Frontier Figures
Page 53
42. Cited in Key, “‘Sweet melody,’” 136-37. In “The Composer and Radio,” Copland offered the utopian suggestion that networks should employ ten “staff composers” and that a radio audience free of concert-hall prejudices would be more receptive to new music. Our New Music, 233-42.
43. Key, “‘Sweet melody,’” 138-39.
44. Deems Taylor to Copland, 28 September 1936, CCLC, 335/9.
45. Cited in Key, “‘Sweet melody,’” 131. Emphasis in the original.
46. Davidson Taylor to Copland, 30 July 1937, CCLC, 335/9.
47. This typescript is preserved in CCLC, 406/10. Jessica Burr has discussed this document and other important matters in “Copland, the West and American Identity,” in Copland Connotations, ed. Dickinson, 22-28. In the list presented here, I have attempted to roughly preserve the relative proportions of urban versus rural and American versus non-American titles while also conveying some of the more colorful entries.
48. Davidson Taylor to Copland, 30 July 1937, CCLC, 335/9.
49. See Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); and James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). “The Ballad of Ozie Powell” was later included in Hughes's collection A New Song (1938).
50. Copland was not the only composer whose conscience was caught by the plight of the Scottsboro Boys. L. E. Swift (a.k.a. Elie Siegmeister) penned a mass song “The Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die” for the first Workers' Song Book, which Copland reviewed for New Masses in 1934. HP, 276. Aaron Copland, “Workers Sing!” New Masses 11, no. 9 (1934): 28-29; reprinted in Aaron Copland, A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923-72, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 88-90. Although it is possible that Copland intended his “Ballad” as a “correction” of Siegmeister's song, I find no compelling links in their music. See also Carol J. Oja, “Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock and Mass-song Style in the 1930s,” Musical Quarterly 73 (1989): 445-475; Zuck, History of Musical Americanism; and Elizabeth [Bergman] Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27-31.
51. Although, the text underlay is missing for this line in the most complete version of the sketches, these words are present in other sketches.
52. Copland, “The Composer and Radio,” 241-42.
53. “Copland Decides He Likes Own Name Best” (unsigned), Boston Evening Transcript, 21 August 1937. Leonhardt's justification for the “Saga of the Prairie” title appears in a slightly different form in a telegram from Copland to Davidson Taylor, 12 August 1937. CCLC, 406/10. I am grateful to Elizabeth Bergman for pointing out the likelihood that Leonhardt was inspired by the subtitle of Ole Rölvaag's novel Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (New York: Harper & Row, 1927).
54. Moses Smith, “Music for the Radio,” Boston Evening Transcript, 26 July 1937, 8, col. 5.
55. This material appears on the penultimate page of the “Ballade of Ozzie Powell” sketches. Although there is neither text underlay nor any indication of where the passage might fit in to the “Ballade,” the motivic and physical connections (the page is attached to the rest of the sketch) strongly suggest that the material was conceived at the same time as the choral setting.
56. Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1940), 241: “To Copland's surprise, the piece had distinctly Western overtones for a good many of his listeners, the winning title, eventually, being ‘Saga of the Prairee' [sic].”
57. Julia Smith, Aaron Copland: His Work and Contribution to American Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1955), 178.
58. Aaron Copland to Eugene Ormandy, 23 September 1958: “As you can imagine, I don't at all like the idea of being difficult about a mere title of a piece. After all, the music is the same whatever it is called. On the other hand, I must confess that I never liked the title ‘Saga of the Prairie,’ for the simple reason that it sounds too corny to me, and was not my idea in the first place.” Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 222.
59. Moses Smith, “Music for the Radio.”
60. Davidson Taylor to Copland, 30 July 1937, CCLC, 335/9.
61. Marion Bauer, “Aaron Copland: A Significant Personality in American Music,” American Music Lover 4, no. 12 (April 1939): 429.
62. Charles Mills, “Over the Air,” Modern Music 20 (November-December 1942): 63.
63. Lazare Saminsky, “‘American’ Phase of International Music Festival Revealed New Talent,” Musical Courier, July 1941, 19.
64. Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto, 124.
65. Howard, Our Contemporary Composers, 145.
66. It is unclear when his mother's early residence in Texas became important to Copland's representation of his heritage. Although it goes unmentioned in “Composer from Brooklyn,” his later autobiographical memoirs take up this theme. See VPAC1, 3: “Aaron Copland's mother, Sarah Mittenthal, born in Russia, grew up in Illinois and Texas, where cowboys and Indians were a natural part of her life. Perhaps this is at least a partial answer to that question so often asked the composer: ‘How could a Jewish boy, born and raised in Brooklyn, write “cowboy” music?’”
12. COMMUNAL SONG, COSMOPOLITAN SONG
1. Crist, Music for the Common Man, chaps. 1 and 2.
2. Copland to Carlos Chavez, 16 December 1933; Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 103.
3. Harold Clurman to Copland, 16 August 1934; cited in HP, 277. Copland recounts the inspiration he derived from this experience in a letter to Israel Citkowitz (September 1934): “When S. K. Davis, Communist candidate for Gov. in Min., came to town and spoke in the public park, the farmers asked me to talk to the crowd. Its one thing to think revolution, or talk about it to ones friends, but to preach it from the streets—OUT LOUD—Well, I made my speech (Victor [Kraft] says it was a good one) and I'll probably never be the same!” Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 106.
4. For more detailed discussion, see Zuck, History of Musical Americanism, 103-53; R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Richard A. Reuss with JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-57 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000); and Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
5. Copland, “Jazz as Folk-Music,” Musical America, 19 December 1925, 18.
6. As cited in Martha Dreiblatt, “Lack of Tradition Blocks Musical Progress Here: Personalities of Composers One Solution, Says Aaron Copland,” World [New York], 7 July 1929, Metropolitan Section, 3. Copland's attitudes here prefigure his more infamous assessment of jazz in “Composer from Brooklyn,” in Our New Music, 227: “All American music could not possibly be confined to two dominant jazz moods—the ‘blues' and the snappy number.”
7. Copland as quoted in Dreiblatt, “Lack of Tradition.”
8. Crist, Music for the Common Man, 48-59.
9. See, for example, Copland's treatment of Farwell's friend and Wa-Wan associate Henry Gilbert: “What he did was suggestive on a primitive and pioneering level, but the fact is that he lacked the technique and musicianship for expressing his ideals in a significant way.” Copland, “Musical Imagination in the Americas” and “The Composer in Industrial America,” in Music and Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 79, 103.
10. Copland, “Composer in Industrial America,” 103-4.
11. Ibid.
12. Burr, “Copland, the West and American Identity,” in Dickinson, Copland Connotations, 23-24.
13. Copland to Nadia Boulanger, 1 June 1928, CCLC; Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 64. Apparently, the fact that Copland went “out West” on his own irritated Harris, who
had been coaxing Copland to visit California with him. Harris wrote from Paris: “Dearly Beloved: So this is what you do when my back is turned—Just like that he ups and goes West without me—It's perfectly [ridiculous?]—and I am seriously considering taking the next Boat home—Why, Aaron, you can't go all alone out in that wild and woolly west. One of these heavy-breasted real estate salesmen might mistake you for a buck from Missouri and try to sell you a sand lot—and Good Lord there might be all sorts of complications—I just won't hear of it, that's all [punctuation added].” Harris to Copland, 1928 (penciled), CCLC, 256/8. Courtesy of Patricia Harris.
14. Copland to Gerald Sykes, 20 May 1928; cited in Burr, “American Identity,” in Dickinson, Copland Connotations, 23.
15. Copland to Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, 2 July 1928, CCLC (my translation from the French); accessed online through the Library of Congress American Memory Project (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), digital ID: copland corr0109.
16. Pollack describes Kirstein's manner of commissioning the scenario from Loring based on an interview with Richard Schottland. HP, 316. See also Frederick Nolan, The West of Billy the Kid (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 291-99.
17. Robert Utley, Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 200; cited in HP, 317.
18. Copland in an interview with Philip Ramey, cited by Richard Freed in the liner notes to Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid, Rodeo (Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra), Angel DS-37357, 1986. See also Philip Ramey, “Copland and the Dance,” Ballet News 2, no. 5 (1980): 11.
19. Pollack cites an undated interview with Loring. HP, 318.
20. John Martin, “The Dance: ‘Billy': Loring Ballet Restored to the Repertoire,” New York Times, 11 April 1948.
21. Edwin Denby, “Billy the Kid and Its Dance Faults,” New York Herald Tribune, 31 October 1943; reprinted in Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, ed. Robert Cornfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 102.
22. Martin, “The Dance.”
23. Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1925), 173.
24. CCLC, 395/10. Kirstein attributed the opening action of Billy the Kid to the influence of Martha Graham, who had a penchant for processionals. VPAC1, 284. As Pollack points out, Burns's Saga of Billy the Kid, seems a more immediate and likely source. HP, 319. Though Graham's Frontier (1935) was surely familiar to Kirstein and others on the New York ballet scene, Louis Horst's score does not involve an ensemble processional.
25. Walter Terry, “The Ballet,” New York Herald Tribune, 7 April 1948. Terry expands on sentiments from his earlier review, “The Ballet,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 April 1942; CCLC, 395/3.
26. Marcia B. Siegel, The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 119.
27. Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, 102.
28. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 121, 119. A nine-page typescript (CCLC, 63/33-F) signed “Eugene Loring & Lemuel Ayers” illustrates Loring's cinematic preoccupations. It gives camera and lighting instructions for the entire action of the ballet, in a total of sixty distinct shots. It may have been crafted in preparation for a 1976 Dance in America production for National Educational Television, in which, according to Siegel, “Loring and the telecast producers converted [the ballet] into the Western it had so carefully tried not to be” by adding film footage of frontier action (“chopping down of trees,” “watching for possible dangers,” etc.).
29. Neil Lerner provides a history of such gestures in “Music of Wide Open Spaces.”
30. Burr, “American Identity,” in Copland Connotations, ed. Dickinson. Burr spoke ab out the opening of Billy the Kid in her paper “Open Fifths, Open Prairie, and the Opening of Billy the Kid,” presented at the annual meeting of the Sonneck Society (Seattle, 1997); cited in HP, 629.
31. Kirstein provided Copland with two collections of folk tunes: Ira Sires's Songs of the Open Range and The Lonesome Cowboy: Songs of the Plains and Hills, edited by John White and George Shackley. A third collection was sent to the composer in Paris. According to Pollack, Jessica Burr discovered the Sires collection in Copland's library, and Elizabeth Bergman Crist found assorted sheet music edited by John Lomax and Oscar J. Fox stitched into his copy of The Lonesome Cowboy. From these sources, Copland selected six tunes: “Great-Granddad,” “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “Old Paint,” “The Dying Cowboy (Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie),” and “Trouble for the Range Cook (Come Wrangle Yer Bronco).” HP, 316, 320, 628.
32. Copland, Music and Imagination, 90-91.
33. Ibid., 90.
34. HP, 320, citing CCLC, “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet.”
35. “Composer Aaron Copland Says: ‘Billy the Kid' Is a Big Boy Now,” RCA Victor Picture Record Review, January 1950. CCLC, 395/3.
36. See Stephen Wade, “The Route of ‘Bonyparte's Retreat': From ‘Fiddler Bill' Stepp to Aaron Copland,” American Music 18 (2000): 343-69.
37. Larry Starr offers an intelligent discussion of this passage in “Copland's Style,” Perspectives of New Music 19, nos. 1-2 (1980-81): 69-89.
38. Virgil Thomson and Walter Terry, “The Ballet and Music,” New York Herald Tribune, 14 February 1941; CCLC, 395/2. Halsey Stevens makes a similar observation in his liner notes for Aaron Copland:…Billy the Kid (Complete Ballet), Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra, Mercury, MG 50246.
39. Irving Kolodin, “Billy the Kid Is Danced by Kriza,” CCLC, 395/5.
40. Burns, Saga of Billy the Kid, 56. 53. Burns writes: “In every placeta in New Mexico, Mexican girls sing to their guitars songs of Billy the Kid. A halo has been clapped upon his scapegrace brow. The boy who never grew old has become a sort of symbol of frontier knight-errantry, a figure of eternal youth riding for ever through a purple glamour of romance” (p. 53).
41. D. K. Wilgus, “The Individual Song: ‘Billy the Kid,’” Western Folklore 30, no. 3 (July 1971): 226-34. This stanza of text (only slightly varied) eventually found its way into the Philadelphia Orchestra program of 1943 and an undated publicity sheet from Boosey & Hawkes. CCLC, 395/5.
42. Loring as quoted by Lisa Anne Sabatini in her program notes for the Oakland Ballet performance of Billy the Kid (with Loring's choreography), November 1998.
43. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 122.
44. Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, 103.
45. Berger, Aaron Copland, 62-63.
46. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 123.
47. Burns, Saga of Billy the Kid, 69.
48. Ibid., 54-55.
49. Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, 101.
50. Ibid.
51. Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 275.
52. Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 13.
53. HP, 373.
54. Agnes de Mille's scenario, CCLC, 253/18.
55. Richard Freed, record jacket liner notes for Billy the Kid: Complete Ballet; Rodeo: Complete Ballet (Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra), Angel DS-37357, 1986.
56. Agnes de Mille's scenario, CCLC, 253/18.
57. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 128.
58. For information on American employment during World War II and the rise of “Rosie the Riveter” as a mythic character, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 776-82.
59. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 126, 131; HP, 365-66.
60. The other tunes Copland used are “I Ride an Old Paint”(in the “Saturday Night Waltz”) and the fiddle tunes “Bonyparte” and “McLeod's Reel” (in the “Hoedown”). Jessica Burr also discovered traces of the fiddle tunes “Gilderoy” and “Tip, Toe, Pretty Betty Martin” in the “Hoedown.”
61. Robert Bagar, “Smallens in Debut at Stadium,” Evening Telegram, [18?] Ju
ne 1947, CCLC, 415/14. Leon Errol was a vaudeville and early film comedian known as “Rubberlegs” for his trademark staggering walk.
62. Pollack notes the metric and structural similarities between de Mille's transcription and Copland's music, for example, the presence of a “bridge” section between the melodic variants of the tune. HP, 367, 370.
63. Siegel, Shapes of Change, 130.
64. Edwin Denby, “With the Dancers,” Modern Music 20 (November-December 1942): 53; reprinted in Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William MacKay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 96.
65. Agnes de Mille, “American Ballet” (penciled: “original script of Rodeo-1942”); CCLC, 253/18. The final word is printed “loliness”; “lowliness” is a possible correction, but “loneliness” seems to me more likely.
66. De Mille, “An American Ballet,” CCLC, 253/18.
67. Howard Pollack, “The Dean of Gay American Composers,” American Music 18 (2000): 39-49. See also the chapters “Personal Affairs” and “Identity Issues,” HP, 234-56, 518-31.
68. Metzer, “‘Spurned Love,’” 418. For a broader discussion of sexuality among composers in Copland's generation, see Hubbs, Queer Composition.
13. COPLAND AND THE CINEMATIC WEST
1. Copland, “Film Music,” in What to Listen for in Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 259. Writing in 1940, Copland was more pointed: “The man who insists on complete self-expression had better stay home and write symphonies. He will not be happy in Hollywood.” Copland, “Second Thoughts on Hollywood,” Modern Music 17 (March-April 1940): 141-43. Sally Bick discusses Copland's writings on film music in “Copland on Hollywood,” in Copland Connotations, ed. Dickinson, 39-54.
2. Copland, “Film Music,” 260-61.
3. Crist, Music for the Common Man, 92-110.
4. Alfred Cochran, “Style, Structure and Tonal Organization in the Early Film Scores of Aaron Copland” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1986), 11.
5. Milestone was responsible for Of Mice and Men (1939), North Star (1943), and The Red Pony (1949). Copland's other film projects were Our Town (1940), the documentary Cummington Story (1945), The Heiress, for which he won an Academy Award in 1949, and the avant-garde Something Wild (1961).