The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Political themes infiltrated Copland’s scores in the early and mid-thirties. The ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934) uses a distorted version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to convey, in Copland’s words, “the corruption of legal systems and courts of law.” Clurman plausibly heard the orchestral piece Statements (1935) as a portrait of Depression-era America, with a Shostakovich-like scherzo movement (“Jingo”) mocking the shallow chauvinism of the Roaring Twenties. The movement “Dogmatic” quotes the Piano Variations, blasting out the main motif as if it were a slogan in a demonstration. Around this time, Charles Seeger observed happily that Copland had moved “from ivory tower to within hailing distance of the proletariat.” During a trip to Minnesota in the summer of 1934, Copland walked into the proletariat’s midst, speaking at a full-blown political rally for the Communist Party of the U.S.A. As he described it in a letter to a friend:

  We learned to know the farmers who were Reds around these parts, attended an all-day election campaign meeting of the C.P. unit, partook of their picnic supper and made my first political speech! If they were a strange sight to me, I was no less of a one to them. It was the first time that many of them had seen an “intellectual.” I was being gradually drawn, you see, into the political struggle with the peasantry! I wish you could have seen them—the true Third Estate, the very material that makes revolution…When S. K. Davis, Communist candidate for Gov. in Minn. came to town and spoke in the public park, the farmers asked me to talk to the crowd. Its [sic] one thing to think revolution, or talk about it to ones [sic] friends, but to preach it from the streets—OUT LOUD—Well, I made my speech (Victor says it was a good one) and I’ll probably never be the same!

  This tale has a quality of make-believe. It is an extravagant fulfillment of Copland’s old notion of “getting real” by washing dishes. The exhortation of the peasantry reeks of big-city condescension; the “people” remain an airy abstraction. All the same, Copland emerged from such political dabblings charged with purpose.

  Crucial to Copland’s transformation were his adventures south of the border, in Mexico. He first went there in 1932, at the invitation of the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, and appreciated the adulation that Chávez and others offered him. “At last I have found a country where I am as famous as Gershwin!!” he wrote to the Koussevitzkys. The National Revolutionary Party, which held power, was hardly a paragon of democratic thought, but its cultural departments did advance the socialist program of bringing art to the masses, along the lines of Kestenberg’s initiatives in Berlin and Lunacharsky’s in Russia. José Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of public education from 1921 to 1924, commissioned Diego Rivera and other Mexican painters to create murals of workers, peasants, and other real-life heroes. Their counterparts in composition were the crisply disciplined Chávez, who based his laconic modal melodies on Amerindian folk music, and his more disorderly colleague Silvestre Revueltas, who fell victim to alcoholism just as he was attaining mastery. Revueltas’s 1939 work La noche de los Mayas, originally conceived as a film score, has found a second life as a Mahlerian symphonic canvas, moving from purposefully kitschy dance episodes to stretches of openhearted Romantic lamentation and on to a scary Mayan bacchanal that spills over into polyrhythmic mayhem.

  Galvanized by the Mexican scene, Copland began sketching the tone poem El Salón México, which, six years later, gave him his long-sought popular breakthrough. El Salón is richly stocked with Mexican melody and dance rhythm. At the same time, it retains the rhetorical punch of the composer’s early modernist scores. As Michael Tilson Thomas has pointed out, the jaunty, upward-leaping figures at the beginning of El Salón look back to passages in the Piano Variations. Similarly, oratorical quarter-note utterances for the trombones and horns in the closing pages recall the craggy fanfares that set in motion the late-twenties Symphonic Ode. Such gestures serve to defamiliarize folkish material, take it out of the realm of rearranged cliché. As the historian Elizabeth Crist writes, El Salón is a utopian attempt to synthesize pre-and postindustrial cultures, “rural peasants and the urban proletariat.” Crist adds that when the music is divorced from its political context it devolves into a simplistic essay in musical exoticism, which is how it now sounds at pops concerts.

  Back in New York, Copland edged into more direct forms of musical activism. He hung around the edges of the Composers’ Collective and tried his hand at Hanns Eisler–style “workers’ music.” In 1934, in response to a competition sponsored by New Masses, he set a poem by Alfred Hayes titled “Into the Streets May First,” which contained the lines “Shake the midtown towers / Crash the downtown air.” The Daily Worker Chorus essayed the song at the second American Workers’ Music Olympiad, alongside performances by the Pierre Degeyter Symphonietta and orchestras of balalaikas and mandolins. The olympiad was organized by the American chapter of the International Music Bureau, Eisler’s outfit.

  This was as far as Copland would go. He never joined the Communist Party, and advised his younger colleague David Diamond not to do so. He rejected the idea that a good leftist American composer should be a “plain unpretentious person,” as Seeger put it, accompanying himself on a banjo. In a 1935 essay in the Communist-funded periodical Music Vanguard, Copland showed that his interest lay more in finding a clear, communicative musical style than in transmitting political content: “Those young people who just a few years ago were writing pieces filled with the weltschmerz of a Schoenberg now realize that they were merely picturing their own discontent and that the small audience which existed for Schoenberg’s music could never be stretched to include their own. Let these young people say to themselves once and for all, ‘No more Schoenberg.’” That last slogan had little chance of seizing the attention of the workers of the world. Copland was conducting a conversation with himself in public, and, tellingly, his flirtation with radical activism ended when he found the style—and the deeper experience of life—that he had long been seeking.

  The first section of the ballet score Billy the Kid is called “The Open Prairie,” a phrase that has become synonymous with Copland’s populist or Americana style. Woodwind figures in rough-hewn parallel fifths cut across an emptied-out musical space, conjuring the picture of a wagon train moving across some long, dusty valley of the West. Yet the music comes straight out of the Parisian Stravinsky. Keening lines for high clarinets and low oboe echo the “Spring Rounds” section of the Rite of Spring, as do some folkish grace notes that are added later. Copland delighted in pointing out that “The Open Prairie,” or “The Open Prairee,” as he initially spelled it, was written in an apartment on the rue de Rennes. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically American about such sounds; they could just as well be used to suggest the English countryside or the Russian steppes. Still, they do create the illusion of a wide expanse, American or otherwise. Later, a liberal sprinkling of cowboy melodies—“Great Granddad,” “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and so on—makes the Wild West association explicit.

  Billy the Kid commemorates the legendary outlaw William Bonney, who, it was said, stole from the rich, befriended the poor, charmed the ladies, and killed twenty-one men. Earl Browder, the Communist Party chief, liked to portray the America of the revolutionary period as a kind of proto-socialist utopia; the first pages of Billy the Kid, likewise, evoke America in a prelapsarian state, before the loss of innocence under capitalism. When the cowboy melodies are first heard, they meet up in out-of-whack polyrhythms: Copland’s West sounds rather like his Mexico. Yet this prairie Eden is threatened by the westward movement of city-building settlers, whose grand designs already glimmer in the brassy climax of the introductory “processional.” Eugene Loring, the choreographer, based his scenario on a semimythical chronicle by the Chicago journalist Walter Noble Burns, who painted Billy as a good-hearted outlaw in rebellion against ruthless capitalist values. The first chapter of Burns’s book contrasts Billy’s bygone world with a modern America covered in asphalt. Copland hint
s at the paving of the West at the end of his ballet; after Billy falls victim to Pat Garrett, the pioneer march becomes a juggernaut in three-quarter time, accented by cymbals and bass drum. A new key-area of E major clashes with remnants of the heroic E-flat of the opening. Skycrapers are rising on the prairie, their hard forms glinting in the sun.

  Leftist politics runs through other Copland works of this period—the school opera The Second Hurricane, which teaches the Brechtian virtue of acquiescing in the common good (though without the scary dogmatism); the CBS commission Music for Radio: Saga of the Prairie, which may contain a concealed program about the Scottsboro Boys (nine black youths imprisoned in 1931 on unsubstantiated charges of rape); and the heart-catching Lincoln Portrait, which arranges quotations from Lincoln’s writings into a vaguely socialistic narrative (“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master”). But the radicalism implicit in these pieces never comes all the way to the surface. Hence, they have been appropriated by all manner of political and nonpolitical parties over the years. Innumerable films, television commercials, news broadcasts, and political campaign ads have used Copland music or Copland-esque imitations to convey the innate goodness of small-town life—elderly couples sitting on porches, newsboys on bicycles, farmers leaning on fences, and so on. By the time of the presidential campaign in 1984, Copland’s open-prairie sound had become such a universal quantity that a kitschy version of it was piped into Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercials.

  Copland probably never lost sleep over the uses and misuses to which his music was put, although he might have relished the irony of a gay leftist of Russian-Jewish extraction supplying the soundtrack for the Republican Party platform. Pragmatic rather than radical at the core, he wanted to speak for the entire country, even at the expense of diluting his message. In this sense, he was the perfect musical counterpart of the thirty-second president of the United States.

  New Deal Music

  Culture ranked low among Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s priorities. Music hardly registered at all. To the extent that the president supported the arts, it was with an obligatory aristocratic air. As Richard McKinzie has written, “Roosevelt was willing to do the noble thing, and support painting, theater, and other creative arts in the same way he supported them as the ‘lord’ of Hyde Park manor.” Alert to all twitches of the political web, Roosevelt knew the dangers inherent in federal funding of the arts. Only with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the adamantly liberal First Lady, did the experiment last as long as it did.

  From the beginning Mrs. Roosevelt pushed the idea that the government had “responsibility toward art, and toward artists,” as she put it in 1934. Her most significant intervention in music came in 1939, when she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in protest of that organization’s refusal to host a concert by the black singer Marian Anderson. That gesture set the stage for Anderson’s legendary concert at the Lincoln Memorial, where the program included an arrangement of “Gospel Train” by Dvoák’s old associate Harry T. Burleigh.

  The New Deal had a mighty impact on the arts for the simple reason that it had a mighty wad of money to spend. Roosevelt dispensed $4.9 billion to relief projects in 1935, whence came the Works Progress Administration, or WPA; of that amount, some $27 million went to the Federal Arts Projects, also called Federal One, and, of this amount, $7,126,862 funded the Federal Music Project, or FMP. At its peak the FMP supported sixteen thousand musicians and operated 125 orchestras, 135 bands, and 32 choral and opera units. Harry Hopkins, the architect of the WPA, hoped that Federal One would become a permanent agency. Eleanor, in her column “My Day,” wrote: “When the arts flourished in the old days it was sufficient for an artist to have a rich patron and then to develop under the protection of his important sponsor. All nobles had their pet artists…Today, for the most part, this method of developing and protecting art has passed out of existence and I am wondering if the WPA art projects may not take their places.”

  The challenge for any arts bureaucracy is to make sound decisions about which artists to promote. Federal One, lacking a precedent, tended to fall back on the Ivy League old-boy network and its attendant cultural connections. The earliest New Deal arts initiative, the Public Works of Art Project, came about when Roosevelt’s Harvard classmate George Biddle, a left-leaning artist who had consorted with Diego Rivera in Mexico, asked the newly elected president to fund an artistic homage to the New Deal’s “social revolution,” in the style of the Mexican muralists. Roosevelt showed immediate interest and even laid out some aesthetic precepts in remarks at an exhibition in the spring of 1934. The president said that none of the paintings exhibited a “despondent theme,” that they generally avoided “both slavery to classical standards and decadence common to much European art.” Stalin and Hitler would have agreed with these sentiments completely; the difference, of course, is that FDR lacked the means, the will, or the desire to enforce them.

  The Federal Music Project got under way in July 1935. “Through the program of instruction carried on by the Federal Music Project,” a press release for an education program said, “a tremendous, unsuspected hunger for musical knowledge has been disclosed among the children of the underprivileged and the relief population from which the classes are enrolled.” In Boston, opera was thrown open to the masses, and a reporter pictured it as a storming of the Bastille: “This was opera for the 4,000,000 and the sign warning, ‘Drivers, chauffeurs, footmen not allowed to stand in the vestibule,’ might just as well have been draped, for the drivers, chauffeurs, and footmen were occupying the seats of the master and the madame at 83 cents per chair.” The New York Police Athletic League reported that singing classes had proved surprisingly popular among juvenile delinquents; the boys were suspicious at first of this “sissy stuff,” but soon were singing out at full strength.

  Big cities were not the only beneficiaries of the FMP. Live music spread out to rural towns, such as Anadarko, Chickasha, and El Reno in Oklahoma. “For the first time in the history of the state these smaller cities have been able to have symphony concerts at home,” wrote the Oklahoma state director. “I wish that I could portray for you a picture of hundreds of school children from rural districts sitting in breathless suspense at a school concert.” Another report summons up a scene out of Charles Ives, or, more appositely, Will Marion Cook’s “On Emancipation Day”:

  The highlight of Music Week Observation for the teaching project was the statewide negro music festival which was held at Boley, the negro metropolis of Oklahoma. An outstanding feature of this festival was a musical parade in which over one thousand pupils participated. Flags, banners, placards and gay streamers added color to the parade which was made doubly interesting by musical selections which were dramatized by choruses and class groups as they marched to the music of three bands.

  Large numbers of women played in orchestras for the first time. Dean Dixon, an African-American, was featured in Time magazine as a rising WPA conductor.

  The FMP also took up the cause of new music, setting up a series called the Composers’ Forum-Laboratory, where composers could interact with the public and thus break away from their presumed artistic isolation. A press release explained: “A technic has been perfected by which the writer of music has opportunity to amend or change his composition in the experience of audience reaction. Following the program the composer answers any questions addressed to him from his hearers.” The Composers’ Forum-Laboratory was directed by Ashley Pettis, an active Popular Fronter and music critic for New Masses. The first event in New York was dedicated to the young composer Roy Harris, who used the occasion to call for “a very great virile music…music which moves in its vastness at a very rapid rate, music of great color, music of great mass, music which could only come out of an American civilization.”

  Harris was another model New Deal musician. His background might have been dreamed up by Great American Composer central casting: he was born in the oil-boom town o
f Chandler, Oklahoma, in a log cabin, no less, on Lincoln’s birthday. Time further noted that the log cabin had been “hewed by hand” and that the young composer had driven a truck. The implication was that Harris was no classical sissy or bourgeois darling. The work that won Harris nationwide attention was his Third Symphony of 1938—an all-American hymn and dance for orchestra in which strings declaim orations in broad, open-ended lines, brass chant and whoop like cowboys in the galleries, and timpani stamp out strong beats in the middle of the bar. Such a big-shouldered sound met everyone’s expectations of what a true-blue American symphony should be. When Toscanini deigned to conduct the piece in 1940, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates wrote to the composer: “If I had pitchers who would pitch as strongly as you do in your Symphony, my worries would be over.”

  If the Federal Music Project was a well-meaning, hardworking organization that never quite defined its purpose, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), toward which politically engaged composers gravitated, was too clear about its goals. A few weeks before the first Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert in New York, Hallie Flanagan, the head of the FTP and an authority on Russian experimental theater, gave a speech with the title “Is This the Time and Place?” in which she set out her vision of a federally funded radical theater along the lines of Meyerhold’s studios in Russia and Brecht’s projects in pre-Nazi Berlin. The occasion was the first meeting of the regional directors of the FTP, which took place in Evalyn Walsh McLean’s mansion in Washington, D.C. Flanagan said that this palatial setting—whose owner wore the Hope Diamond—represented “the conception of art as a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed by the rich.” She was reminded, she said, of scenes that she had witnessed on a trip to the Soviet Union ten years before: