the life and work of an uncommon man (extract)

8/17/2019 The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (extract)

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A ARON COPLAND

THE LIFE AND W ORK OF AN UNCOMMON M AN

HOWARD POLLACK

(extract: pp.113-120)

Jazz and Popular Music

Without a vital concert tradition to build on, Copland concluded that America's

serious composers might well look to their folklore; and like Carpenter,

Gershwin, and others, he considered jazz and popular music a kind of folklore

and an especially appealing one. "If we haven't a folk-song foundation, we must

invent one," he argued in 1925. "I began by thinking—what is folksong after all?

And I came to the conclusion that in my case it was the songs I heard when I was

a child—rather commonplace jazz tunes and music of the 'Old Black Joe' variety.

These, then, are my material, and I must accept them for what they are."

During these early years, Copland obviously used the word jazz broadly, even

more so than was typical in the 1920s, when it commonly described varieties of

so-called real jazz (or "hot" jazz), arranged dance music (or "sweet" jazz), popular

song, and ragtime and novelty piano pieces. For the young Copland, "jazz"

formed a sort of continuum from the Stephen Foster melodies sung at school tothe ragtime played at home to the improvisational jazz heard in clubs.

Consequently, when he says that he and his Brooklyn friends listened to "the

exciting, pulsating jazz rhythms" in one another's apartments, one cannot be

sure what this means—especially considering that nothing now considered to be

jazz had been recorded at this point in time—but it apparently included

renditions of Irving Berlin and W. C. Handy.

Copland initially considered all this music pedestrian. "You mustn't forget," he

told Gilbert Seldes, "that I was born in Brooklyn, and that in Brooklyn we usedto hear jazz around all the time—it was just an ordinary thing." Hearing jazz (or

what passed for jazz) in a bar in Vienna in 1923 (apparently the Weinberg

Bar, where the black Charleston-born Arthur Briggs had a long-

standing engagement) gave him a new perspective; he was

fascinated by how American this music sounded in such a foreign

context: "When I heard jazz played in Vienna, it was like hearing

it for the first time. It was then that I first began to realize the poten-

tiality of jazz material for use in serious music." Copland remained intrigued; in

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June 1924 he told a reporter that he had "nightly been haunting the Paris cafés

where Jazz is played." In these cafés he might have heard real jazz musicians,

including perhaps the clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who regularly performed in

Paris during these years."

With the full approval of Boulanger, he also began consciously abstracting jazz

elements in his ballet, Grohg (1922-25). He had instinctively been leaning in that

direction since 1920, but Europe's infatuation with American popular music no

doubt encouraged such inclinations. Especially in these early years, he viewed

such music as fodder for an art music that would surpass it in seriousness,

sophistication, intensity, personality, and formal coherence. He considered

figures like Kern and Berlin songwriters rather than composers and regarded

their work as "limited." "You can only hear popular songs so many times beforeyou want to hear another popular song," he would joke.

Still, after his return to New York, he continued searching out jazz, venturing

into some clubs in the West Fifties, where one could hear the likes of Bix

Beiderbecke and Benny Carter, and up to Harlem's Cotton Club, where Duke

Ellington and his band performed. In 1925 he took Koussevitzky to a few jazz

clubs, reporting, "He listened carefully, then said, 'It's just like the gypsies; it's

just like the gypsies.' And it is. Like the wild, impassioned, improvised music of

the Russian gypsy.

With Music for the Theatre (1925) and the Piano Concerto (1926), both composed,

significantly, for Koussevitzky, Copland followed the path only tentatively

explored in earlier works and made blatant, explicit, occasionally parodistic use

of jazzy rhythms, colors, and moods. At the time, such works were called

"symphonic jazz"; Copland employed the term himself, though he later referred

to them more simply as his "jazz works." "Any piece based on jazz was assured of

a mild succés de scandale,' he recalled, and such proved the case with both Music

for the Theatre and even more so the Piano Concerto. But for Copland the use of

jazz meant more than mere notoriety; it signified a defiant badge of

contemporary urban America.

In discussions of symphonic jazz, Copland often used the adjectives piquant

and grotesque. It is not clear exactly what he found piquant and

grotesque, the use of jazz in concert music or early jazz itself, but

he apparently meant both. The word grotesque betokened to him the

wilder, "almost hysterical" side of jazz—as well as the ragtime-inspired mu-

sic of Debussy and Stravinsky—while piquant he associated with the blues—as

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well as with Weill's Threepenny Opera. A 1929 statement further suggested a

connection between the "grotesque" and the "excitement" of city life, and the

"piquant" and the "sensuality" of sex.

After the Piano Concerto, Copland more or less put the idea of symphonic jazz

behind him. In one of his most controversial and oft-quoted remarks, he

explained, in 1941, "With the Concerto I felt I had done all I could with the

idiom, considering its limited emotional scope. True, it was an easy way to be

American in musical terms, but all American music could not possibly be

confined to two dominant jazz moods—the blues and the snappy number." He

had criticized the "spirit" of jazz as early as 1927, in his article "Jazz Structure

and Influence," written at a time when other composers—including Carpenter,

Milhaud, and Krenek—similarly had begun to distance themselves from jazz.But many—including, recently, Martha Bayles—misconstrued Copland's 1941

remark to mean that he had written jazz off, whereas he essentially meant that

he had renounced the parodistic mannerisms of symphonic jazz.

In fact, "Jazz Structure" became the first of many statements that argued for and

sought to explain jazz's crucial importance to the American composer. In this

early essay he emphasized jazz's rhythm, whose growing complexities he traced

from the ragtime hits of Irving Berlin to the fox-trot to newer techniques that

could more definitely be described as polyrhythmic, including syncopationwithout any "evenly rhythmed bass," as in the Charleston, or conflicting metrical

patterns, as in Zez Confrey's "Stumblin' or Gershwin's "Fascinatin' Rhythm." He

could not locate any comparable rhythmic phenomenon in the European

repertory; even the polyrhythms of the English madrigalists did not contain the

"peculiar excitement" derived from jazz's habit of "clashing two definitely and

regularly marked rhythms." For Europeans, consequently, jazz represented an

exotic novelty that they could take or leave; but "since jazz is not exotic here but

indigenous, since it is the music an American has heard as a child, it will be

traceable more and more frequently in his symphonies and concertos." Once"freed of its present connotations," Cop-land predicted, jazz will "stir" the

American composer: "It may be the substance not only of his fox trots and

Charlestons but of his lullabies and nocturnes. He may express through it not

always gaiety but love, tragedy, remorse."

"Jazz Structure" had its usefulness, including providing a theo-

retical foundation for Winthrop Sergeant's Jazz: A History. But as an analysis of

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real jazz, it left much wanting, as has long been pointed out; Copland, after all,

primarily had in mind popular tunesmiths as opposed to improvising performers.

It should be remembered, however, that this early article took as its subject not

so much jazz per se as the influence of jazz on the concert composers of the time,

and in that regard, the emphasis on Berlin and Gershwin made some sense. At

any rate, he stood behind the article's basic tenets for many years.

As large swing bands began to flourish in the 1930s, Copland took a renewed

interest in jazz, perhaps spurred on in this respect by such younger friends as

Paul Bowles, who as early as 1932 wrote to him, "I think Duke Ellington is really

the best source for inspiration." Copland's 1936 course for the New School, What

to Listen for in Music, cited Duke Ellington—his first public acknowledgment of

a real jazz musician—and included some discussion of the jazz band under thesubject of tone color. In a 1938 review, he praised recent recordings by Benny

Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Bunny Berrigan, Fats Waller, and especially Duke

Ellington, "the master of them Ellington is a composer, by which I mean, he

comes nearer to knowing how to make a piece hang together than the others? His

admiration for some of the commercially successful big bands did not hinder his

appreciation, voiced in a 1939 review, for the more "untrammelled expressions of

Negro folk art," as represented by the boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis and

Albert Ammons. "We mustn't make the mistake of 'Brahms or Wagner' over

again," he warned his readers. "Duke Ellington may still be listened to." In thesame review, he further recommended a recording of Congolese folk music: "They

have a marvelous tang and savor, plus an intoxicating rhythmic intricacy that all

the history books mention in relation to primitive music, but which we seldom

have heard to so authentic a degree."

These reviews and other writings from the period show a new respect for jazz:

not only for its rhythms, but for the unusual sounds made with traditional

instruments, the "supervirtuosity" of the individual jazz musician, and the

idiom's "brazenly dissonant" harmonies. "A few more years of such harmonicliberties," he observed, "and Stravinsky's boldest flights in that field will sound

quite tame to the man in the street."

Throughout the 1930s, his own music continued to reflect jazz, at times quite

explicitly, as in the ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! and the opera The Second

Hurricane. By 1945, he even expected some near convergence

of jazz and concert music, a development thought to represent "the

levelling, the democratic trend, in contemporary music. The barriers are down,

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the classifications are disappearing." He himself contributed to this hope with

his Four Piano Blues and his Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman (both 1948).

But by the 1950s he had reversed himself, predicting that, despite the growing

presence of jazz musicians with classical backgrounds and classical musicians

with jazz backgrounds, jazz and concert music would remain distinct and

separate. "The two fields will continue to borrow and perhaps eventually will

overlap," he wrote in 1958. "But I don't feel that there ever will be one form."

In his discussion of jazz in his Norton lectures (1951-52), Copland stressed, in

contrast to his earlier writings, African-American culture, jazz's global

connections, the art of improvisation, and the importance of the phonograph,

which "makes it possible to preserve and thereby savor the fine flavor of what is

necessarily a lucky chance result." Indeed, assertions by others to the contrary,he emphasized improvisation—as he had rhythm in the 1920s and timbre in the

1930s—as an aspect of jazz that offered considerable potential to serious

composers, in that it stood opposed to the growing and questionable trend toward

"absolute exactitude in the execution of the printed page." At the same time, he

differentiated jazz from the chance compositions of John Cage, a distinction he

maintained in later years.

Although he admired jazz in all its phases, Copland particularly liked the

"modern" or "cool" jazz of the 1950s. Again younger friends helped. Erik Johns,for instance, took him to a Dave Brubeck concert and played recordings of Lennie

Tristano for him. But Copland also pursued such investigations on his own. In

his Norton lectures, he discussed and played, in addition to Brubeck and

Tristano, Oscar Pettiford and Bud Powell. Another friend, John Kennedy,

recalled that Copland also liked the Modem Jazz Quartet. He may have felt

especially close to these jazz musicians because their style and aesthetic came, in

some ways, close to his own.

Such interests climaxed around 1960, as suggested not only by scores like the

Piano Fantasy and Something Wild but by written and spoken remarks,

including two 1958 interviews with Don Gold and Gilbert Seldes. Discussing a

wide range of jazz styles and figures—Dixieland, Louis Armstrong, Duke

Ellington, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus, Lennie Tristano, Teo Macero, Jimmy

Giuffre, Shelly Mann; George Russell, Miles Davis, and Billy Taylor—he told

Gold that he wished he could take a month off and listen to the latest jazz.

In some of these publications, he expounded on what he felt to be the

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virtues and limitations of jazz. He praised its contrapuntal textures, its bold

harmonies, and its lively spontaneity, singling out for special praise Ellington,

Davis, and two of his favorites, Mingus and Tristano. If he ever regularly taught

composition, he said he would introduce his students to the latest jazz, "for the

freedom of invention present." At the same time, he criticized jazz's formal

looseness and, while disavowing earlier remarks about jazz having only two

primary moods, its expressive limitations: "Jazz does not do what serious music

does either in its range of emotional expressivity nor in its depth of feeling, nor

in its universality of language. It does have universality of appeal, which is not

the same thing." And while he expressed a preference for jazz "free and

untrammelled, as far removed from the regular commercial product as possible,"

he cautioned against jazz's becoming too sophisticated: "Erudition in jazz often

has a phony sound.”

In 1968, Copland, citing Ornette Coleman and Jimmy Giuffre, appraised the

changing relationship between jazz and concert music: "In recent times, the

tables have turned insofar as jazz influence is concerned: jazz has been more

influenced by serious music than the other way around." As for Gunther

Schuller's "third-stream music," he thought such efforts hampered by the

seemingly insuperable problem of getting classically trained musicians to

improvise in a jazz style. On the other hand, the fusion of "serious and jazz

idioms" in the work of Larry Austin and David Reck suggested that "the lastword has not yet been said on the influence of jazz on serious composition, at

least in America."

Copland also took note of developments in American popular music, including in

the 1960s, when rock—especially Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles—caught

the fancy of his younger friends. Copland, who had by this point long

distinguished jazz from popular music, put rock into the latter category, even

referring to it as "light" musk; but he acknowledged its newness and its appeal.

"The music is powerful," he stated in 1967. "I'm taken up with it too." The idiom,he argued, marked an advance for American popular music in terms of subtlety

and complexity, which suggested that the rock generation was "more open to new

musical experience than many of their elders." He worried, however, about the

decibel levels at the discotheques he had visited; and as with jazz, he noted the

music's limitations: "Marvelous as rock music may be, it's circumscribed by

the kind of thing it's trying to do. There are other moods in life

which are not able to be expressed in terms of rock." Moreover,

he cautioned against such institutions as symphony orchestras engaging rock

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bands for financial reasons: "I can see the temptation. But it's dangerous. The

minute you start matching the box office in terms of art you are going to get into

trouble."

Even in his eighties, Copland remained interested in jazz, thanking Barbara

Kolb in 1982 for recordings of Chick Corea and Gary Burton. And he always

acknowledged the "radical" and "unique" contribution jazz had made to concert

music in America: "Even if you're not thinking about jazz rhythms, it just comes

out that way." He also recognized that jazz's worldwide appeal helped nurture

friendly feelings toward the United States. Yet he rejected the notion of jazz as

the country's "major" contribution to the art of music and consistently pleaded

that more be done on behalf of American concert music abroad.

Copland's use of jazz in his own music initially won, at least among elite critics, a

generally positive, sometimes even enthusiastic response. Listeners as different

as Edmund Wilson, E. B. Hill, Paul Rosenfeld, Lawrence Gilman, Isaac

Goldberg, and Henry Cowell commended the imagination, skill, and

individuality with which he employed the idiom. The most extended such

discussion, Goldberg's "Aaron Copland and His Jazz" (1927), further extolled his

sincerity and ease:

A Brooklynite by birth, a New Yorker by residence, he grew up in the very

midst of our musical capital during the period when our popular song was

tearing through its race from rag-time to jazz. This was his folk music and

his cradle song. He does not come to it from the background of a millennial

culture; therefore, not even unconsciously does he condescend to it. He

weaves it into his writing as naturally as one employs the rhythms and

accents of one's childhood.

The negative reactions to Copland's jazz works—and they were many and

sometimes violent—tended to take issue more with their modernist implications

than with their jazziness per se.

The critical consensus shifted in the early 1930s as writers like R. D. Darrell and

Constant Lambert compared Copland's symphonic jazz unfavorably to real jazz.

In the ensuing decades, many expert critics, including Hall Overton, Sidney

Finkelstein, Wilfrid Mellers, David Ross Baskerville, and Hugo

Cole, judged his use of jazz a mistake. Overton argued that

he had failed to digest it the way Bartok had assimilated Hungarian

folk music; Cole and many others felt that jazz itself defied assimilation into a

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concert idiom. Finkelstein and Mellers emphasized the superficiality of

Copland's jazz works, their appropriation of the "hard-boiled surface" of jazz but

not its "inner pathos"; Copland ironically came closer to the true spirit of jazz,

argued Mellers, only after he had renounced such self-conscious appropriations.

Baskerville similarly found Copland's jazz pieces from the 1920s "among his

weakest works," writing, "He ended up sounding more American when he forgot

all about jazz."

Aside from the fact that Copland's jazz-inspired pieces from the 1920s continue,

over seventy years later, to attract large numbers of listeners, a problem with

such remarks resides in the idea that he subsequently "forgot all about jazz." On

the contrary, his respect for jazz only deepened over the years; moreover, he

made use of jazz throughout his career. Elliott Carter was one of those rarecritics who observed the presence of jazz elements in his style quite generally.

Copland himself often acknowledged the debt he and other American composers

owed to jail and popular music, writing, for instance, that "the rhythmic life in

the scores of Roy Harris, William Schuman, Marc Blitzstein, and a host of other

representative American composers is indubitably linked to Negroid sources of

rhythm.”

The common notion that Copland left jazz behind in the 1920s seems, in short,

simplistic. During the 1930s and beyond, he at times employed American andLatin folk tunes, but he adapted such tunes to a highly personal, jazz-related

style, in a way not unlike the way jazz musicians them-selves appropriated such

materials. In still later years, he accommodated jazzy rhythms and gestures to

Schoenberg's twelve-tone method; still later, to Ivesian multiplaned textures.

But jazz remained central to his musical style and imagination.

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the life and work of an uncommon man (extract)

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