Page 19 - Phil Made in America program digital flipbook

of musical sparks utilizing fragments of everything already heard.” It is one of a kind: an
effervescent American overture in strict sonata form, from one of our greatest musical
minds at the top of his game.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

Third Symphony (1942 – 1946) Aaron Copland

(1900 – 1990)
Commissioned by the BSO, Copland’s epic Third Symphony was composed all along the
Eastern seaboard. The work is his longest symphonic composition, requiring twenty-
six winds, five percussionists, celeste, piano, two harps, and strings, and incorporating
his complete Fanfare for the Common Man. That piece was one of eighteen American
fanfares (donated for free by Allied composers) as “stirring and significant contributions
to the war effort” for the Cincinnati Orchestra to play during its 1942-43 season.
Harvard’s Walter Piston contributed a Fanfare for the Fighting French, Brookline native
Daniel Gregory French wrote a Fanfare for Friends, Harvard grad Virgil Thomson gave a
Fanfare for France, and NEC grad William Grant Still donated a Fanfare for American War
Heroes. Copland struggled over the title for his own 1942 fanfare, considering Fanfare
for the Four Freedoms (referring to FDR’s 1941 speech listing freedoms “of speech, of
religion, from want, and from fear”), Fanfare for the Spirit of Democracy, and Fanfare for
the Rebirth of Lidice (a Czech town razed by the Nazis in 1942).

The Fanfare is the oldest music in Symphony No. 3: its basic melodic contours permeate
all four of the symphony’s movements, building to a final climax in which the Fanfare is
played in full. Copland’s brief opening movement was composed in Topoztlán, Mexico
in 1944: it contrasts an opening flourish, a hymn (violas and oboes), and a fugal tune
introduced by solo trombone. The dynamic Scherzo that follows develops the fanfare
motive (listen for the main statement from unison clarinets, horn, and violas) into both
a patriotic march and a wistful waltz: this music dates from the composer’s August
1945 stay in Bernardsville, New Jersey with Barner, Menotti, and Leonard Bernstein,
who had just conducted Copland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring with the
BSO at Tanglewood.
By December 1945, Copland needed to escape New York City (he was starting to be
stopped in the street due to his new-found notoriety), so he found a house to rent on
Great Hill Road in Ridgefield, CT. “Conn. is cold and bleak, but self-exile is essential if I’m
ever to finish up that piece,” Copland wrote a friend in December 1945, one of dozens
of letters penned in Ridgefield, many now in the Library of Congress. The war effort —
writing scores for films and radio programs for the federal Office of War Information
— had delayed his focusing on his Symphony No. 3, so he dug in for the winter. His
snow-bound third movement restates the fugal tune from the first, languidly stretched
out through chromaticism and harmonic development. An angular second theme (a
plaintive flute) contrasts with a springy two-step (muted trumpet): this music develops
in fits and spurts, at times disappearing into an icy fog of harmonics and concluding
with a chorale.

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