Theatre and the Piano Concerto, one such attempt was documented in a newspaper report given the telling title “Jazz as Folk-Music.” Here, the writer conveyed Copland's belief that “distinctively national” music required “a literature of folk music as a background.”
“If we haven't a folk-song foundation, we must invent one,” he said. “I began by thinking—what is a folk-song after all? And I came to the conclusion that in my case it was the songs I heard when I was a child—rather commonplace jazz tunes and music of the “Old Black Joe” variety. These, then, are my material, and I must accept them for what they are. If we have only these elements as essentially American, our music must make the best of it and do the work so well that something worth while will come from the effort.”5
Judging from Copland's emphasis on the effort needed to refine this raw material, building a national music on such rudimentary material was no easy task. By 1929, he was even more pessimistic. With an air of resignation, he dismissed the possibility that jazz could solve the problem of an American composing style: “Five years ago I felt the need of some tradition and at that time I used jazz in my compositions. But no matter what one does with jazz, it is essentially limited…. Jazz, at most, means either the excitement of New York City or the super-sensuality of the Negro blues.”6 Noting that the United States could neither build upon the centuries-old musical traditions of a nation like France nor rely on the indigenous folk traditions of a country like Russia, he voiced his frustration: “And so one comes to a cul de sac…. We have Indian songs, Kentucky mountain songs, the Negro songs, jazz,” he observed, “and we have had many attempts to use these songs in our music. But what, for example, do the songs of the Indians mean to me, an American of New York and the twentieth century?”7
With attitudes like these, Copland's stint with Anglo or any other folklore might have been a passing fancy had it not been for an earlier but more substantial (and far more successful) foray into the folk sphere. Fortunately, he did discover folk materials that spoke to him—but he found them south of the border. After a trip in 1932 to Mexico City's most famous dance hall, El Salón México, he began thinking about how to shape his sonic impressions of the nightclub and the nation. The resulting work, El Salón México, was not completed until 1934 and not orchestrated until his second trip to Mexico in 1936. This long gestation period gave Copland ample time to ponder his approach. He later recalled: “It seemed natural to use popular Mexican melodies for thematic material; after all, Chabrier and Debussy didn't hesitate to help themselves to the melodic riches of Spain. There was no reason I should not use the tunes of the hispanic land on our southern doorstep. My purpose was not merely to quote literally, but to heighten without in any way falsifying the natural simplicity of Mexican tunes” (VPAC1, 245).
Acquiring appropriate Mexican tunes was the easy part: though his inspiration was the live music of the dance hall, Copland found the melodies for the work in two published collections: Rubén Campos's El Folklore y la Música Mexicana of 1928 and Frances Toor's Cancionero Mexicano of 1931 (HP, 299). The more difficult stages involved finding ways to “heighten” the tunes without corrupting their “natural simplicity.” The resulting struggle helped him formulate his ideas about using folk materials: “If quotation of folk tunes is a sure way for a composer to translate the flavor of a foreign people into musical terms, it also presents a formal problem when used in a symphonic composition. Most composers have found that there is little that can be done with such material except repeat it. In El Salón México I decided to use a modified potpourri in which the Mexican themes or fragments and extensions thereof are sometimes inextricably mixed” (VPAC1, 246). The potpourri approach outlined here would prove typical of Copland's treatment of folk song in his instrumental music. Its most obvious corollary was the notion that simple quotation or literal repetition was aesthetically insufficient: fragments, extensions, motivic work, and musical mixture were part of his recipe for success. Underlying this surface consideration, one can still s
ense a palpable insecurity about melodic borrowing. Copland was well aware of the many, many precedents for such borrowing in his own work and elsewhere—Debussy and Chabrier were hardly the most famous precedents he could have cited—but he could not ignore the fact that a wide spectrum of music reviewers (including some of his harshest critics and some of his dearest friends) already thought he was overly inclined toward borrowing.
While Bergman Crist understands Copland's El Salón México as a successful rendering of “communitarian vision,” I find equally striking the anxiety that the piece seemed to provoke in Copland about his status as a musical outsider.8 “Despite Chávez' enthusiasm,” he recalled, “I still felt nervous about what the Mexicans might think of a ‘gringo' meddling with their native melodies” (VPAC1, 246). In this instance, Copland was soon reassured by the warm applause he received from Chávez's orchestra at a rehearsal before the premiere and the appreciative critical reception that followed. “They seemed to agree,” he later remarked, “that El Salón México might well be taken for Mexican music—'as Mexican as the music of Revueltas,' which was like saying at that time, ‘as American as the music of Gershwin'” (VPAC1, 247).
Copland's apparent satisfaction in his role as the Gershwin of Mexico offers an unexpected but instructive vantage point on the vagaries of musical nationalism. However curious, the analogy is apt: like Porgy and Bess, for example, El Salón México involved a cross-cultural engagement that was far deeper than voyeurism but was still captivated by the exotic nature of the subjects it depicted. Copland freely confessed that he would have considered it “foolish for me to attempt to translate the more profound sides of Mexico into musical sounds—the ancient civilizations or the revolutionary Mexico of our own time—for that, one really had to know a country well” (VPAC1, 245). He would find no such relief back home, for it was abundantly clear that being “as American…as Gershwin” would do Copland little good. If Copland was troubled by his “gringo” status in Mexico, he had equal but opposite reasons for concern at home. South of the border, his whiteness marked him as a foreigner; in his native land, his non-whiteness was the greater source of concern.
It is no wonder, then, that Copland was cautious when he cast his lot with Anglo folklore and crossed the Rio Grande. His Norton lectures at Harvard (1951-52) are circumspect, acknowledging that “the composer must have in his background some sense of musical culture and, if possible, a basis in folk or popular art,” but balancing this desideratum against the importance of technique.9 Departing from his brief historical survey to speculate on larger aesthetic questions, Copland wrote: “What, after all, does it mean to make use of a hymn tune or a cowboy tune in a serious musical composition? There is nothing inherently pure in a melody of folk source that cannot be effectively spoiled by a poor setting. The use of such materials ought never to be a mechanical process. They can be successfully handled only by a composer who is able to identify himself with, and reexpress in his own terms, the underlying emotional connotation of the material.”10 Harris could only have seconded Copland's denigration of the mechanical and his call for identification with the material. Yet he might have bristled at the emphasis on professionalism that emerged as Copland continued: “A hymn tune represents a certain order of feeling: simplicity, plainness, sincerity, directness. It is the reflection of those qualities in a stylistically appropriate setting, imaginative and unconventional and not mere quotation, that gives the use of folk tunes reality and importance. In the same way, to transcribe the cowboy tune so that its essential quality is preserved is a task for the imaginative composer with a professional grasp of the problem.”11
The composer must identify with the material, but he must also refashion it in a way that is “imaginative and unconventional.” Inventing autobiographical connections with the American folk would have been impractical for the “Brooklyn Stravinsky.” Instead of mourning this separation, he chose to treat the folk sphere with a professional's detached respect. Copland's biographical and emotional distance from western Americana thus opened up space for irony, comedy, and nostalgic displacement in such works as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and The Red Pony.
AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY
Though the idea bears a certain geographic neatness, it would oversimplify matters to suggest that cowboy song provided the perfect compromise between the Mexican music Copland found so moving and the Anglo American songs that had won approval from Seeger and others back home. For one thing, Copland had other musical models to follow when it came to cowboy materials, including, of course, Thomson's Plow That Broke the Plains. For another, Copland's initiation into the world of western heroes came courtesy of other artists. While it is not common knowledge that The Saga of the Prairie got its title from an audience member, it is well known that both his “cowboy ballets” were commissions from prestigious urban ballet companies with East Coast or European ties: Billy the Kid for Lincoln Kirstein in 1938, and Rodeo for Agnes de Mille in 1942. Racial and ethnic considerations surely prevented Copland from claiming cowboy songs as his artistic inheritance, but so did the circumstances under which he wrote his western works.
The western United States was by and large unfamiliar ground for Copland. As Jessica Burr has pointed out, Copland had in fact visited the American West long before undertaking such works as Billy the Kid.12 Having written to Boulanger in 1928, “I suppose it is good for me to see America a little,” he made a brief stopover in Santa Fe while en route to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where he was to perform his Piano Concerto.13 But his first impressions of the region make it seem unlikely that he would ever return to the West—either musically or in person. Burr uncovered correspondence between Copland and his friend Gerald Sykes that reveals just how strongly he reacted against this unfamiliar territory: “What a country this is!” he exclaimed. “Sickly looking parched earth inhabited by he-men cow-punchers. I should have gone to Finland.” Though he later expressed a cautious admiration for the region's diverse people, for him the scenery left much to be desired: “Whatever it was I expected reality proved different—very. I am still trying to acquire a taste for the landscape—it still seems frightfully austere. I can't get used to these barren hills—they remind me of the war-scarred battlefields I saw in France.”14 So remote were the western deserts from Copland's idea of natural beauty, that he did not even venture an analogy between their lonely expanses and other naturally desolate landscapes. Instead, his experiences called to mind a wasteland of human invention, emptied by modern technology and brutal warfare. After almost two months in this new environment, Copland came to admire its impressive vistas and diverse inhabitants, but he still bore a powerful sense of the western landscape's foreignness. He wrote to Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky: “Here I am after seven weeks in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's certainly far from Paris! But this country is truly magnificent with tall mountains practically without vegetation—which give the country an austere and somewhat horrifying effect. The people are also extremely curious and very diverse—there are Mexicans, cowboys, Redskins, artist-painters, American-pioneers, tourists, etc. In Santa Fe, you get the impression of being more in Spain than in America.”15 As these letters make plain, Europe was still the primary playground for Copland's imagination.
One can only guess how daunting it must have been when Lincoln Kirstein approached Copland with the scenario for Billy the Kid in 1938. Though Kirstein may have approached Copland in part because of the popularity of El Salón México, there were significant differences in the challenges presented by the two scores. In Mexico City, despite his anxiety about musical borrowing, Copland had felt a real sense of identification with the Mexican people. His descriptions of Santa Fe reveal instead his powerful impressions of sterility and social alienation. To make matters worse, the disclaimers he had been able to make for El Salón México were not ones he wished to repeat in his native land. Though not necessarily “profound,” Billy the Kid still represents an adventure in mythmaking with serious historical and nati
onal implications.
When Kirstein showed choreographer Eugene Loring a copy of Walter Noble Burns's Saga of Billy the Kid (1925) and exhorted him to “make a ballet out of it,” he was asking him to create in dance a legend that had already been recounted in many different formats.16 Burns's treatment of the subject was new in its sympathy for the outlaw hero—an aspect that Loring and Copland chose to reinforce. Paraphrasing historian Robert Utley, Pollack writes that “Burns's popular Saga appealed to readers as a coming-of-age story twice told: as a study in the development from adolescence to manhood and from frontier wilderness to industrial society. Indeed, Billy emerges as a barely disguised symbol for America; his frontier lawlessness must be crushed by a changing world. Unlike previous books about Billy, Burns struck an interwar note of nostalgia for a lost innocence and a bygone America.”17 Given this allegorical potential, it is not surprising that none of the ballet's creative contributors were overly concerned with accuracy of historical detail. The true identity of the outlaw-hero is a fundamental case in point. Although Kirstein was mistaken when he identified Billy by his outlaw alias “William H. Bonney” rather than his given name, William Henry McCarty, the happy coincidence that both “Bonney” and Copland were born in Brooklyn seems to have outweighed any desire to set the record straight. (McCarty grew up in Indiana, Kansas, and Colorado before ending up in the desert Southwest.) Copland later went so far as to suggest that knowing the facts of Billy's life was not merely superfluous, but that it might actually have hindered his creative response. “I didn't think of the story in a realistic sense,” he remarked. “If I had, I would never have touched it as I wouldn't have considered it a proper musical subject. Anyway, my knowledge of the actual historical facts was rather vague, and I thought of Billy the Kid as a legendary character, a young innocent who went wrong, part of the picturesque folklore of the Far West.”18