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Fanfare for an Uncommon Man
Aaron Copland lived a paradoxical life, full of what his biographer Howard Pollack calls "startling dichotomies." Says Pollack, "A participant in the avant-garde, he wrote works of popular appeal; respectful of the great European traditions, he embraced the musics and cultures of the Americas; a Jewish, homosexual, liberal New Yorker, he created an American Musical language; sensitive to life's tragic reality he remained resiliently optimistic." NPR has produced a one-hour documentary exploring the very complex man behind the universally appealing music. Melinda Whiting is host.
As an introduction to the program, we present an brief essay written exclusively for NPR by respected Copland scholar Jennifer DeLapp, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Maryland.
Aaron Copland and America
American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) composed his way
through the Roaring Twenties,  the Great Depression and the New Deal, World
War II, and the Cold War. Best known for his accessible, popular works
like Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Fanfare for the Common
Man, Copland began and ended his career with lesser-known, modernist works
written for a specialized audience. Copland portrayed not only the
American West, the American past, and the Common Man, but also Latin
America, and the Modern City.
Paris Years
Later in his life, Copland recalled that he discovered America in
Europe. A student in Paris throughout the early 1920s,
Copland witnessed the vital interaction of French theater, music, dance,
and literature. American jazz was also in vogue. Hence the works written
after his New York return--Music for the Theatre (1925) and the Piano
Concerto (1926). These pieces combined elements of jazz with a dissonant, modernist
sound. Others, like the Piano Variations (1930), had a lean, forceful,
angular construction that reminded some critics of American skyscrapers and continue to breathe an urban air.
Music for Everyone
The Great Depression and rise of mass media led Copland to, as he put it, "say 
what I had to say in the simplest possible terms." The
Second Hurricane (1936), a children's play opera, Music for the Radio
(1937), and the populist ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and
Appalachian Spring (1944) soon followed. The desire to reach a broad
audience, coupled with the need for income, led Copland to Hollywood. There,
he scored films linking his musical images of America to the those of
authors John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, and Henry James
in Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), The North Star (1943), The Red
Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1950). Patriotic works like Lincoln
Portrait (1942) encouraged wartime listeners. Much of Copland's music from
the 1930s and 1940s used folk tunes borrowed from diverse American
sources, whether Latin American dance music, cowboy tunes, or Shaker
songs.
American Politics and Tradition
During the Cold War, Copland's populist and patriotic impulses came
under the suspicion of the Red Scare.  Because of his earlier involvement in politically liberal causes, the FBI investigated and blacklisted him. In 1953, Senator
Joseph McCarthy called him to Washington to testify. Much of his output at this time was abstract, detached from potentially
damaging associations. It did, though, contain recognizable imprints of the
Copland style. But these later, modernist, works--Piano Fantasy
(1957) and Connotations (1962), for instance--have yet to achieve the recognition of his
populist compositions.
By the mid-1970s, as his earlier
works continued to shape American musical identity, Copland stopped composing. Based in the European,
Western art-music tradition--in spite of its debts to jazz, Latin American, and North American folk traditions--his work endures as a collective
emblem of American pluralism. In movies, on television, at political
rallies, and ceremonial events, Copland's music evokes an open, independent
American spirit.
-- Jennifer DeLapp
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