Fanfare for the Common Man
Aaron Copland
(b. 1900, Brooklyn, New York; d. 1990, North Tarrytown, New York)
For a program of 20th-century American composers saluting their native land, Aaron Copland’s stirring Fanfare for the Common Man is the perfect opener. Born in Brooklyn in 1900, Copland had the gift for creating music that captured the American spirit in all its optimism and ruggedness.
When he submitted a three-minute fanfare to the Cincinnati Symphony in late 1942, he had no idea it would become one of his most famous pieces—in fact, one of the most famous pieces ever written by an American classical composer. World War II had been raging for years, and in 1942, there was little to celebrate on the Allied side. As a morale booster, Eugene Goossens, Cincinnati's music director, decided to commission a series of 18 fanfares from America's most prominent composers to open each of the orchestra's 1942–43 season concerts.
Upon receiving the score, Goossens wrote Copland: “Its title is as original as its music.” The composer had considered a number of possibilities, among them Fanfare for the Spirit of Democracy and Fanfare for the Rebirth of Lidice (a Czech town that had been destroyed by the Nazis that year). Finally, he settled on Fanfare for the Common Man. As he said, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”
The music—scored for horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, and percussion—combined full-throated splendor with a sturdy, unvarnished pride that seemed an ideal tonal personification of the average GI Joe. Its brass writing emphasized big, rangy intervals, and its powerful, equally prominent part for timpani epitomized virile force. Perhaps hoping this inspiring music would not be forgotten after one performance in Cincinnati, Copland also made it the focal point of the finale of his Third Symphony, composed a few years later as the Allies swept to victory.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1 (1986)
Joan Tower
(b. 1938, New Rochelle, New York)
And now a salute to the other half of the audience!
A quiet revolution has taken place in classical music over the past few decades: at long last women have successfully begun to infiltrate the male-dominated fields of conducting and composing. Joan Tower does both, but it is her creative work that has won her a prominent place in the American contemporary music scene. Her vibrant, energetic, and often highly dramatic music has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras from New York to Tokyo.
“Creating ‘high-energy’ music is one of my special talents,” Tower says. “I like to see just how high I can push a work's energy level without making it chaotic or incoherent.” Certainly this is true of her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1, which has become her most frequently performed piece since its premiere by the Houston Symphony in January 1987.
Its title, of course, is a play on Copland’s Fanfare. And it even shares the same instrumentation: three trumpets, four horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and two percussionists playing a very loud battery. Tower has long been a fan of Copland’s music, and so when she received a commission to write a short work for the Houston Symphony's Fanfare Project, she originally wanted to create a tribute to him. But ultimately her fanfare adopted a feminist message; it celebrates, in Tower's words, “women who take risks and are adventurous.”
Although she was born in New Rochelle, New York, Tower developed her own adventurous spirit from a childhood spent in South America, where her father was a mining engineer. She returned to the U.S. for college, where she earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has been composer-in-residence with the Saint Louis Symphony and with New York's Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Her many awards include the 1990 Grawemeyer Award and the Delaware Symphony's 1998 Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composers and Conductors.
Canticle of Freedom
Aaron Copland
By January 1953, Aaron Copland was universally acknowledged as the dean of American music. In tribute to his stature, his A Lincoln Portrait (which we will hear later on this program) was chosen for performance at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first inauguration.
However, this was also the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his infamous Committee on Un-American Activities, who were hunting for Communists and “fellow travelers” to purge. In a related act, Congressman Fred Busbey of Illinois, a fierce anti-Communist, denounced Copland as unworthy of this honor because of his “questionable affiliations” and demanded the piece be removed from the program. This was promptly done, and the usually mild-mannered Copland responded with an angry public statement: “This is the first time, as far as I know, that a composition has been publicly removed from a concert program in the United States because of the alleged affiliations of the composer. I would have to be a man of stone not to have deeply resented both the public announcement of the removal and the reasons given for it. No one has ever before questioned my patriotism.”
And in late May of that year, Copland—a proud liberal, but no Communist sympathizer—was summoned before McCarthy’s committee. He held up solidly in his testimony and refused to name any names for McCarthy’s Black List. But for a time, Copland’s commissions and lecture invitations tailed off.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) immediately showed its support for Copland by commissioning a large work for orchestra and chorus to celebrate the opening of its Kresge Auditorium and nearby chapel. His rousing Canticle of Freedom was premiered there on May 8, 1955. Announcing the work to friends, Copland quipped: “It makes a big noise. … Maybe I’ll call it ‘Inauguration Overture’ and dedicate it to Rep. Busbey.” Later he wrote to Leonard Bernstein: “It’s called Canticle of Freedom. Sounds subversive, no?”
For the choral text used in the final third of Canticle, Copland chose a heroic poem written by 14th-century Scottish poet John Barbour, its language slightly modernized by Willis Wager. Because the original chorus at MIT was amateur, Copland limited it to a two-part texture. Here is his own succinct note on the work:
“Canticle of Freedom is scored for a normal-sized orchestra, with percussion instruments requiring five players. It is in two main sections: an orchestral prelude followed by a choral portion. … The first part, mainly for brass and percussion, presents the principal melodic material … in imitative fashion in the woodwinds; it concludes with a full orchestral statement of the main material. … A transition, using chords from the introduction, leads to the choral finale, which brings the materials of the first part to an intense climax.”
“Hymn to the Fallen” from Saving Private Ryan
John Williams
(b. 1932, Flushing, Queens, New York)
One of the greatest war epics ever made, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was both the most critically acclaimed and most financially successful film of 1998. Opening with a brutally realistic 30-minute sequence depicting the beginning of the Normandy invasion at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, it was unflinching in its depiction of the horrors of the final year of World War II, while also capturing the heroic resolve of a small band of American soldiers, led by Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks), who sacrifice their lives in a mission impossible.
Ordered by General George Marshall, this mission is to find and extricate from battle Private James Ryan, the sole survivor of four brothers, three of whom have been killed within days of each other. Though not enacted as law until 1948, this order is in accordance with the American armed forces’ “Sole Survivor Policy,” in which the last surviving member of a family is kept out of harm’s way. The film’s script was written by Robert Rodart, who conceived the story in 1994 after viewing a Civil War monument commemorating eight brothers killed in that conflict. Additional background came from the actual W.W. II case of the four Niland brothers. Captain Miller’s party succeeds in saving Private Ryan, but in the process most of them are killed, including Miller himself.
For decades, John Williams—who recently celebrated his 90th birthday— has been Steven Spielberg’s composer-of-choice for a superb sequence of film scores, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan. However, with Private Ryan, Spielberg gave him a particularly difficult task. Much of the film avoids musical accompaniment, including that shattering opening sequence. Said Spielberg: “Restraint was John William’s primary objective. He did not want to sentimentalize or create emotion from what already existed in raw form.” The solemnly beautiful “Hymn to the Fallen” for chorus and orchestra is only used for the closing credits. In Spielberg’s words: “It’s a ... testament to John Williams’ sensitivity and brilliance that, in my opinion, will stand the test of time and honor forever the fallen of this war and possibly all wars.”
A Lincoln Portrait
Aaron Copland
In December 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Aaron Copland—along with two other prominent American composers Jerome Kern and Virgil Thomson—was approached by the conductor Andre Kostelanetz to compose a work about a great American, political or literary, to be premiered at Kostelanetz’s concerts with the Cincinnati Symphony in summer 1942 and then to be presented around the country. The commission’s underlying motive was to create morale-boosting orchestral pieces for a country facing dark times.
Though Copland initially thought he’d focus on poet Walt Whitman as his subject, he soon switched to Lincoln, probably the most revered figure in American history at that time. The magnificent seated statue of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French had been added to the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, and Carl Sandburg’s two-volume biography of the Illinoisan was of even more recent vintage. Lincoln had led the country through the Civil War, and Americans in 1942 looked to him for inspiration as they faced an even more challenging international struggle.
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait was given its first performance on May 14, 1942 in Cincinnati and today ranks as America’s most popular piece for narrator and orchestra. Dozens of famous Americans have voiced its simple, powerful text, including public figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson and actors such as Gregory Peck and James Earl Jones. As Copland explained: “The letters and speeches of Lincoln supplied the text. It was a comparatively simple matter to choose a few excerpts that seemed particularly apposite to our own situation today [i.e. 1942]. The order and arrangement [as well as the connecting words] are my own.”
In a note for the work’s premiere, Copland wrote: “I worked with musical materials of my own, with the exception of two songs of the period: the famous “Camptown Races” and a ballad that was first published in 1840 under the title of “The Pesky Sarpent,” but is better known today as “Springfield Mountain.” …
“The composition is roughly divided into three main sections. In the opening section, I wanted to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality. Also, near the end of that section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit. The quick middle section briefly sketches in the background of the times he lived in. This emerges into the concluding section where my sole purpose was to draw a simple but impressive frame around the words of Lincoln himself.”
Selections from The River
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
(b. 1899, Washington, D.C.; d. 1974, New York City)
Orchestrated by Ron Collier
In 1969, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington returned to Washington D.C. to receive the rarely conferred Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon. The occasion was a triumphant return for a native son, for in 1899 Ellington had been born in that city and his father had actually been a butler at the White House. He began piano lessons at age seven and made his professional debut at 17. At the urging of Fats Waller, he moved away to Harlem in 1923 with his band, The Washingtonians. By 1927 he and his ensemble—now called the Duke Ellington Band—had reached Harlem’s famed Cotton Club, where they reigned as Harlem's leading jazz band.
Today, 124 years after his birth, Duke Ellington is widely acclaimed as the greatest jazz master America ever produced. He was certainly among the most prolific—creating so many three-minute instrumental pieces (timed to fit on the old 78 records), popular songs, film scores, symphonic concert suites, musical comedies, and even an opera that they totaled around 2,000 works.
However, sheer productivity was not what made Ellington great; far more important were his originality and his superb taste. Though he’d detested his childhood lessons, he became a masterful pianist. As a composer, he was largely self-taught—relying on his remarkable gift as a melodist and his refined ear for instrumental color and harmony, while absorbing seemingly by osmosis what he needed to know technically. Many commentators have described Ellington as a painter in musical tones.
By the 1940s, Ellington had no more worlds to conquer in the world of big band jazz. From then until the end of his life, he devoted his most intense energies to composing a number of extended concert suites, which married jazz with symphonic techniques and ambitious extra-musical programs
Combining influences from both jazz and classical music, The River is one of Ellington’s most beautiful scores. It was commissioned by the American Ballet Theater as a ballet score for the great African American choreographer Alvin Ailey and was premiered at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center on June 25, 1970; today it continues as an active repertoire piece staged by ballet companies around the world. Described by Ellington as a work “celebrating birth, life and rebirth,” it traces the flow of a river from its source to the sea and uses that transit as a metaphor for how human beings evolve over the course of their lives. Originally made up of roughly a dozen movements, it was later edited down to a seven-movement concert suite comprising the following sections: “Spring,” “Meander,” “Giggling Rapids,” “Lake,” “Vortex,” “Village of the Virgins, and “Riba.”
Notes by Janet E. Bedell copyright 2023
