The Unbearable Beauty of Not Quite Belonging: Aaron Copland - Our Town

I have a love hate relationship with the play Our Town, originally with the movie they made of it.  I don't remember if that's the first time I ever saw anything of it but I hated the movie on first viewing and I've never seen a really good production of the play.  There was a really bad TV performance with Hollywood actors who didn't get that it wasn't a TV show and another production I saw on PBS was the absolute bottom, it played like everyone was strung out on quaaludes or on some idiotic idea of how New Englanders were undemonstrative and cold.  You tell some actors that and the results will be like a stage full of victims of lobotomy.   And the school and amateur productions of it, while, actually, not all as bad as those, seemed to miss something.  The play has things in it that I doubt many local players would dare to present, something that isn't quite respectable or facile about the play.

Perhaps it's because I've got family who live in Peterborough, NH, the town Grover's Corners was modeled on and can remember the town when it still had the vestiges of the people who would have been in it as Wilder knew it.  And I grew up in a town probably more like the one in the play than Peterborough was then.  I don't know.

The play reads a lot better on page than I've ever seen it done on stage.  It does have one of Thornton Wilder's problems in several of his major works, like The Eighth Day, a book that starts out with you thinking it's going to be one of the really great novels of the American language only to have him seem to lose control of the threads of narrative and he solves the problem by having everyone just die.  Somehow, By The Skin of Our Teeth seems like a more complete and satisfying piece.

Much as I hated the movie, I loved the music Aaron Copland wrote for it.  It is, perhaps, his one work which has just skirted the danger of too many performances and too many of those being too precious but which can still be heard as great music.  For a long time I preferred the three pieces he arranged for piano over his orchestrated version because there were too many of those too precious performances in the air.

It's easy for a man who, like Copland, is gay, though of a far different generation to think he understands the terrible yearning that is an intrinsic part of Copland's style and it's easy for a gay man to assume that their shared experiences gives him some insight into Copland's clear yearning for a place in the normal family life and community life that was always far more an ideal than a reality even for straight folk.   I think it's what makes Our Town great as a play, and it is a great play, what is taken to be a look back at the unremarkable experience of life in a small, rural town in New England which was certainly, even by the time of Wilder's composition of the play, gone forever.  Wilder was also a gay man who even more than Copland felt compelled to hide the fact from the public.  Gore Vidal once said that Wilder was absolutely terrified that his fame would cause his outing which, in 1930s-60s America would have killed any chance for a successful career in most of the arts.  My reading of the play has the sobering character of Simon Stimson who as the town musician would probably fit the image of a gay man in small town life, though he might be a warning of thwarted artistic ambition, if Wilder saw them as distinct.  He certainly ends up as an unhappy shade even in the New England Hades Wilder wrote, hardly an optimistic view of ultimate reality, one which seems to go unnoticed by so many who have seen and expressed a love of the play.

It would be possible to take the beginning three bars, the part of the score that everyone knows and could sort of hum.  The first two measures (I'm looking at the piano score online, mine is in a box somewhere) of a melody consisting of a G Major arpeggio in 4/4 supported by a C Major triad, or perhaps the arpeggio suspended over it would be a better description, resolved to a G Major chord, that repeated and then a change of time to 3/2 with an A Major arpeggio suspended over a Bb Major 7th chord which resolves irregularly, though with strange effectiveness to a repetition of the material of the first two measures.   The effect of that in hearing of it is of the most normal sounding of music but also music which is both normal but strange, giving way to the pattern set.

But that description tells you nothing as the music tells you more than you can express about the wonderfulness of every day life and, at the same time, the inevitable alienation from it if you aren't quite part of that beloved pattern.   Of belonging and not quite belonging, of wanting and not quite wanting because you can't both be true to those things that you do love and to yourself.  And that's only the first three measures.

That's enough of me, for now.  Here is the music selected by Copland as he conducted it.

London Symphony Orchestra,  Aaron Copland, conductor