Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man on December 3rd, 2019 at the Athenaeum Theatre.
Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990)
Fanfare for the Common Man
Eclecticism is as American as apple pie. In a culture defined by its multiplicity, any concert music that purports to be American must, somehow, reflect that multiplicity. Such American concert music did not emerge until the first decades of the 20th century, when American-born composers began to synthesize jazz, ragtime, Negro spirituals, Anglo-American and Hispanic folk music, popular song, and elements of American musical theater into their concert works. The first 20th century American composer to create a significant body of work celebrating the diverse and multifarious reality of American society was Charles Ives (1874 – 1954). Unfortunately, Ives’ music (most of which was composed between 1900 and 1920) did not attain the level of esteem in which it is now held until the second half of the 20th century – way too late to guide and inspire Aaron Copland’s generation of composers. With genuine regret, late in life Copland wrote, “We had only an inkling of the existence of the music of Charles Ives in the 1920s.”
Born in Brooklyn to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Copland belonged to a well-to-do family; his father owned and operated a successful department store. In his youth, Copland studied piano, and by the age of 15 he decided to be a composer. His parents sent him to Paris to study with the Conservatoire de Paris composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887 – 1979) from 1921-1924. While studying in Europe, Copland rubbed shoulders with some of the most important composers of the time, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Weill. When Copland returned home, he declared that he wanted to be as recognizably American as Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were recognizably Russian. Though just 23 years of age, Copland was immediately accepted into the upper echelon of American concert music and was awarded Guggenheim fellowships in 1925 and 1926.
When Copland returned to the United States in 1924, a recognizably American style of concert music began to emerge from the pens of native-born American composers. This was Copland’s generation of composers, a generation that put American concert music on the map by incorporating the various aspects of American music culture with the genres and compositional techniques of traditional European music. This new style, evocative of the upright and self-sufficient pastoral image central to this country’s collective national myth, dominated the American concert hall. This generation of composers set out to achieve a “feel-good” and nationalistic style of music to which Americans would instantly relate. Today, American music still is one of the most complex styles of traditional Western concert music, in part due to the varied backgrounds and philosophies of the composers who write it. American music is very simply a reflection of Americans, who are the most diverse collection of humans in world history to be unified by central philosophical and political ideals in one geographical region.
American music more or less matured with little influence from the “Old World.” Underlying foundations still remained, of course, but the thrust of the American style and American compositional development was as uniquely American as was American popular culture at the time. In the 1920s and 30s, “uniquely American” meant something separated from the rest of the planet and insulated by the standard philosophical understanding of America’s place in the world. This all changed at 7:48 a.m. Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time on Sunday, December 7, 1941. America had to very quickly recognize that old political theories like the Monroe Doctrine were more or less irrelevant in the 20th century– because, despite America’s best efforts to stay out of its affairs, the rest of the world decided to pull America in. This brave new world was as uncertain it had been at any other point in the 20th century, and it was by no means obvious that the United Kingdom, the United States, and their allies had the strength and ability to defeat one of the most malevolent forces of White Nationalism ever to exist.
On May 8, 1942, Vice President Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965) delivered his speech titled “The Century of the Common Man” in New York City. At this time, Americans were debating wartime strategy and America’s role in the post-World War II order. Wallace’s speech cast World War II as a battle between a “free world” and a “slave world,” and Wallace held that “peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China, and Latin America – not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.” He continued, “Some have spoken of the American Century. I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.” Though many political conservatives of the time disliked the speech, it was translated into twenty languages, and millions of copies were distributed around the world. Now, in 2019, it is completely unthinkable that any American politician as recognizable as the Vice President of the United States would include the entire planet as deserving of the fundamental rights that most Americans are afforded. Copland would later echo Wallace’s sentiment, saying, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”
In that same year, 1942, Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, requested that Copland write a work for the 1942-1943 season. Copland recalled, “The challenge was to compose a traditional fanfare, direct and powerful, yet with a contemporary sound… The music was not terribly difficult to compose, but working slowly as was my custom, I did not have the fanfare ready to send to Goossens until November.” When Goossens received the work, he wrote to Copland saying, “Its title is as original as its music, and I think it is so telling that it deserves a special occasion for its performance. If it is agreeable to you, we will premiere it 12 March 1943 at income tax time.” Copland's reply was, “I [am] all for honoring the common man at income tax time.”
Orchestrated entirely for brass and percussion, Fanfare for the Common Man is characterized by a lean, open sound, reflecting both American democratic ideals and the natural grandeur of the country. Fanfare is deliberately written as an everyman response to the popular -isms of the day plaguing Europe and the world (Nazism, Fascism, Communism, White Nationalism, etc.). The work does not celebrate any individual hero, protagonist, or central conflict. Instead, Copland intentionally aims at a broader story, painting every common person as having the ability to be heroic in the fight against evil, moving towards the goal of decency and tranquility. Even now, in spite of the current political landscape, we must still believe that there is an American dream of peace and prosperity for everyone. Music that soars and inspires like this work does brings hope for the future. It is powerful, it is direct, and it is really just American.
Program Notes by Luke Smith.
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man on December 3rd, 2019. Make It a Date >>>