Aaron Copland (born 1900; died 1990)
Few figures in American music loom as large as Aaron Copland. As one of the first wave of literary and musical expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, Copland returned to the United States with the means to assume – for the next half century – a central role in American music as composer, promoter, and educator. Copland's sheer popularity and iconic status are such that his music has transcended the concert hall and entered the popular consciousness; it both accompanies solemn and joyous celebrations the world over (Fanfare for the Common Man) and punctuates the familiar words "Beef: It's What's for Dinner!" (Rodeo) for millions of television viewers.
Copland was the youngest of five children born to Harris and Sarah Copland, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who owned a department store in Brooklyn. He did not take formal piano lessons until he was 13, by which time he had also begun writing small pieces. Instead of attending college, Copland studied theory and composition with Rubin Goldmark and piano with Victor Wittgenstein and Clarence Adler and attended as many concerts, operas, and ballets as possible.
In 1921, he went to Fontainebleau, France, taking conducting and composition classes at the American Conservatory. He went on to study in Paris with Ricardo Viñes and Nadia Boulanger and spent the next three years soaking up all the European culture – both new and old – that he could. He learned to admire not only composers like Stravinsky, Milhaud, Fauré, and Mahler, but also others, such as author André Gide. Boulanger's performance of Copland's 1924 Organ Symphony with Koussevitzky was the beginning of a friendship between the conductor and composer that led to Copland teaching at the Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood) from 1940 until 1965.
After his return to America, Copland drifted toward an incisive, austere style that captured something of the sobriety of Depression-torn America. The most representative work of this period – the Piano Variations (1930) – remains one of the composer's seminal efforts. He tried to avoid taking a university position, instead writing for journals and newspapers, organizing concerts, and taking on administrative duties for composers' organizations, trying to promote American music.
By the mid-1930s, taking the direct engagement of – and communication with – audiences as one of his central tenets, Copland's compositions developed (in parallel with other composers, such as Virgil Thomson and Roy Harris) an "American" style marked by folk influences, a new melodic and harmonic simplicity, and an appealing directness free from intellectual pretension. This is nowhere more in evidence than in Copland's ballets of this period, and it finally earned him the respect of the public.
While Copland gradually became less prolific from the mid-1950s on, he continued to experiment and explore fresh means of musical expression, including a highly individual adoption of 12-tone principles in works, such as the Piano Fantasy and Connotations for orchestra. Still the fundamentally lyrical nature of Copland's language remained intact and occasionally emerged – with an often surprising, retrospective air – in works, such as the Duo for flute and piano (1971).
He continued to teach and write and received numerous awards both in America and abroad. In 1958, he began conducting orchestras around the world, performing works by 80 other composers as well as his own over the next 20 years. By the mid-'70s, Copland had – for all intents and purposes – ceased composing. One of the last of his creative accomplishments was the completion of his two-volume autobiography (with musicologist Vivian Perlis), an essential document in understanding the growth of American music in the twentieth century.
A Lincoln Portrait, for speaker & orchestra
Instrumentation: flute, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani plus 3 percussion, harp, celesta, strings, narrator
The DPO last performed this piece in 1976, with Paul Katz conducting.
Performed even more often than the composer's repertoire mainstay Appalachian Spring, Copland's A Lincoln Portrait has achieved the status of a legitimate American classic. The restraint and nobility of Copland's score and the inclusion of Abraham Lincoln's own words (including extracts from the Gettysburg Address) lends A Lincoln Portrait a dignity and sincere, non-jingoistic spirit rare in other "patriotic" music of the World War II era.
In 1942, conductor André Kostelanetz commissioned Copland, along with a number of other well-known composers, to provide a musical portrait of a famous American. After considering and then rejecting Walt Whitman as a subject – one of the other commissioned composers (Jerome Kern) had already chosen a literary figure, Mark Twain) – Copland decided upon Lincoln.
Copland's friend and fellow composer Virgil Thomson pointed out the problems of adequately representing the greatness of a man such as Lincoln solely in music. The solution he suggested was to bring Lincoln into the music by writing the work for speaker and orchestra, the speaker declaiming Lincoln's own words. Copland embraced such a plan, producing one of the more successful examples of a concert work that incorporates narration.
Luminaries from many fields of endeavor, ranging from Marian Anderson to Henry Fonda to Eleanor Roosevelt to Norman Schwarzkopf to Copland himself, have filled the role of speaker in major performances and recordings of A Lincoln Portrait.
Listeners may find much of the text unfamiliar, since Copland drew his source material largely from lesser-known passages in Lincoln's writings and speeches. Copland reserves the famous phrase from the Gettysburg Address – "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" – for the work's climactic ending, maximizing the impact of the words.
In his program notes, Copland explains that he divided A Lincoln Portrait into three main parts. The first part is a portrayal of Lincoln, "the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln's personality, and near the end of the first section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit." Allusions to the folk song Springfield Mountain (including a trumpet solo at the end of this section) aptly echo this characterization.
The central section is a sprightly Allegro that evokes the times in which Lincoln lived: sleigh bells recall horse-drawn, nineteenth-century transportation, while fragments of Stephen Foster's Camptown Races weave in and out of the texture.
In the final section, the speaker assumes the voice of Lincoln himself. The words are for the most part set against a quiet, unobtrusive orchestral backdrop, with occasional, more prominent punctuations and responses from the ensemble. The work climaxes with a quotation from the Gettysburg Address, accompanied by a return of the solo trumpet melody from the opening section. A powerful C major chord brings the work to a sonorous close.
Biography by AMG
Composition Description by AMG
Source: All Media Guide
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