Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley, editors
THE SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE OF AARON COPLAND
288pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $45).
0 300 11121 5
On the inside tough, intrepid, solitary and visionary (“Moses”, in Leonard Bernstein’s words); on the outside gregarious, generous, endearingly gawky, dignified, but unaffected and with a ready laugh; someone who might have been taken, not for an artist, but for a trusted pharmacist or paediatrician: Aaron Copland was an uncommon man who spearheaded American music in the twentieth century, both through the smart, unabashedly American language of his own music, and through his ability to carve out a professional place for American composers in the concert hall and on the international stage. Copland also became a beloved public figure, and is one of only a handful of major twentieth-century composers who managed to write music that could be used for national occasions (“Fanfare for the Common Man”, “Appalachian Spring”, “Rodeo”) and that therefore became known to millions of people, who also remained a composer’s composer.
Before Copland, American audiences tended to consider concert music the province of Europeans, and her composers tended to pursue a Eurocentric language. Those who did not, like Charles Tomlinson Griffes or the great Charles Ives, were marginalized. After his initial composition lessons with Rubin Goldmark as a teenager, Copland left Brooklyn and sought European training, too, skipping college and travelling to France in 1921 to study composition at the Château de Fontainebleau, with Paul Vidal. There he discovered a charismatic young teacher with whom he bonded, someone who, as he later wrote to his parents, “understands the kind of modern music I like to write”. “Now be prepared for a surprise”, his letter continues. “My teacher is not – as you suppose – a man – but a woman.”
Copland’s studies with Nadia Boulanger continued for the following three years – years that were transformative for him and for the six generations of American composers who followed in his footsteps and studied with this legendary teacher. Boulanger helped him learn and absorb the “Western” tradition, while also drawing out of him his first ambitious works in a new kind of idiom: long-lined, transparent, unencumbered; a bracing music of gleaming modernity, directness, power and character, unashamed to declare its Americanness or to make use of native jazz or folk sources. Copland returned from Europe not only more trained, but also more American than when he left. It was Boulanger who gave the first performance of his brilliant Organ Concerto with the New York Symphony and the Boston Symphony in 1925, and so launched his career. Gershwin, at the same moment, was being accepted into the concert hall, but with a public uncertainty about whether his music could be considered “serious”. Copland and a handful of other American composers consigned such insecurities to the past, while also becoming early champions of the music of Ives and other neglected American masters.
This charming, modest-sized collection of Copland’s letters, culled from the composer’s own papers and from those of his recipients, has been put together by two scholars, Elizabeth B. Crist of the University of Texas, and Wayne Shirley, a former music specialist at the Library of Congress. Reading through the chronologically arranged documents, one has the pleasant experience of looking over Copland’s shoulder as he writes to his parents from Europe announcing his first performances and publications, later navigating with great clear-headedness a busy musical life, and communicating with a select group of colleagues. The book is perhaps best seen not as an introduction to his life but as usefully ancillary to the estimable two-volume collaborative “autobiography” which he co-wrote with Vivian Perlis, Copland 1900–1942, and Copland Since 1943. These books inevitably shed a more comprehensive light on his activities, as they contain first-hand contributions by dozens of his peers, alongside his own reminiscences, reflections and commentaries on specific compositions. The outside perspectives are crucial in Copland’s case because, excellent writer though he was, he revealed himself more fully in his music and behaviour than in his words. The value of this “new” collection lies in the way it makes clear the private consistency of his nature and views, his imperviousness to corrupting influences, and the degree to which he was not deflected from his artistic aims by success. If there is a mystery in the degree to which the man was formed, once and for all, at such an early age – already, it would appear, at the age of twenty sailing towards the future with a rare kind of artistic and personal fearlessness and optimism, a sense of adventure, a strength suggestive of self-knowledge – it is not a mystery likely to be elucidated by Copland himself.
Yet while these charming and circumspect letters do not dwell on intellectual matters and seldom betray any personal or artistic secrets, this is still a book that artists, in particular, should read. It shows very movingly that it is possible to be committed to what one is doing while being generous to others and a citizen of the world; that it is not necessary to be especially neurotic to be a great artist; that strong convictions need not preclude diplomatic civility; that it is possible to produce important work and remain unpretentious. Addressing the latter point directly, Copland instructs the young Henry Brant:
“Some friendly advice: get a different bow. The one you have at present is not simple enough . . . . It looks too much like Henry Brant the great composer coming to greet his public! Be a great composer but be natural and unaffected about it.”
His letters (to Arnold Schoenberg, to William Schumann, to Carlos Chavez) attempting to patch up misunderstandings, or making requests (of Serge Koussevitzky), or trying to garner support for a cause (from the League of Composers), are models of genial directness. In his earliest letters he shows both practical foresight (to his parents: “save my letters as I have decided not to bother with a diary”) and a sense of his obligations as a cultural leader (“if one is interested in growing things, one must be interested in these countries where all musical effort is just beginning”). If he pondered any of the ironies implicit in his story, he did so privately. Among them are that a Jewish, Brooklyn-born homosexual, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, whose only run-in with a cow was at Tanglewood when his car collided with one on the road, should – in his ballet and film scores – create the musical sound for ever associated in the public mind with the American Midwest and with the American cowboy.
Copland’s music smells of outdoors. Its intellect is conveyed in ringing sounds and a supple rhythmic mobility which seems to carry with it a sense of national identity, regardless of the melodic materials. It conveys an America of possibilities, but also an America whose openness can be bleak, rootless and lonely. His optimistic outlook was coupled to a kind of stoicism, and a distinctly American sense of isolation and solitude, akin to that found in Hopper’s paintings or Frost’s poetry. While superficial aspects of Copland’s more folksy side have been mimicked in a thousand film and television scores, the originals have an inventiveness and precision – a hardness, in fact – that is inimitable. Whether in the idiom of the score to Our Town, or the nearly twelve-tone half-hour Piano Fantasy, his music – lean, stripped of all excess, finely focused – retains its brilliant effectiveness. When sunny or lyrical, it radiates an honest, unsentimental warmth that is never gooey.
Copland was a slow composer, taking two years to complete his Third Symphony, five to finish the Piano Fantasy. His work process normally included a literal cooling-off period, after which he would examine the music more critically before making the final draft. Those works such as the “Short Symphony”, Vitebsk, the Dickinson Songs, the late Inscape, or the Piano Quartet – which wear their stridency and toughness on the outside – prompted some commentators to see his music as expressive of a surprising duality. Yet the two sides represented one man. The commitment to Modernism was lifelong (the letters contain glimpses of his late-in-life contacts with Boulez and Berio), as was the populism. Copland was in fact a political liberal whose leftist leanings in the 1930s resulted in an impulsive (later regretted) speech at a Communist rally, a song entitled “Into the Streets May 1rst”, and eventually a summons before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was an optimist without illusions. In 1931, writing to a friend who had expressed reservations about his starkly powerful Piano Variations (1930), Copland expressed the view that to “affirm the world is meaningless, unless one also affirms the tragic reality which is at the core of existence”.
There is very little narcissism or self-pity in these letters, and whatever the injuries Copland may have suffered, they never made him lose sight of his good fortune. He knew the value of his work, but retained a sense of youthful delight that things worked out relatively well for him (“Who would have thunk it?”, he writes to Bernstein). His joviality and sense of humour emerge in the first letters (“Although France may not be Paradise it is H--- to get there”, he writes at the age of twenty-one) and are rarely absent thereafter (“the reviews were so bad that I decided I must have written a better cycle than I had realized”). In addition to his parents, three other recipients of his letters come to dominate the Selected Correspondence. Copland describes his meeting with his teacher Nadia Boulanger as the most important encounter of his life, and his letters to her show unswerving loyalty and gratitude, and deep personal connection, keeping alive memories of the days when he was her young, aspiring student, while also maintaining a crucial degree of independence and distance from her. To the composer Carlos Chavez he talks shop and writes with unusual warmth and respect. Copland’s deep love for the music and people of Mexico, Cuba and South America is an important theme of the book.
The letters to Leonard Bernstein come the closest to capturing the informal or the amorous Copland, and suggest that the complete correspondence between these two important figures of American music should be assembled in book form. Whatever the nature of their initial rapport – the editors discreetly suggest the possibility of a brief affair – there is no mistaking the symbiotic bond revealed by these letters, in which the older Copland at first plays the role of playful and sensible mentor, but eventually becomes a grateful and admiring colleague. (Copland took Bernstein’s advice and made an important cut in the final pages of the Third Symphony.) Bernstein later wrote of Copland’s early compositional advice as focused on stripping things down to a kind of radiant plainness, on teaching him to recognize freshness or its absence (“that note is not fresh because you’ve just used it here”). Letters to Bernstein maintain their slangy intimacy and joie de vivre even after age has begun to dim Copland’s memory. (Copland, who lived to be ninety, suffered from senile dementia in his final years.) To Bernstein he conveys a kind of joyful pride (“you’re still my favourite genius”), and attempts to inculcate some Coplandesque virtues in the self-involved younger artist. “As for your general disappointment in Art, Man and Life”, he wrote, responding to some youthful jeremiad from Bernstein, “I can only advise perspective, perspective, perspective. This is only 1938. Man has a long time to go. Art is quite young. Life has its own dialectic. Aren’t you always curious to see what tomorrow will bring?”
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Allen Shawn is a composer and the author of Arnold Shoenberg's Journey, 2002.
