Fanfare for Copland

...Making a music that was as recognizably "American" as Modest Mussorgsky's was "Russian" had been a goal of Copland's since his time with Boulanger...

...And while his music might call to New Yorkers' minds the vast expanses of the West, Copland displaces the real West with prettified impersonations...

...He demanded government support for the arts, yet built a fortune on a career financed by private patrons...

...His 1954 opera The Tender Land was a failure at its premiere in New York, and his 1962 orchestral "Connotations," first performed by Leonard Bernstein, failed to make an impression...

...He intended to stay only a few months, but lived there almost four years, one of the first of a long line of Americans to study with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger...

...Besides being possibly illegal and certainly unethical, and raising the question of why Tan-glewood would allow it, Copland's antics force us to consider questions about his character...

...lovers were often half his age and frequently his students...

...When he lectured at the New School for Social Research, his broad experience with contemporary European music and his self-effacing style made his talks immensely popular (these lectures were later published as What to Listen for in Music...

...With choreography by Martha Graham, a set by Isamu No-guchi, and music by Copland, Appalachian Spring is probably the only American ballet comparable to the great works associated with the Ballet Russe...

...And what remains of Aaron Copland after all this biography is just what we might expect: the paradoxes of the man and the greatness of the music...

...Pollack is forthright about Copland's habit of taking young men as lovers and then discarding them—something he was doing into his seventies...

...This is a graceful, witty, and admirable account of one of the century's most important and interesting musicians...

...So too, the homosexuality deserves investigation...

...Although he was able to work out sweetheart deals with his publishers regarding royalties, it was Hollywood which most helped his bank account...

...Aaron quickly showed a propensity for music...

...At the invitation of the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, Copland made his first visit to Mexico City in 1932...

...BY MICHAEL LINTON In 1986 Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of the Arts and the House of Representatives presented him with the congressional Gold Medal, yet in the 1930s he had openly campaigned for Communist candidates and in 1953 was called before a Senate subcommittee and asked by Senator Joseph McCarthy about his Communist ties (he lied...

...He began piano lessons under an older sister but soon graduated to more demanding instructors...

...Even with these faults, however, Pollack's Aaron Copland is a readable portrait of one of this century's most important musicians...

...Pollack interrupts his chronology with long asides: The chapters devoted to Copland's politics, sex life, and support of younger composers give him the opportunity to discuss these topics directly, but they confuse a reader unfamiliar with the general contour of Copland's life...

...Besides composing, lecturing, and writing, Copland also became increasingly active in leftist politics...

...The chapter on Copland's examination by Senator McCarthy might have been spared its predictable whine if Pollack had reviewed recent literature on the real nature of the Communist threat...

...His comment that "Copland's amorous friendships enriched and gladdened the lives of all involved" seems extremely Pollyan-nish: Certainly somebody—and there were in fact many—felt used and jilted...

...Their sometimes rocky relationship would last until 1944, and was Copland's longest romantic attachment...

...After high school, he lived at home while studying privately with the composer Rubin Goldmark...

...Unlike John Williams, whose scores are basically variations on Gustav Holst, Igor Stravinsky, and Ralph Vaughn Williams, Copland never lost his original voice, and his scores remain some of the best film music ever composed...

...On at least one occasion, he apparently made it possible for a college student to summer at Tanglewood so that he might seduce him...

...though in many parts of the country a beginning schoolteacher's wage was $400 a year (and that included janitorial duties...

...Copland's training in Paris wasn't only musical...

...At the same time he was taking chic swipes at capitalism, Copland was getting rich...

...Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Ned Rorem: The line-up is so significant and influential that it may not be inappropriate to speak of the homosexualization of American art culture in the 1940s and 1950s...

...Apparently thinking that a reader interested enough in a classical composer to buy a nearly seven-hundred-page book would be musically illiterate, Pollack includes no musical examples and keeps the vocabulary entirely nontechnical...

...He won a prize for his hymn, "Into the Streets, May First" and in 1934 made stump speeches for a Communist candidate...

...He took with him a new symphony (called the "short symphony") and a new lover: the sixteen-year-old violinist Victor Kraft...

...With the publication of his Piano Variations in 1931, his reputation was firmly established...

...That proved difficult, but rather quickly he came to the attention of a group of philanthropic New Yorkers who provided him with gifts and helped him receive grants...

...At Boulanger's suggestion (and using her introductions), Copland spent his summers traveling, visiting England, Italy, Germany, and Austria, and introducing himself to musicians everywhere...

...In an era when sex is a rich field for biography, Pollack's reluctance to investigate this apparently malevolent aspect of Copland's life seems odd...

...He attended lectures on drama at the Sorbonne, and he became part of the artistic circle that included Sergey Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway...

...Unlike Ned Rorem (who openly wrote about his homosexuality) and Leonard Bernstein (who announced his in a press conference), Copland's homosexuality was acknowledged but not widely known outside musical and gay circles...

...Of American composers of his generation, only Duke Ellington has a legacy that can challenge Aaron Copland's...

...But the book is not without its failings...

...Leonard Bernstein, for instance, is introduced far before we're told how he and Copland met and what they meant to each other...

...But homosexuals did dominate American music in Copland's era...

...Pollack also overplays the composer's early poverty, citing with shock his 1934 fee of "only" $250 for the ballet Hear Ye...

...Leonard Bernstein, his student, lover, interpreter, and promoter, characterized him as "simply the best we've got...

...Though the moralism of his music led him to be dubbed by Virgil Thomson an "Old Testament prophet," he was long rumored to be the center of a homosexual ring of artists that tightly controlled American art music, and his Michael Linton is associate professor of music at Middle Tennessee State University...

...There was always something of the tourist in Copland's Americana scores (giving, for example, the word "rodeo" its typical Eastern pronunciation of "ro-DAY-o...

...In his new biography, Howard Pollack covers this terrain expertly...

...But it's a legacy that Howard Pollack rightly characterizes as paradoxical in his finely crafted recent biography, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man...

...But it would have been interesting to place Copland's Americanisms in a larger context...

...Through the 1950s and 1960s, Copland continued to compose, but his music began to seem dated when compared to Anton Webern and the younger composers Olivier Messaien, Pierre Boulez, and Krysztof Pen-derecki...

...And that was basically right...

...He was shy and soft spoken...

...It's in his music...

...He eventually told his father that he wanted to be a musician, and though the elder Copland was disappointed in his decision, he nonetheless supported him...

...Although a musicologist at the University of Houston, there is none of the professorial lugubriousness that typically burdens musicologists' work...

...Copland flourished under Bou-langer's strict regimen, and in turn the teacher rewarded him with significant professional introductions and asked him to write an organ symphony for her to premiere with the New York Philharmonic (in later years she remembered him as the best student of her career...

...But beginning with the ballet Billy the Kid in 1938 and continuing through Lincoln Portrait, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring in 1944, Copland produced a kind of American symphonic language based upon modal scales, syncopated rhythms, and folk songs (his use of the Shaker hymn "'Tis a Gift To Be Simple" in Appalachian Spring is probably the most familiar...

...He was a tireless promoter of his own music and had a reputation for deviousness, but his generosity to other composers was legendary...

...Hear He...

...In 1925, Sergey Kousse-vitzky premiered his "Music for the Theatre" with the Boston Symphony, and the next year premiered his "Piano Concerto," both works strongly influenced by jazz...

...And here is where Pollack's account most disappoints...

...Yet his music was boisterous, passionate, expansive, and sometimes violent...

...But he continued to exert a strong influence upon the music scene through his many appearances as a guest conductor, his summer teaching at Tanglewood, his writings, and the enduring quality of his music...

...Pollack does a better job describing the Paris of Copland's days with Boulanger and the culture of the New York Left to which he belonged in the 1930s...

...It's Copland's music that attracts our interest, and that's just what disappears in Pollack's biography...

...The meaning of such behavior is ignored by Pollack...

...But our interest in Copland isn't in his sex life or his politics...

...The real meat of Copland's artistry—his harmonic inventiveness, his melodic audacity, and his rhythmic vitality— are ignored...

...The result is the disappearance of any significant discussion...

...When he returned to New York in 1924, Copland intended to support himself as a composer and teacher...

...Pollack is quite right to dismiss as nonsense the rumors of a homosexual cabal with Copland at the center...

...A champion of American music, he regularly advised young composers to study in France and knew little about his own country (the folk songs he used in his music he got from books...

...Since Paris, he had gravitated to fashionable Communist circles, and had become something of a Soviet enthusiast...

...By the time he was born in 1900, the youngest of five children, Copland's parents were well on their way to becoming prosperous shopkeepers in Brooklyn's emigrant Jewish community...

...He died in North Tarrytown in 1990, having suffered several years with increasingly severe dementia...

...In the late 1940s, Copland justified the Kremlin's attacks on Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian, and in a speech delivered at the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, the composer blamed the Cold War on the United States...

...In 1920, Copland went to France...

...Between 1939 and 1949, Copland wrote seven film scores...

...Except for the ballet Appalachian Spring that he wrote two years later for Martha Graham, it remains the only piece by an American art composer many Americans recognize...

...And even if that kind of a label might be overstating things, it does help understand the alienation and even disgust such outspoken heterosexuals as the composer Charles Ives and the painter Thomas Hart Benton felt toward the centers of culture during the period...

...Pollack's subtitle is a play on the Fanfare for the Common Man Copland wrote in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony...

...Not only were these enormously lucrative (around $5,000 each, while for later scores he received $15,000), but Copland gave good value...