Aaron Copland - Connotations

Julliard Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, conductor

There is a common line that is encountered that blames Aaron Copland's early retirement from composing to the alleged stranglehold that "academic serialism" had on American music.  As someone who was obsessed with the American music scene in the 1970s, that assertion is about the biggest load of crap there ever was.   Even in universities, the alleged epicenter the serialist overlords empire, you were far more likely to encounter a neo-classical composer, a neo-romantic composer a non-ideological composer who composed tonal music and, let me tell you, the performances of new tonal compositions were probably more than 20 to one over pieces in some serial mode of composition.  That line was pushed by a small group of failed composers who tried to gain some traction for their music by pushing a "return to tonality" line and, oddly, by Leonard Bernstein, notably in his Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard.  I say "oddly" because he was certainly in a position to know better, certainly about Copland's music.  There were idiot critics who pushed it too, conservative critics who weren't ever happy with the later music of Schoenberg and the 12-tone strategies of composing sustained music.

This piece,  Connotations, from the early 1960s was given its premier by Leonard Bernstein who, as the director of the New York Philharmonic, commissioned the most eminent of American composers to produce a piece for their inaugural concert in their new home at the Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center.   I don't know if he ever commented that he was disappointed that Copland wrote a piece of atonal music - though with strong tonal feeling in many places.   The piece is far from Coplands popular works with relatively few performances and much criticism of it.  I've listened to it about eight times in the last week and I think it's a great piece of music.  It takes so many things that he'd investigated in his earlier work and gave it a more serious and rigorous treatment.  Maybe the seriousness of the music was why it was rejected.  I'm sure Bernstein would have liked another Appalachian Spring better but that was a piece for its time just as certainly as Connotations is a piece that is reflective of 1962, the same year we all faced the very real prospect of nuclear incineration, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a year when the full fury of reaction against the Civil Rights Movement was going on.  It was a year as troubling, in many ways as the time of the composition of his 3rd symphony was full of the possibilities of better times.  If anyone is puzzled by the title, consider what Copland could have been connoting just as he had in his incredible end-of-war Symphony had at the time of its composition.   Aaron Copland didn't stop living, thinking, reading the newspaper and changing as soon as he'd penned the last note of his Clarinet Concerto, which, by the way, is one of his few great masterworks that is sufficiently performed well.   A soloist doesn't want to crap all over one of the major works in their repertoire which they have the good fortune to be performing.   Too bad superstar conductors don't often seem to have that feeling about what they have the massive good fortune to be performing with reliable regularity.

Why those people thought they knew what music Aaron Copland should be writing better than the man who had produced so many masterworks is interesting to consider.  But, luckily, we don't have to wonder about his thinking on that because Copland was a good writer as well as a great composer. In writing about the cold reception that Connotations got, in his 1968 update to his A Composer from Brooklyn, he said.

It brought to the fore once again a continuing discussion concerning the apparent dichotomy between my “serious” and my “popular” works.  I can only say that those commentators who would like to split me down the middle into two opposing personalities will get no encouragement from me.  I prefer to think that I wrote my music from a single vision;  when the results differ it is because I take into account with each new piece the purpose for which it is intended and the nature of the musical materials with which I begin to work.  Musical ideas engender pieces, and the ideas by their character dictate the nature of the composition to be written.   It bothers me not at all to realize that my range as composer includes both accessible and problematic works.  To have confined myself to a single compositional approach would have enhanced my reputation for consistency, no doubt, but would have afforded me less pleasure as a creator.   The English critic Wilfrid Mellers puts it this way:  “There is no fundamental disparity between the two styles;  the same sensibility adapts the technique to the purpose in hand.”   I like to believe that what he says is true.