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Listening guide for the 2010 WCFSO Youth Concerts

Aaron Copland [1900-1990] is widely viewed as America’s most recognizable and influential composer. With his unique ability to absorb and transform a range of diverse musical styles into a perennially new yet recognizable American sound, Copland is emblematic of this country’s enterprising and inclusive spirit during its global ascendancy during the first half of the twentieth centiry. The genres in which he excelled also include the key media forms that defined this country during that period, including radio and film, and the narrative aspects of his music draw heavily on themes from American history and our national mythology.

The San Fransisco Symphony’s Keeping Score program Copland and the American Sound is an ideal resource for researching the teaching guide to this concert. One section of the show is embedded at the bottom of this page, and the entire program can be viewed at PBS – I recommend incorporating as much of it as possible directly into classroom learning. The Library of Congress also has an excellent collection of Copland materials. Yale’s Oral History of American Music project features a series of interviews with Copland, excerpts of which will be woven into the concerts:

The Orchestra
The orchestra that students will see and hear is a standard twentieth-century ensemble, featuring strings and all of the traditional wind and brass instruments plus piccolo, english horn, bass clarinet, harp, piano and a variety of percussion. One notable aspect of Copland’s music is its instrumental precision and clarity – as several works on the program demonstrate the composer scored many of his evocative pieces for a relatively small orchestra or with a self-consciously restrained palate of instrumental color. Due of the special transparency of his sound, Copland offers students an excellent exercise in listening for timbre and orchestration.

The Genres
While Copland did excel in traditional instrumental genres like the symphony and the concerto, he is most well-known for his works in other media. In addition to his masterful ballet scores for Martha Graham and Lincoln Kirstein, Copland composed music for a variety of theatrical settings as well as modern media formats like radio and especially film. Our program will feature examples from the wide variety of genres in which Copland worked, as well as photos and video of his collaborators and inspirations from other media.

The American century
One of the key needs of any growing world power is a series of national myths or stories; for America on its rapid ascent to global dominance in the first half of the twentieth century Aaron Copland was the artist most successful at telling those stories. His themes ranged from imaginary Old West scenes to metropolitan soundscapes to celebrations of regional rural life, and in each case the sounds he imagined for those themes became definitive. Classroom discussion for any piece included on our program could begin with a simple question: ‘Why does Copland’s music sound so American?’

Who was Copland?
Copland’s biography is a classic illumnation of the American melting pot phenomenon, and as such its inclusion in the teaching materials would offer an excellent opportunity to discuss that particular phenomenon. Other themes that could be addressed include the intersection of art and civics – a ever-present aspect of American life the 1930s and 40s – and issues of political and personal tolerance in this country.

Fanfare for the Common Man

The most instantly recognizable piece of American public music, Copland’s Fanfare was essentially a response to post-Depression conditions in this country [conditions which also inspired an earlier exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York subtitled ‘The Art of the Common Man in America’]. The powerful setting for brass and percussion, notable for its rhythmic starkness and melodic directness, portray the American worker as resilient, upstanding and honorable. Copland later reconfigured the Fanfare for inclusion in his Third Symphony.

Rodeo, Buckaroo Holiday

Copland enjoyed working relationships with a variety of artists and producers outside of the world of concert music. In the 1940s Copland composed music for a series of important ballets, including a fictional story of American cowboy life entitled Rodeo. With this piece and his other western-themed dance work, Billy the Kid, the composer created an iconic sound for the Old West that is still echoed in today’s western music for film, television and commercials. One of the key elements in the immediacy and authenticity of Copland’s western sound is his use of original melodies, including two songs that make appearances in the first movement of Rodeo [Buckaroo Holiday], ‘Sis Joe’ and ‘If He’d Be A Buckaroo’.

Prairie Journal

Prairie Journal was originally known as Music for Radio in its first form as a commission for the CBS Radio Broadcast Network. Though the work is intended to depict ranch life on the western prairie, it also demonstrates Copland’s ability to conjure specific scenes of open space and human activity through musical sound. Iowa students can be encouraged to imagine a day of farm or ranch life through this music, as did radio listeners in the era before television came to dominate home entertainment.

Quiet City

Copland traveled widely and was strongly influenced by the places and cultures he encountered. His strongest ties, however, were to New York City [where he grew up] and its uniquely American stories of big dreams and big city disappointments. Quiet City was adapted from Copland’s incidental music to a play about one such story, and in addition to its depiction of a forlorn nighttime city mood also demonstrates how effective Copland could be with a limited orchestral palette of strings, english horn and trumpet.

Appalachian Spring, Variations on a Shaker Melody

Appalachian Spring is probably Copland’s most influential work, and its musical depiction of a simple life on a Pennsylvania farm was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The original suite for 13 instruments was commissioned by Martha Graham for her modern dance company – students may enjoy seeing excerpts of her original choreography for the piece. Copland rescored the work as an orchestral suite, and our program will feature one section from that suaite, Variations on a Shaker Melody. Below, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas discusses Variations on a Shaker Melody from Appalachian Spring in this clip from his Know the Score program Copland and the American Sound: