Abstracts for September 12, 2003
Prof. Mark Clague: Aaron Copland and the Aesthetics of Hollywood
After years of failing to get work for film, Aaron Copland's effective
and evocative score for the 1939 rhetorical documentary The City
finally earned him notice and respect on the West coast. Commissions
from Hollywood quickly followed. Director Lewis Milestone hired Copland
to score Of Mice and Men (1939) and Sam Wood used Copland for
Our Town (1940). Although an outsider to the film industry, Copland
immediately engaged with the aesthetic debates over the uses of music
in narrative film. At the time, synchronized sound had been available
for only a dozen years, and film music techniques were very much in
the process of refinement. Copland would become one of the genre's influential
thinkers. Rather than transfer his experiences in the concert hall to
the silver screen, Copland treated film as a wholly new creative discipline.
In the concert hall, music expressed the "soul" of the composer;
in film, music served the story.
Although Copland's ideas about film music are well known, their genesis
and aesthetic backstory is little appreciated, leading to a shallow
understanding of Copland's filmic efforts. Copland's fundamental ideasfilm
musics basic functions (to express emotion, to create continuity, to
serve as neutral background), the avoidance of melody, and the primacy
of emotion over actionare developed in conscious opposition to
the work of Hollywood's leading composers. Although he wrote complimentarily
of Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, for example, Copland's own approaches
attack some of their hallmark techniques, notably Wagnerian Leitmotif
and musical isomorphism ("Mickey Mousing").
Given as a guest lecture for Columbia University in 1940, an unpublished
talk reveals CoplandŐs initial reactions to Hollywood's prevailing "systems"
of composition. The reasoning outlined here lies behind the well-known
conclusions given in the "Film Music" chapter of Copland's best-selling
music guidebook What to Listen For in Music. This twenty-minute
paper explores the aesthetic debates informing Copland's film scoring
with a focus on his music for The City and Of Mice and Men.
Placing the composer in context of his Hollywood contemporaries reveals
much about his personal aesthetics and suggests solutions for a possible
critical edition of Copland's film music.
Tim Freeze: Two Orchestrations of Gershwin's Concerto in F
Coming soon.
Stephanie Heriger: "Tis the Gift to be Simple": The Second
Hurricane and Copland's First Steps toward American Opera
The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented
push to establish an operatic tradition that was wholly "American."
Staged shortly after Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts
(1934) and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), Aaron Copland's
The Second Hurricane (1937) marks the composer's first attempt
at opera and occupies a strange place in both the composerŐs oeuvre
and in the general history of American opera. Little known and rarely
studied, Copland's "play-opera for high school children" offers a much
needed glimpse into the composerŐs own approach to the genre (his second
and final effort, The Tender Land wouldn't premiere until 1954)
and into his changing musical aesthetic (The Second Hurricane
was one of the first works to usher in Copland's so-called "populist"
period).
The Second Hurricane, commissioned by the Henry Street Settlement
School in New York City, stands as a call for social and political reform
set as the straightforward story about co-operation in the face of disaster.
A work for and about teenagers, it is simple in plot and in musical
style. However, the work cannot and should not be dismissed as simplistic.
That is, while meant for amateur performers, it is far from an amateur
work. Situated somewhere between amateur and professional, opera and
theater, aria and show-tune, The Second Hurricane is, at once,
part of both the high school performance repertory and the world of
"grown-up" opera; daring to question what the genre actually is or can
be and who the music is for and about.
Wilfrid Mellers has argued that The Second Hurricane is distinctly
American and Howard Pollack has described the work as having "its own
very American personality." It would seem then that Copland's first
steps toward opera were steps toward establishing both his own voice
and that of the American opera composer. Still, the work's importance
lies not so much in its "Americaness" (The Second Hurricane
is far from the "Great American Opera"), but in its means of production;
it is a product of the times, a product of the composer's own changing
aesthetic and a product what was demanded of Copland's by his benefactors,
audience, and fellow composers.
Colin Roust: The Birds and the Squirrels: Finding David Diamond in
Copland's Dickinson Songs
The dedications for each song in Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of
Emily Dickinson are unsolved mysteries in the field of American
music. The only published study to explore the reasons behind the dedications
is a 1991 article by Helen Didriksen in the Sonneck Society Bulletin.
While her correspondence with the dedicatees failed to provide any conclusive
evidence, they did include the suggestive comment from Phyllis Curtin
that "The dedications are not idle." So far as David Diamond knows (or
admits), the first song in the set was dedicated to him because he had
been unsatisfied with his own settings of "Nature, the Gentlest Mother."
I suggest, however, that the dedication bears greater significance.
This paper interprets the mysterious significance of the dedication through Copland's use of text-painting devices and two prominent motives. Through the text painting, Coplandas a gay composer writing a song for a gay friendhighlights words that suggest the alienation inherent in the late-1940s homosexual identity. I argue that the two motives, which I have labeled "the Bird" and "the Squirrel," are used to create a message of reassurance for Diamond that he indeed was accepted for who he wasat least by the older, parent-like Copland. Because the song was composed after a turbulent period in Diamond's life, I argue that "Nature, the Gentlest Mother" is ultimately a caring, parental admonition to straighten up and fly right.
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