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 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Given as a guest lecture for Columbia University in 1940, an unpublished talk reveals CoplandÕs initial reactions to Hollywood's prevailing "systems" of composition.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 composerÕs 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 composerÕs 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, Copland—as a gay composer writing a song for a gay friend—highlights 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 was—at 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.