by Sean Wilentz
But Ives, who was something of a hermit, wrote music that was difficult for musicians to play and for audiences to understand, and he had been largely ignored. The Mexican tunes of El Salón had the advantage of at least sounding exotic. Jazz contained the rhythmic and modal magic of African-American music, which impressed even the Europeans. American cowboy music was different. Copland later said that he was “rather wary of tackling a cowboy subject,” since he had been born in Brooklyn, but there were artistic concerns as well.11 “I have never been particularly impressed with the musical beauties of the cowboy songs as such,” Copland wrote in a note published to accompany Billy the Kid’s premiere.12
Kirstein pushed Copland and persuaded him that having worked with Mexican folk songs, he should see what he could do with homegrown ones. Only after he sailed to Paris, however, where he composed the ballet while living on the Rue de Rennes, did Copland become “hopelessly involved” in rearranging Old West tunes.13 “Perhaps there is something different about the cowboy song in Paris,” he mused, not for a minute relinquishing his urbane cosmopolitanism. In his hands, what he called “the poverty stricken tunes Billy himself must have heard” became modern art.
Still, the songs were indubitably present in Billy the Kid; anybody could recognize them; indeed, Copland’s whole endeavor involved making sure that they were easily recognized. And if their presence helped make Copland’s music more popular and commercially viable, it also underscored Copland’s newfound attachment to his own variation of Popular Front aesthetics. By these lights, popular folk music, stories, and legends contained raw materials for new forms of art—and for a better world to come. The revolutionary artist’s task was to help entwine the party with the fabric of national life by seizing upon these popular cultural forms—from detective thrillers to high, lonesome ballads—and infusing them with revolutionary élan. Copland started out this program by mining and reinventing the cowboy tunes.
The compositional task he set himself was by no means simple, even though the results sounded that way. “It’s a rather delicate operation,” he wrote, “to put fresh and unconventional harmonies to well-known melodies without spoiling their naturalness.14 Moreover, for an orchestral score, one must expand, contract, rearrange and superimpose the bare tunes themselves, giving them if possible something of one’s own touch. That, at any rate, is what I tried to do.”
Copland succeeded, and in doing so created something special, a music unlike any that had ever been written, even by George Gershwin with his jazz-inflected rhapsodies and tone poems—an amalgamation of traditional American folk songs and avant-garde harmonics that retained, unspoiled, the songs’ “naturalness,” a synthesis that employed the unconventional modal and chromatic shifts characteristic of “difficult” music, yet that did not require a practiced ear to understand and enjoy.
After opening in Chicago in October 1938, Billy the Kid, and particularly its score, won both popular and critical acclaim. Over the next three years, Copland devoted himself chiefly to writing film scores, teaching, publishing two books, making a concert and lecture tour of Latin America, and serving as president of the American Composers Alliance, an enterprise he had helped to establish in 1937 to promote serious contemporary American music. As it happened, his pause from concert-hall composing coincided with a confusing period for the American Left. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in 1939 signaled a complete reversal of the Communist Party line, from endorsing antifascism to endorsing peace, and it formally brought an end to the Popular Front. But after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 (one month after Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth), the party line changed again—and the renewal of antifascism caused a revival of the basic tenets of Popular Front politics and culture.
Copland, who unlike some artists in the Communists’ orbit remained loyal to the party during the Nazi-Soviet alliance, was happy to embrace and advance that revived sensibility—and so was the American public, as never before. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II allied with the Soviets, the Popular Front style began spreading out far beyond the political and cultural margins. Enlisted against the Axis powers, what had once been a sectarian leftist impulse now looked and sounded patriotic, unifying, and mainstream. The war became popularized as the fight of the common man—the ordinary, dog-faced GI foot soldier—to vindicate democracy, alongside the common men of the other Allies. In politics, idealizations of the People, and of the international struggle against class and racial oppression, began turning up in the rhetoric of the warmer, deeply liberal elements of the New Deal. And in virtually every realm of American culture, high and low, Popular Front motifs and mannerisms helped to define the 1940s.
Copland did his part for the war effort by returning to his composing. In 1942 alone, he completed three of what would become his most beloved works—Lincoln Portrait, Fanfare for the Common Man, and, for the young choreographer Agnes de Mille, the ballet Rodeo. (Copland also received a commission initiated by his friend Martha Graham to write another ballet, which would appear in 1944 as Appalachian Spring.) All three pieces extended the “imposed simplicity” of Billy the Kid. Two of them celebrated the nation’s popular culture and democratic politics; the third was a lucid, modernist orchestral tribute, solemn but vibrant, to the unshackled egalitarian masses.
American folk music remained, for Copland, a major resource, in the Popular Front vein. Lincoln Portrait incorporated Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” and the old New England folk song “Springfield Mountain,” in a cowboy rendition that John Lomax had included (one critic called it a “stammering version”) in his first published song collection, and that Woody Guthrie later recorded for Moe Asch.15 These tunes helped Copland evoke what he perceived as Lincoln’s plebeian simplicity as well as the 1850s and 1860s, as part of a Popular Front paean to the Great Emancipator as a revolutionary democratic leader—a radical ideal that was also patriotic and blended easily enough with more anodyne celebrations of Honest Abe, typified by the sentimental early installments of Carl Sandburg’s widely read multivolume biography of Lincoln.
Rodeo included the cowboy song “Old Paint,” which Copland had used in Billy the Kid—but Copland also utilized American folk music that was country but not western. In 1937, Alan Lomax and his wife, Elizabeth, had trudged a Presto disc-recording machine across rutted roads in the hills of eastern Kentucky. In the town of Salyersville, they found the fiddler William Hamilton Stepp. The recording they made of Stepp performing a juiced-up version of the old fiddler’s march “Bonaparte’s Retreat” was so powerful that a transcription of it appeared in a song collection that John and Alan Lomax published in 1941, Our Singing Country. Copland may have heard the Lomaxes’ recording, but the scrupulous transcription (made by Pete Seeger’s stepmother, Ruth) would have been sufficient to provide him with what he turned into the opening melody of Rodeo’s “Hoe-Down” section, which would be loved by generations to come—including Bob Dylan.* Befitting the occasion of its composition, Fanfare for the Common Man sounds, in contrast to Rodeo, abstract and declamatory as well as majestic. Written on commission for the Cincinnati Symphony as a concert prelude to honor the Allies—one of seventeen commissioned by the orchestra’s conductor, Eugene Goossens—Fanfare can be understood as a coda to Lincoln Portrait, which Copland completed only a few months earlier. The title contains an obvious paradox. Fanfares, rooted in the music of the court, are supposed to herald the arrival of a great man, a noble. Copland’s Fanfare, however, heralded the noble groundlings, grunts, and ordinary men—not just their service and sacrifice in the war, but their very existence and their arrival in history. The title had more specific political connotations as well—for Copland borrowed it, as he later informed Goossens, from a widely publicized speech, “The Century of the Common Man,” delivered earlier in 1942 by the New Dealer most closely identified with pro-Soviet and Popular Front politics, Vice President Henry Wallace.
W
illiam Hamilton Stepp, circa 1937. (photo credit 1.5)
Copland reinvented the fanfare musically as well as thematically. Virtually all of the pieces that Goossens received—including one by an old comrade of Copland’s from the Composers’ Collective, Henry Cowell—conformed to the same basic model: brief and snappy; heavy on trumpets and on rolling, military snare drums; filled with triplets and other traditional flourishes; and either starting out at full blast or quickly building to it. Copland’s Fanfare, though, is stately and deliberate, perhaps the most austere fanfare ever written. Beginning with its opening crash and rumble, it builds slowly in sonority and complexity, moving by stages from dark, obscure tones to an almost metallic brilliance, soaring and then concluding with a bang, in a different key from where it began. In its dignified simplicity, it is also complex—a subtly esoteric piece of music written for the democratic masses as well as to honor them.
Copland’s works from 1942 vastly increased his popularity, and they remain, to this day, admired standards in the orchestral repertoire. Yet Copland’s broadening appeal also got him into trouble with some high-toned critics—a foreshadowing of greater trouble to come. The detractors included the composer and scholar Arthur Berger, who, though a leftist sympathizer and for a long time Copland’s friend, criticized Copland in the influential Partisan Review for his switch from writing what Berger called “severe” music to writing “simple” music.16 When Copland, unfazed, inserted Fanfare as the opening to the fourth movement of his Third Symphony in 1946, even his erstwhile kindred spirit the composer Virgil Thomson derided the symphony as evocative of “the speeches of Henry Wallace, striking in phraseology but all too reminiscent of Moscow.”17
These criticisms were of a piece with a more general repudiation of Popular Front culture—both in its explicitly left-wing political form and in the broader “little guy” impulses of the 1940s—that had been brewing for several years inside the anti-Stalinist Left. An up-and-coming critical avant-garde was refashioning the idea of modernism along the lines articulated by several of the critics in and around Partisan Review, above all Clement Greenberg—a view hostile to accessibility and that regarded any hint of the programmatic in the arts as redolent of realist philistinism, suspiciously Stalinist as well as aesthetically vapid. Fanfare, along with the rest of Copland’s work from the late 1930s on, fit in perfectly with what Greenberg had been denouncing since 1939 as “kitsch” and what Dwight Macdonald eventually defined as “mid-cult”—a style, Macdonald wrote, that “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”18
The detractors had an important point when they attacked the purposeful subordination of art to politics. But they did not adequately appreciate Copland’s art when they failed to comprehend efforts to cut through the distinctions between sophistication and simplicity as anything other than pursuit of the party line. Simplifying music, Copland believed, need not mean cheapening it; it could, in fact, help form the basis of an American artistic style that would fuse “high,” “middle,” and “low,” elevating creatively interesting forms of popular culture while also popularizing more serious culture. That effort had aesthetic intentions and merits above and beyond politics. “The conventional concert public continued apathetic or indifferent to anything but the established classics,” he recalled, whereas “an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and phonograph.19 It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”
It is always important to remember that the idea of using popular culture as a takeoff point for a larger artistic quest was not limited to the music of the Popular Front; neither was it limited to the Left nor to musicians alone nor to the ferment of the 1930s and 1940s. Numerous giants in modern American culture, from across a wide political spectrum, tried to build something new and larger out of popular forms, among them Louis Armstrong, Willa Cather, John Ford, William Carlos Williams, Duke Ellington, Walker Evans, Edward Hopper, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Copland understood and felt a kinship with their efforts, with no narrow political agenda.
People’s Songs magazine June 1947. (photo credit 1.6)
Still, for Copland, the principles of “imposed simplicity” were inevitably bound up with his Popular Front political loyalties of the 1930s and 1940s, even as a diluted form of those loyalties entered the cultural mainstream. And although Copland was chiefly identified with the symphony concert hall, he did not completely lose touch with the more populist adaptations of American folk music being undertaken by his friend Charles Seeger’s boy Pete and by Pete’s leftist folksinger friends—adaptations that Copland found musically and politically sympathetic. At the very end of 1945, the younger Seeger, recently discharged from the army, was instrumental in founding a new organization, People’s Songs, which over the next five years promoted the use of radical-minded folk music in order to encourage left-wing union organizing and related causes. Joining Seeger on the group’s founding committee were members of the Almanac Singers and other notables on the New York leftist folk-music scene, including Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, Alan Lomax, and Josh White. A few years later, the Board of Sponsors of the expanded People’s Songs Inc. included Aaron Copland as well as Paul Robeson and Leonard Bernstein.
During the same summer of 1934 that Copland roused the “peasantry” of northern Minnesota, the newlyweds Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone Zimmerman, by complete coincidence, settled in Abraham’s hometown, Duluth—the port city of the Mesabi Iron Range, about 150 miles from Copland’s vacation cabin on Lake Bemidji. Zimmerman had a good job working as a senior manager for the Standard Oil Company, and he ran the company union. Seven years later, on May 24, 1941, Beatrice, known to all as Beatty, gave birth to the first of the couple’s two sons, Robert.
Bob Dylan’s proximity and debt to the World War II era and its aftermath always need emphasis. It is said that he owns the 1960s—but he is, of course, largely a product of the 1940s and 1950s. At the very end of the 1950s, he heard for the first time John and Alan Lomax’s greatest discovery in the field, the Louisiana ex-convict and folksinger Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. Then he heard an album of Odetta’s, picked up on the folk revival, and traded in his electric guitar for a double-O Martin acoustic; a year later, he immersed himself in the romance of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and was well on the way to becoming Bob Dylan. Before that, when he was still Bob Zimmerman, a mixture of country and western, rhythm and blues, and early rock and roll dominated his listening and his first expeditions as a performer, while his reading, at Hibbing High School, embraced Shakespeare and the classics, Mark Twain, and Popular Front stalwarts like his particular favorite, the novelist John Steinbeck. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he was immersed in the singers and musicians whom everyone heard: Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and the original cast recording of Oklahoma! (choreographed by Copland’s sometime collaborator de Mille); Whoopee John Wilfahrt, Frankie Yankovic, and a host of other Midwest polka band leaders. And, at the movies, there were Woman of the North Country, On the Waterfront, The Law vs. Billy the Kid, and (above all for Zimmerman and his friends) Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. Finally, although far less popular, on stacks of twelve-inch records (and then the flood of long-playing records released after 1948), as well as on the radio and on early television as well as in school, there was classical music, old and new—including the music of Aaron Copland.
Whoopee John Wilfahrt, bottom of stairway, and his band in a playful pose at the Wold-Chamberlain Minneapolis and St. Paul Airport, 1947. (photo credit 1.7)
Copland was virtually inescapable in the 1940s and 1950s, even for the less musically inclined. The leading music-appreciation textbooks of the day, by Martin Bernstein and Joseph Machlis, hailed him as “one of Amer
ica’s greatest composers,” his music “straightforward without being banal, and thoroughly American in spirit,”20 including compositions in which local and regional music “is dissolved in personal lyricism, thereby assuming a value that extends beyond the particular time or place.”21 Copland wrote works intended especially for young performers and listeners; his Young Pioneers and Suite No. 1 for Young Pianists, performed by Marga Richter, appeared on an MGM Records album, Piano Music for Children by Modern American Composers in 1954. Early in its premier season in 1952, the pioneering “highbrow” television show Omnibus broadcast Rodeo, and a year later it aired Billy the Kid. A portion of Billy the Kid also served as the opening theme for the first and only “live” television Western series, Action in the Afternoon, starring Jack Valentine as a singing, guitar-playing cowboy, broadcast by CBS in 1953, two years before it began running a televised version of the radio series Gunsmoke, starring James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon. (As Abe Zimmerman was in the appliance business, his family became the first in town to own a television, in 1952.) Copland also scored music for several movies, including those based on Steinbeck’s novels Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Red Pony (1949), and in 1950 his music for a William Wyler film, The Heiress, won the Academy Award for Best Original Musical Score.
Dylan has never disclosed when he first heard Copland’s music, and as it was so ubiquitous on the American scene, he may not even recall. Dylan did not take any music-appreciation course after the eighth grade, so he likely did not hear Copland at school. Still, in light of where and when he grew up, it would have been extraordinary if Dylan, as a boy or a teenager, had not heard, somewhere, something composed by Copland. And whether he first heard Copland’s music then or later, it has clearly impressed itself on him—as has, just maybe, Copland’s example. Although born forty years apart, both Copland and Dylan descended from Jewish immigrant forebears from Lithuania. Both were drawn to the legends of underdogs and outlaws like Billy the Kid, as well as to the youthful, leftist New York musical precincts of their respective times. Both soaked up the popular music of the American past (taking special interest in the balladry and mythos of the Southwest) and transformed it into their art, reconfiguring old songs and raising them to creative and iconic levels that the purist folklorists could never have reached.