The Slipped Disc daily comfort zone (291): The common man
mainTwo versions of Aaron Copland’s White House commission.
And this one’s for the composer.
Two versions of Aaron Copland’s White House commission.
And this one’s for the composer.
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So many messages in the issues that surround these video. Fanfare for the Common Man, a wonderful work written in 1942 to address the challenges the country faced in WWII, and the Lincoln Portrait, didn’t keep HUAC from harassing Copland, the effects of which permanently harmed him. His opera The Tender Land, which addressed the plight of American farmers during the depression, revealed an ethos that made him suspect.
The USA spends three times more on military bands than it does the entire NEA. Probably 10 times more than what the NEA spends on classical music. It’s one of the reasons we have such fine DC military bands. Musicians are forced into the work where they are soldiers first and musicians second, but there they have no choice since there are so few jobs. (Cue patriotic/militaristic bluster from the Breitbart crowd against commie liberals.)
Common Man was premiered in 1942 and aptly named. The orchestral video is by the New York Phil. The first woman didn’t enter the orchestra until 27 years later.
Here’s a video of “The Promise of Living” from the Tender Land. (The video images are over the top at times, but note the music and the message.) If only the USA could return to the Rooseveltian values reflected in this wonderful music written by one of America’s greatest composers and one of American democracy’s truest champions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLM_YTnmLto
“Rooseveltian values”…sure.
https://mises.org/library/myth-fdr
Commentary on that source:
” Nicholas Sarwark and Arvin Vohra, then the chair and vice-chair of the United States Libertarian Party, condemned Deist’s speech, with Vohra stating that “the Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right”. Vohra further accused the Mises Institute as a whole of being “authoritarian, racist, nazi”.”
That is to say, it’s entirely consistent with everything else you post.
Why do you choose to do so?
So, instead of repeating that sort of dreck on this special and august day, with the peaceful transfer of power from the Orange Enemy of the People to President Biden, what are your thoughts on Copland’s music?
Mises Institute is alt right. Hahahah! Just like Ludwig von Mises himself! That’s there’s funny. I don’t care who you are.
How about these Rooseveltian values?
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/748ae24/2147483647/strip/true/crop/780×438+0+0/resize/840×472!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fca-times.brightspotcdn.com%2F66%2Ff1%2Fcbd26ea97f36f19c8fb5c8d868b9%2Fla-1492117043-hz4u92cozn-snap-image
How about his praise of Mussolini? From a left wing blog…https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/7/19/1225012/-FDR-s-Endorsement-of-Benito-Mussolini-Is-Stunningly-Tone-Deaf-and-Troubling
If you refuse to do what Roosevelt tells you to do?
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/after-refusing-to-renew-a-labor-contract-with-the-news-photo/515508108
Roosevelt was a fascist but to celebrate it? You want to return to it? Really?
🙂
Way back when, Copland was in residence at the University of California Irvine (in Orange County). Standing before a group of talented student musicians, he mentioned that one of them had asked him about ELP’s version of the Fanfare. “Well,” he said, “it started out sounding like the Fanfare, and then I guess they went off and did their own thing. (pause, then his toothy grin). I was reconciled with the royalties.”
I’m not convinced.
Most (not all) of the members of the US Marine Band are not ‘real’ Marines — they win an audition and do not go through basic training. (The other branches do have their musicians take training, though.)
Roosevelt was a disaster. The New Deal should never have happened and Copland should never have had the opportunity to while away time in Mexico on the government’s dime just to come home and write the silly mish-mash that is ‘El Salon.’ HUAC should have investigated that.
President Roosevelt is why we live in a democracy, and not a dictatorship, or even as a vassal state to Nazi Germany.
The New Deal saved our country. Get over it.
You’re like most of the US, fooled by propaganda. The New Deal PROLONGED the Great Depression by about 18 years. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, had authoritarian tendencies, and was NOT overrun by democratic principles.
True, and let’s not forget the S.S. St. Louis which carried Jews (many children) fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939 to the US. It was ignored by Roosevelt and then Canada where it was sent back where 254 eventually died from the Nazis. It’s ok Roosevelt was an anti -Semite. He “saved” our country. God, the power of the media…
I am a former member of the USAF band. I assure you I was no soldier. As usual, William, you speak with few facts but much invective (cue liberal/commie hissy fit).
You were an airman first, and musicians second. Plain fact.
Horrible, just horrible.
As for the underlying property:
“I tell you, worthy little people, life’s riffraff, forever beaten, fleeced and sweating, I warn you that when the great people of this world start loving you, it means that they are going to make sausage meat of you. That is the sign, it is infallible.”
— (Journey to the End of the Night)
As to the militarization of music, even without the advantage if Coplandian pomposity in the original, compare these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-24qGCvo7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q41ctPLDHvU
Keith Emerson and ELP were always very entertaining and Emerson was quite virtuosic in his playing. I know that Bernstein hated Emerson’s version of ‘America’ but I don’t know what Copland thought of the ‘Common Man’ arrangement. I always thought the rocked-up versions of classics were pretty harmless, often entertaining and sometimes just really good and clever. I know some people got quite hot under the collar about such versions, but I took the view that even if only one listener was drawn into listening to the original versions then it was worth it. Each to their own after all.
Copland liked them.
“The interesting thing… was that we had to get the permission of Aaron Copland, the composer. The publishing house said forget it. So I got Mr Copland’s home number, called him up and he was very friendly on the phone. And he says “Send it to me, let me listen.” And he loved it. He called me and said ‘This is brilliant, this is fantastic. This is doing something to my music.'”
There’s more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanfare_for_the_Common_Man_(Emerson,_Lake_%26_Palmer_song)
You can click through to the citations.
These citations are largely from ELP sources… but in fact the BBC interview quoted largely agrees with what I heard from him… he was flattered to have the attention, but he couldn’t quite appreciate all the improvisation in the middle.
For me, this is Copland at his best. It’s a wonderful tune, music that continues to inspire almost 80 years after it was written. The Fanfare has certainly stood the test of time.
It hasn’t been mentioned yet, but Copland showed his genius by the way he used this material in the final movement of the third symphony. When the flutes enter with the melody, minus the percussion, it’s an incredible moment not easily forgotten.
Isn’t anything better minus the percussion? (just kidding percussionists)
Of course, this work could be substituted, on today’s august occasion, with something by Charpentier or Lully. Might be more accurate.
I had a chance once to ask Aaron Copland what he thought of the ELP version. He didn’t really like it… “they changed it…”
The Fanfare for the Common Man is not a White House commission. In “42 Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra commissioned ten composers to write fanfares. It was premiered by Goossens and Cincinnati SO in “43 — the other nine – spread over the season — have not held the boards.
I like the President’s Own Band version. I also recognize some of the same faces (lead trumpet player, for instance) who performed at Biden’s inauguration. Only problem: too much gold braid on the conductor especially for this “common man” theme; he could open a shop and sell yards of it from his own uniform.
Last night our classical FM station broadcast Bernstein’s record of Copland’s third symphony, which has his favorite intervals and echoes of “Fanfare for the Common Man”, also loads of percussion imitating gunfire like Shostakovich. I at once thought of this discussion. å few days ago they had played “Quiet City”.