Page 268 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

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The United States is a highly pluralistic society, home to recent and not- so-recent immigrants, as well as Native Americans. This cultural and ethnic diversity is reflected in the country’s many popular musical traditions, including jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, traditional Appalachian, bluegrass, and country and western. American art music of the past hundred years has been equally variegated, ranging from high-art European Modernism with a distinctly American flavor to, most recently, Postmodernist music. Offering both a “free market” for the exchange of artistic ideas and a safe homeland for ethnic groups from around the globe, the United States has come to enjoy the most diverse and vibrant musical culture in the world. In this chapter, we explore how several composers of high-art music added their very different voices to the diverse chorus of American music.
Aaron Copland (1900–1990)
Until the twentieth century, the United States was a cultural backwater of a Euro- pean tide. European symphonic scores, for example, dominated the repertoire of symphony orchestras in New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago, among other places, in post–Civil War America. During the twentieth century, however, as the presence of the United States grew increasingly large on the world stage, American composers provided this emerging nation with its own distinctive musical character—one not only attuned to the Modernist style then prevalent in Europe, but one that also sounded truly American. The composer who best captured the spirit of the American heartland was Aaron Copland (Figure 16.1), who, ironically, spent much of his life within the confines of New York City.
Copland was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents. After a rudimen- tary musical education in New York, he set sail for Paris to broaden his artistic ho- rizons. In this he was not alone, for the City of Light at this time attracted young
writers, painters, and musicians from around the world, including Igor Stravinsky (1882–1974), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), James Joyce (1882–1941), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Ernest Hemingway (1898–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). After three years of study, Copland returned to the United States, determined to compose in a dis- tinctly American style. Like other young expatriate artists during the 1920s, Copland had to leave his homeland to learn what made it unique: “In greater or lesser degree,” he remarked, “all of us discovered America in Europe.”
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cop- land sought to forge an American style by incor- porating into his music elements of jazz, a dis- tinctly American product. This was, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed it, the Jazz Age, and American jazz was a craze that swept the world.
Figure 16.1
Aaron Copland
246 chapter sixteen american modernism and postmodernism
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