Aaron Copland - Letter from Home

After he had retired from composing in the early 1970s, Aaron Copland turned largely to conducting. As if people suddenly realized what they'd lost, even as they were ignoring his last major works because they found them "difficult"* they started paying more attention to his work.   There were endless performances of Appalachian Spring, the suites from his other ballet scores, the even more endless and generally vulgar use of his Fanfare For The Common Man and celebrity narrations of A Lincoln Portrait, most of his work, even that which was far from "difficult" was ignored.  

There was a concert of his works, probably for a birthday ending in a five or a zero, where someone had the idea of asking him what he'd like them to play.  As I recall, he chose pieces which were seldom played,  the wartime piece, Letter from Home was one of those.   I can't, for the life of me, understand how it could have fallen into obscurity, it's one of his best and most moving and meaningful pieces.  I wish he'd done a piano version of it, if anyone knows of how to get one he approved of, I'd love to have it. 

London Symphony Orchestra

Aaron Copland, conductor

Aaron Copland's last years were increasingly dominated by the dementia which, eventually robbed him of his memory and then his life.   He conducted, successfully, well into that period, one thing I read said that he could have conducted some of his pieces even after the disease had robbed him of most of his other memories.  Which would indicate how important the work was to him, how thoroughly it was an expression of the inner most man.  They say that his generally kind and gracious personality remained, as well.  Everything I've ever read about him talks about what a really nice guy he was. 

*  Contrary to what a lot of ignorant folk have said about works like Connotations and Inscape and the Piano Fantasy being futile attempts of Copland at trying to fit into the alleged post-war serialist hegemony, a myth, in itself, he had been writing "difficult" and atonal pieces all along.  The Piano Variations, the Passacaglia, are fairly early and major works.   I don't know the extent to which Copland was aware of Charles Ives, who was still alive and who some of Copland's friends and colleagues were promoting as the genius he was, but he might have noticed that Ives, as well, produced both the most pioneering of polytonal, atonal, even proto-serial works as he was composing the most conventional seeming of tonal works.  Why a composer would feel they were restricted to choosing some kind of ideological camp when they could do whatever they wanted, when they wanted to do it is something I don't get.  The ideologues of the serial vs. neo-tonal camps during Copland's last years of active composition was probably something he didn't see any point in.  

There were some snarky remarks, some by composers as fine and as generally sensible as Milton Babbitt who mocked Copland's excitement in discovering some new chords that he liked and hoped to use, making fun of his time with Nadia Boulanger on that count.   He called her harmony classes "the boulangerie".  I always think of a remark the great avant garde composer Edgar Varse to someone pointing out that some other composer's music "lacked counterpoint," he asked why a composer should write counterpoint if he chose to write something else.  The idea that music has to be one thing or another thing and that if it is that other thing it is bad is ridiculous.  A composers music should be what they make it, second guessing their choices is ridiculous.   But the idea that the serialists "ran music" in the 50s and 60s was even more ridiculous than that, an silly idea spread largely by the neo-tonalists who didn't tend to write music that proved to be much more popular than that of the serialists they had been and who they were now "opposed to".  The music scene at any particular time can get to be pretty silly.