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 ideas—film
musics basic functions (to express emotion, to create continuity, to
serve as neutral background), the avoidance of melody, and the primacy
of emotion over action—are 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Given as a guest lecture for Columbia University in 1940, an unpublished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.