Page 23 - Phil 25-26 opening night DIGITAL program book

Program Notes

music and text. Boulanger, a young teacher/pianist/musicologist at the
Fontainebleau Conservatory where Copland studied in his early twenties,
introduced him to modernism, made him sing Renaissance music with
his fellow students, and encouraged him to break the European classical
mold. Copland called her “an intellectual Amazon.” In 1925, he relocated
to Manhattan, befriended his contemporaries (including photographer
Alfred Stieglitz and the founders of The Group Theatre), and borrowed
from the jazzy sounds of bars and speakeasies. By 1933, Copland began
advocating for contemporary composition to “interest the general
public.”
He recalled, “I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the
relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. The old
‘special’ public of the modern-music concerts had fallen away. It seemed
to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.
Moreover, an entirely new public for music had grown up around the
radio and phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue
writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I
couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”

He called this new approach “imposed simplicity,” developing an
approach that became his signature, drawn from traditional folk
melodies of the Americas. Copland’s turn toward accessible music was
further influenced by his changing political sensibilities. Moved by the
desperate suffering of people through the Great Depression, he aligned
himself with Progressivism and the Popular Front (which frequently
quoted Lincoln). The most famous works from this “populist” period are
his ballets (Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring) and his epic Symphony
No. 3, featured by the Plymouth Philharmonic last season.

Andre Kostelanetz, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony in the 1940s,
commissioned A Lincoln Portrait in 1942 just before the 1942-43 season
that Cincinnati premiered eighteen American fanfares (donated for free
by Allied composers) as “stirring and significant contributions to the
war effort”: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man became the most
successful of these. A Lincoln Portrait shared its premiere with new works
by Jerone Kern (Portrait for Orchestra: Mark Twain) and Virgil Thomson
(The Mayor LaGuardia Waltzes and Canons for Dorothy Thompson [his
colleague at New York’s Herald Tribune). Serge Koussevitsky was the first
to record A Lincoln Portrait (with the BSO, in 1947).

As Copland chose the texts for his Lincoln Portrait, he emphasized
Lincoln’s narrative agency, including some version of “He said…” eleven

Season 2025/26
S eason 20 25/26 ~ 21
~ 21