Any opportunity to spend time with Aaron Copland is always a pleasure. Here’s a 28-minute interview I had not seen before, conducted by James Day in 1973. The subject at about 23 minutes in is particularly prescient and gives one pause when one considers this conversation took place 50 years ago!
JAMES DAY: It’s interesting that while we’re developing this new, highly-challenging idiom, which does require attention, concentration, a real depth of interest, we’ve also developed electronic mechanisms to feed music into our ears 24 hours a day. Where primitive man perhaps had to listen to stay alive, modern man almost has to non-listen, stop listen, unlisten, I don’t know what the word is. This must affect the performance of music, if we are being conditioned not to give our full attention.
COPLAND: Yes, I regret that very much. I wish that when people are not in the mood to listen to music that they would turn the darn thing off, because that kind of casual bathing in musical sounds without listening to it, that’s not at all the composer’s idea. If you want to really listen to what he has to say, listen. Otherwise, forget it. Don’t just let it on there like wallpaper on a wall that just is around you because it kind of makes a pleasant sound.
If Copland had lived into the age of YouTube, Spotify, and earbuds, his head would have exploded.
I hadn’t intended to watch the full interview over breakfast, but I found it most enjoyable. Not a lot new, perhaps, for Copland enthusiasts, but always worthwhile. The full conversation is available here:
I can’t say it’s what the composer intended, but there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Here’s the slow movement of Romeo Cascarino’s Bassoon Sonata – played on theremin and toy piano!
Cascarino, who was born on this date 101 years ago, grew up in an unforgiving neighborhood in South Philadelphia. With a name like Romeo, he had to learn how to use his fists! While navigating the School of Hard Knocks, he taught himself privately, gleaning the mechanics of music theory from books checked out of the Free Library. He was discovered by composer Paul Nordoff, who recognized his genius, and the two formed a bond that was more like a friendship than teacher-student.
While still in his teens, Cascarino was handed a letter from Aaron Copland, inviting him to Tanglewood. Romeo’s father had secretly sent the “Dean of American Composers” some of Romeo’s compositions, and Copland responded with an impressively favorable evaluation. At Tanglewood, upon further examination, Copland said he couldn’t suggest any improvements and that Romeo’s works should remain just as they were.
If you’re interested to know more, I wrote about Cascarino and Copland in further detail last year:
Later, Cascarino served as a professor of composition at Philadelphia’s Combs College of Music. The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, he labored at his magnum opus, the opera “William Penn,” for the better part of three decades. The work received its premiere at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in 1982 to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city. Metropolitan Opera singer bass-baritone John Cheek sang the title role.
“William Penn” is one of American opera’s best-kept secrets. I’m convinced, if only it had been completed 30 years earlier, it would now be spoken of in the same breath with Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” and Robert Ward’s “The Crucible.”
In 2006, a number of Cascarino’s orchestral works were recorded by JoAnn Falletta for the Naxos label. These too are informed by a seductive, twilit beauty.
The Bassoon Sonata was written at the request of Cascarino’s army buddy, Sol Schoenbach, in 1942. The composer made some sketches, but completed the work only after he was discharged. Schoenbach later became principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and recorded the piece for Columbia Records’ “Modern American Music Series.”
This was the not only music to came out of the war. Cascarino composed his plaintive elegy, “Blades of Grass,” in 1945. The title refers to Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass,” written in 1918, in response to the “Great War.” It seems the work was played by the U.S. Marine Band as recently as last month!
Here it is, performed by English hornist Dorothy Freeman and Philadelphia’s Orchestra 2001.
Happy birthday, Romeo Cascarino, wherever you are. Your music endures, even if we have to thank the Marines, and not the Army, for playing it!
Clockwise from left: Cascarino outside the Academy of Music, before a poster of “William Penn;” at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland (Copland standing, arms crossed, center, with Cascarino the big guy holding the cigarette on the right); and Sgt. Cascarino conducting a U.S. Army band
Aaron Copland loved Mexico. He visited there many times, staying for extended periods, and enjoyed a close personal friendship with Carlos Chávez, Mexico’s most celebrated musician. “El Salón México” was Copland’s first certifiable hit, inaugurating the “populist” period that would also yield “Billy the Kid,” “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Lincoln Portrait,” “Rodeo,” and “Appalachian Spring.”
The work was inspired by a dance hall located in Mexico City. Copland adored the fact that there was a sign on the wall there that read: “Please don’t throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies don’t burn their feet.”
“…In some inexplicable way,” he wrote in his autobiography, “while milling about in those crowded halls, one really felt a live contact with the Mexican people – the atomic sense one sometimes gets in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people – their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.”
Happily, the work was embraced by the Mexican public and was a sensation when it was given its debut in Mexico City, with Chávez on the podium, in 1937.
But it took Ricardo Montalban to turn it into a piano concerto, in “Fiesta” (1947)!
Only Hollywood could cook up the dilemma of having Montalban caught between his desire to become a composer, on the one hand, and to fulfill his father’s expectation of his becoming a bullfighter. It’s as if some producer remembered seeing “The Jazz Singer” and thought he’d transplant it south of the border.
But it gets even better: as things are brought to a head, Montalban’s twin sister – played by Esther Williams! – impersonates him in the ring. The Hollywood dream factory was working overtime on this one. At least it was shot on location in Puebla.
“Fiesta” was Montalban’s first Hollywood film. He would reteam with Williams in “On an Island with You” (1948) and “Neptune’s Daughter” (1949).
Totally implausible and kitschy as hell, but even in this bastardized version, the music is hard to resist. Copland generally avoided overt commercialization of his oeuvres, especially when, as here, the music is chopped up and reorchestrated. But in this instance, he took the money and ran. After all, $15,000 was $15,000 – even more so in 1947!
The arrangement is by Copland’s old friend Johnny Green. André Previn recorded the piano solo. The choreography in the film was provided by Eugene Loring, who created Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid.”
“El Salón México” was an international smash, the first of the composer’s so-called populist works.
Be sure to watch the entire clip to see Mr. Roarke meet Batman’s Alfred, Alan Napier!
On this date in 1945, Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” became the third recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The announcement came on V-E Day. Purely by chance, this American classic was honored as the Allies celebrated victory in Europe.
Few Pulitzer Prize winners have endured as repertory pieces. Probably a handful at best. How many are actually known to the average concertgoer? Sure, the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti and Robert Ward get revived from time to time, and Jennifer Higdon has been exceptionally fortunate for a composer in her prime. But most Pulitzer winners tend to languish in relative obscurity.
The 21st century has been a little kinder, with at least ten of the recipients garnering a respectable number of performances. But there have been some real eyebrow-raisers too.
This year’s Prizes will be announced this afternoon at 3:00 EDT. You can catch the livestream at http://www.pulitzer.org.
2022 Pulitzer winner, “Voiceless Mass” by Raven Chacon
Aaron Copland conducts his 1945 winner, “Appalachian Spring,” at 80
The complete list of past recipients, including additional citations
Yesterday, in writing about experimental composer Milton Babbitt on his birthday, I remarked upon his softer side, as “a frustrated show composer” (according to Stephen Sondheim, a Babbitt pupil), a lover of jazz, an admirer of the film scores of Bernard Herrmann, and a friend of John Williams. I was interested to discover that Babbitt himself had scored a film, “Into the Good Ground” (1949), which also includes selections from Handel’s “Messiah” performed by the First Methodist Church Choir of Germantown, PA (a neighborhood in Babbitt’s hometown of Philadelphia).
Whether or not you find the content agreeable – the film was produced by Pathescope for the Presbyterian Church and its publishing branch, Westminster Press, so you can expect a good sermon – it is very interesting to hear what Babbitt does with it. I find it very much in the tradition of the film work undertaken by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson for the WPA and Richard Arnell for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I would love to hear the score free from the film, perhaps worthy of inclusion in the series of music for short subjects recorded by the PostClassical Ensemble (so far documenting works by Aaron Copland, Silvestre Revueltas, and Virgil Thomson)? You’ll find the albums on CD and freshly-recorded scores issued with the films on DVD at the link, all highly recommended.
There’s certainly plenty of other material out there, including Richard Arnell’s music for Robert Flaherty’s “The Land” and Ulysses Kay’s score for “The Quiet One.” It’s niche market, to be sure, but a fascinating corner of our musical heritage, now largely forgotten.
