A Symphony of the People
Date:
07/06/2012 Contributor:
Absent from my consideration yesterday of the great American symphonists was the name of the composer of the last and grandest, if not necessarily greatest, in our week-long WFCR series of Great American Symphonies. The fact that he's been known for as long as any of us can remember as the Dean of American Composers makes the absence of his from the list even more conspicuous. But the work in question is really a one-of-a-kind both for its composer and for the history of the American symphony.
The broad public knows Aaron Copland best from ballets like Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, and from such populist fare as "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait." Less-known to the public but highly-regarded on the "inside" of classical music are such brilliant abstract instrumental works as the Piano Variations, Piano Fantasy and Piano Quartet. Check them out if you've never heard them. You'll recognize Copland's familiar voice, all right. But you may be surprised by their spare, uncompromising tone, as well as by their high quotient of dissonance. I think you'll also find yourself gripped by their mastery and cogency; these are some of the finest concert works in the annals of American classical music, and no appreciation of Copland's place our musical history is complete without knowing them.
But this works both ways, as there have been and continue to be those in the classical establishment who regard populism with condescension, and equate popularity with artistic inferiority. Yet for Copland, populism was not a compromise. It was a mission, of a piece with the political ideals he and other artists espoused during the thirties. The era of the depression, dust bowl and New Deal was also, for music, the era of Virgil Thomson's scores for the films The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains (both of which you may watch online) , of Marc Blitzstein's agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock , and of the folk music research of John and Alan Lomax and of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger (father and stepmother of Pete, parents of Peggy). There was even a Federal Music Project, and its successor, the WPA Music Program, to put unemployed musicians to work — could you imagine such a thing today?
This was the spirit of the Copland populist works mentioned above, and of the work coming up on WFCR at about 1:00 this afternoon. Yet another work for which we may thank Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Copland's Third Symphony (really his only work in standard symphonic form) was begun in 1944 and premiered by the BSO in October 1946. Epic, noble and dignified, it is a Grand Symphonic Statement of a kind that few composers outside the Soviet Union (e.g., the Fifth Symphonies by Shostakovitch and Prokofiev) were still writing at the time. Just to drive the point home, Copland quotes his own 1942 "Fanfare for the Common Man" at the beginning of the finale. Almost uniquely for Copland, the Third Symphony is an abstract concert work in his populist style. And as it served as the grand conclusion for Copland's populist era, it serves well as the conclusion of our Independence Day series of Great American Symphonies this afternoon on WFCR, with Koussevitzky protege Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic doing the honors.
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Comments
Copland's Symphony?
Try his Short Symphony, or Symphony No. 2.
All right...I will! Of
All right...I will! Of course, it's by title and content not a full-fledged symphony, but it's a terrific piece in Copland's more abstract early-30s vein.