Page 269 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

But the Jazz Age ended with the Great Depression, so Copland then turned his attention to a series of projects with rural and western American subjects. The ballet scores Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942) are set in the West and make use of classic cowboy songs like “Goodbye, Old Paint” and “The Old Chisholm Trail.” Another ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944), re-creates the ambience of the Pennsylvania farm country, and his only opera, The Tender Land (1954), is set in the cornbelt of the Midwest. In 2009, Ken Burns featured Copland’s music prominently in the soundtrack of his TV miniseries The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. What could be more American and spacious than the wide-open sounds of Aaron Copland?
Copland’s Music
Copland evokes a sense of space in his music by means of a distinctive kind of orchestration called “open scoring.” He typically creates a solid bass, a very thin middle, and a top of one or two high, clear tones, such as those of the clarinet or flute. This separation and careful spacing of the instruments create the fresh, uncluttered sound that is so pleasing in Copland’s music. Another characteristic element of Copland’s style is the use of Americana; he incorporates American folk and popular songs to soften the dissonant harmonies and disjunct melo- dies of European Modernism. Copland’s melodies tend to be more stepwise and major/minor than those of other twentieth-century composers, perhaps be- cause Western folk and popular tunes are conjunct—have few skips—and non- chromatic. His harmonies are almost always tonal and often change slowly in a way that can evoke the vastness and grandeur of the American landscape. The triad, too, is still important to Copland, perhaps for its stability and simplicity; and dissonance unfolds slowly against it, rather than in a jarringly abrupt, Mod- ernist fashion. Spatial clarity, folksongs, and a conservative approach to disso- nance, in sum, mark Copland’s “listener friendly” scores.
The clarity and simplicity of Aaron Copland’s music is not accidental. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, he became convinced that the
gulf between modern music and the ordinary citizen had become
too great—that dissonance and atonality had little to say to most
music lovers: “It made no sense to ignore them [ordinary listeners]
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.” Thus, he not only wrote appealing new tonal works like Lincoln Portrait (1941) and Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), but also incor- porated simple, traditional tunes such as “The Gift to Be Simple,” which he uses in Appalachian Spring.
Appalachian Spring (1944)
Appalachian Spring (Figure 16.2) is a one-act ballet that tells the story of
“a pioneer celebration of spring in a newly built farmhouse in the State of Pennsylvania in the early 1800s.” A new bride and her farmer husband express through dance the anxieties and joys of life in pioneer America. The work was composed in 1944 for the great American choreographer Martha Graham (1893– 1991), and it won Copland a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The score is divided
Figure 16.2
A scene from Martha Graham’s ballet Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland. Here Katherine Crockett dances the role of the Bride (New York, 1999).
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