MESSAGE FROM THE CEO
Some thoughts on Copland’s Fanfare and Third Symphony
In his remarks from the stage at the last concert featuring Dvòřak’s Cello concerto, Music Director Scott Speck reflected on the profound influence the Czech composer had on American music during his directorship of the National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to ’95. Dvòřak was appointed to the post by the conservatory’s founder, philanthropist Jeanette Thurber. It was her hope that the well-known composer would help America’s burgeoning musician community in fostering a distinctly American style. The Cello Concerto of 1895 and the “New World” Symphony, which preceded it by two years, were the crowning jewels of Dvòřak’s three-year sojourn in the U.S.
When we were planning this season’s programming, it never occurred to me what a fitting progression it was to go from Dvòřak in one concert to Aaron Copland in the next. For it is in the music of Copland that Dvòřak’s challenge to create a truly American style came to fruition.
A student of the great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, Copland began his career in the mid-1920s as something of an enfant terrible, composing in the thorny, angular and often discordant style of that time. His initial efforts to forge a distinctive American voice were through the incorporation of jazz elements. This is especially evident in his 1926 Piano Concerto, which sounds like swing jazz seen through a Cubist lens.
In the 1930s, Copland began a process of simplifying his musical language in a desire to reach more people. This led to his Americana style, characterized by “wide disjunct harmonies, sparse textures, and slowly changing harmonies.” (Sarah A. Ruddy, Ph. D.) Copland premiered his new style, in an extraordinary four-year burst of creativity, between 1938 and 1942 with the ballets Billy the Kid, its sequel Rodeo, and such works as Quiet City, Our Town, Outdoor Overture, Danzon Cubano, and Lincoln Portrait. Fanfare for the Common Man, which opens our season finale, was commissioned in 1942 by Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, as part of a series of American fanfares meant to inspire the war effort. Perhaps the most famous of all Copland’s works, the ballet Appalachian Spring, premiered in 1944.
But it is in his Symphony No. 3 of 1945 that this distinct musical language finds its highest expression. As Sarah Ruddy writes in her program notes, in this great work Copland “fused the American musical style of his ballets with the formal structure and grand scale of the symphony. Across four movements played by a huge orchestra—including 26 woodwind and brass players, five percussionists and two harps—Copland’s signature style” is expanded and exemplified.
Some musicologists have termed the piece “abstract,” but I disagree. Of course as a formal symphony, it comes across as more abstract than the ballet scores, which are associated with their own familiar story lines. But to me the Symphony No. 3 is bursting with meaning and power. It is like an American Mahler symphony: absolute music that speaks for itself and conveys its message without reference to an external storyline or “program.” Its musical arc encompasses the entire period of the American participation in World War II, but there is nothing jingoistic about it. The work spans the full gamut of human emotions: apprehension, fear, grief, anger, pain, hope and triumph. It is a musical journal chronicling a crisis in humanity, when the world’s commitment to freedom and democracy was literally under the gun.
The first movement begins reflectively, builds in volume and potent, and then ends in a return to quiet reflection. The second movement is a playful romp in the style of a scherzo, full of rapid, staccato brass lines and punctuated by timpani strikes. The third movement feels to me like a desperately quiet expression of pain and sorrow tinged with hope and expectation. The familiar statement “it is always darkest before the dawn” describes its sense very well. And when it comes, the dawn is equally quiet, as we hear the opening strains of hope in the returning Fanfare for the Common Man theme played on flutes. This ushers in the final movement, in which we come full circle into an exultant affirmation of all that is best and truest in the American spirit.
This performance of Copland’s Third Symphony is a fitting memorial of the 80th Anniversary of the end of the Great War. But it is not simply a triumphant commemoration of a past crisis and its resolution. It is a statement of unity and faith in humanity that remains as fresh and relevant today as ever. ###
