Page 20 - Phil Made in America program digital flipbook

Copland’s famous Fanfare emerges triumphantly from a turbulent, syncopated final
movement. Like his younger colleague Bernstein, Copland was a first-generation
American and the child of European Jews who had emigrated to America: though
Copland stated that he did not write his Third Symphony as a direct response to World
War II, he conceded that its “affirmative tone” was “certainly related to its time,” and
that he had closely monitored events in Europe throughout its composition. Copland
finished the last movement in the summer of 1946, first at the MacDowell Colony, then
at Tanglewood, and made his final touches to the symphony on September 29, 1946,
in a converted barn in nearby Richmond, MA. It won the New York Music Critics Circle
Prize for the best orchestral work by an American composer during the 1946-47 season.
No composer made more of an effort to immortalize the epic quality of America than
Aaron Copland. Though he studied music under conservative German and French
teachers in his youth, he constantly experimented with innovative, contemporary
musical styles. Born during the first year of a new century, when America was
undergoing drastic transformations, he mined the flux of the world around him,
creating a unique synthesis informed by the jazzy sounds of speakeasies and of folk
music from all over the Americas. Active as a political writer, music ambassador to
South America, and pan-American arts advocate, Aaron Copland taught throughout
his life: he remains one of the most notable musical chroniclers of twentieth-century
America.

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18 Plymouth Philharmonic O r ches tr a
18 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra