This Day in Classical Music History (Copland-Scored ‘Our Town’ Opens in Theaters)

May 24, 1940-- Our Town, Hollywood’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder, with a screenplay by the playwright himself, was released in the United States. 

The movie, distributed by United Artists when Americans feared being drawn into an overseas war, appealed to critics and audiences alike for affirming eternal values found in even the smallest communities in the country. It went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards.

When writing about a collaborative medium like film, there are all kinds of subjects to consider. In the case of Our Town, I could talk about how it represented a step forward for William Holden after his debut in Golden Boy; how director Sam Wood expertly guided the other members of the cast; and how producer Sol Lesser worked to win Wilder’s approval of the finished product.

But instead, I will focus on another aspect: the score by Aaron Copland. It fits squarely into a roughly 15-year period, from 1935 to 1950, when this and other works such as Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Hoe-down, and A Lincoln Portrait virtually redefined the notion of “Americana” in music. 

At first glance, the 39-year-old product of Brooklyn might seem an unlikely candidate to render a small-town setting created by Wilder. But in fact, he had already begun to do so the year before, with his score for John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which had enabled him to morph from a modernist art composer to one working in a mass medium. 

When Copland discovered that Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corner was inspired by Peterborough, N.H., where the composer had created several of his own works, he felt an immediate affinity with the playwright and setting.

In a 1980 interview with Roger Hall, Copland explained the delicate balance maintained by film composers: “When you’re writing music for a film, you know that it’s not going to be listened to like concert music. People should be absorbed in the story of the film. Very often they don’t even know that music is going on, though it affects their emotions. The music mustn’t get in the way. But on the other hand, it must count for something.”

Our Town represented a particular challenge. The playwright was at pains to dispense with conventional stagecraft, to allow the text to convey his deepest meanings. 

“Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner,” Wilder wrote in a preface to this and to his two other most successful plays, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. “And here the method of staging finds its justification — in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and tables are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ‘scenery.’...The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.”

But film is a vastly different medium from the stage. Wordless closeups can convey all that a playwright might try to express in a five-minute monologue. In fact, extensive talk is antithetical to the combination of movement and image inherent in the concept of “motion picture.” On the other hand, music can subliminally express this emotion, as long as it remains unobtrusive.

Studio executives and Wood were "counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story,” Copland later recounted. “I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story."

The experience with Our Town was successful and pleasant enough that four years later, Copland arranged his soundtrack for an 11-minute orchestral suite, dedicating it to protege Leonard Bernstein. That compressed take (here in this YouTube clip) has become a staple of symphony orchestras since then.

As he had been for Of Mice and Men, Copland was nominated in the Oscar categories Best Music, Score, and Best Music, Original Score for his work on Our Town. He would be nominated two years later in the category Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for The North Star before finally winning at the close of the decade for his score for The Heiress.

But the latter film marked the end of Copland’s Hollywood activity. Director William Wyler cut and unevenly dubbed much of the composer’s carefully wrought music, and Copland now had enough financial resources that he could afford to be more selective about his projects. As a result, the only other movie that Copland worked on for the rest of his life was the 1961 independent production Something Wild.

More disappointing for Copland, he never got the chance to work with Wilder again, despite the great esteem the two had for each other. When Copland broached with Wilder the idea of collaborating with him on adapting Our Town for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the playwright declined: 

“I'm convinced I write a-musical plays: that my texts 'swear at' music; that they're after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life . . . Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive 'idea and essence' behind our daily life. I hope my plays don't lack that idea and essence, but they singularly shrink from an explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.'' 

If Copland’s association with Wilder was fleeting, the composer’s influence on subsequent Hollywood film music was enduring, most notably in soundtracks by Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird), Randy Newman (The Natural) and James Horner (Field of Dreams). 

The latter two baseball films so vividly evoked the wistful pastoral nostalgia associated with “America’s pastime” that Spike Lee decided to go directly to the original source, so to speak, in recasting the image of a different sport. For He Got Game, the director borrowed directly from Copland with the selections “The Open Prairie," "Appalachian Spring," "John Henry," "Lincoln Portrait," "Hoe-Down."

(The image accompanying this post shows William Holden and Martha Scott from the film Our Town.)

This Day in Classical Music History (Copland’s ‘Lincoln Portrait’ Performed on Barge)

July 4, 1942—Two months after its premiere in Cincinnati, Aaron Copland’s homage to America’s 16^th President, Lincoln Portrait for Speaker and Orchestra, was performed in a special way: on a barge in the Potomac River, narrated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Carl Sandburg.

This setting, I would argue, couldn’t be more appropriate. The river had been connected indelibly, ever since the republic’s founding, to George Washington, who, in nearly all Presidential ratings by historians, is ranked immediately above or below Abraham Lincoln. The performance took place with the already-iconic Lincoln Memorial in the background.

(I must admit, though, that a river was just about the last place I’d expect a great work such as this to be performed. The only comparable instance of this in music history might have been Yale University’s Olympic-sized pool, the setting for Stephen Sondheim’s incidental music for a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Frogs—a beyond-crazy production I discussed in a prior post.)

As for the date: Perhaps no President since the nation’s founding has been more responsible than Lincoln for making a reality of the central contention of the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.”  Perhaps my favorite quote from Lincoln is this one, in the concluding remarks in his Second Annual Message to Congress (December 1862): “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”  

I can only wonder about the technical issues related to playing on a barge. Evidently, the audience on the boat must have been distracted, because, Copland recalled years later, this piece elicited no applause upon its conclusion.

No matter: It’s been receiving all the cheering it could want in the years since, including, no doubt, much on the Fourth of July. It’s a showcase not just for orchestras, but for celebrities who know how to sound every depth in the majestic Lincoln passages narrated in the second half of the 14-minute piece—by individuals as wildly disparate as Sandburg, Barack Obama, Adlai Stevenson, Charlton Heston, James Whitmore, Katharine Hepburn, Annette Bening, Margaret Thatcher, baseball slugger Willie Stargell, General Norman Schwarzkopf —and, on at least one occasion, with good friend Leonard Bernstein conducting, Copland himself.

(You can hear two of the more memorable voices, Henry Fonda and James Earl Jones, blended together in this YouTube clip.)

The piece, commissioned by conductor Andre Kostelanetz, came in a creatively fertile half-dozen-year period in the early 1940s, in which Copland also produced the soundtrack for the film Our Town, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Rodeo. It was all part of an attempt by the composer at an accessible, "imposed simplicity.” Collectively, they functioned as a kind of musical Declaration of Independence, a turn toward and consolidation of indigenous American folk influences incorporated into the symphonic form. In their heightened, unabashed lyricism, they also struck a chord with a country that desperately needed to remember moments of past greatness.

A living piece of music will transcend the time of its original creation, but to appreciate it in all its fullness, I think, it still helps to consider the age from which it sprang. The hymnlike qualities of Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” for instance (never rendered more potently, I think, than in the reunion concert in Central Park with Simon’s former partner, Art Garfunkel, as seen in this YouTube clip), are at stark variance with the savage disillusionment and psychic exhaustion of the lyrics. (“When I think of the road we’re traveling on,/I wonder what went wrong.”)

In the year that “American Tune” was released, the Vietnam War was a wound that had stopped bleeding but remained open, and Watergate was corroding faith in government.  Many, then, would have identified with Simon's lyric about “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

In retrospect, that was profoundly shortsighted—but it was just like a baby-boom generation to feel it was all about them. Nearly every American generation has been faced with similar anxiety, and perhaps none would have possessed a better right to it than the generation that survived the Great Depression only to be called upon immediately afterward to defeat Fascism. “That’s all I’m trying—to get some rest”? They didn’t have time for that. Copland didn’t create Lincoln Portrait to soothe spirits, but to summon them—“the better angels of our nature” that Lincoln believed would eventually help “swell the chorus of the Union.”

The surprising thing about Lincoln Portrait is that Copland originally wanted someone else to memorialize. Kostelanetz’s original proposal, also sent out to composers Jerome Kern and Virgil Thomson in the month after Pearl Harbor, called for orchestral works that would celebrate "the qualities of courage, dignity, strength, simplicity and humor which are so characteristic of the American people." He suggested several Americans as possible subjects: George Washington, Paul Revere, Walt Whitman, Robert Fulton, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth.

Thomson chose New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (imagine a contemporary counterpart: a musical celebration of Mike Bloomberg!) along with Herald Tribune colleague Dorothy Thompson. Because Kern chose Mark Twain, Kostelanetz did not want a second writer celebrated in the trio of pieces, so Copland had to choose someone else besides the figure he wanted, Whitman.

A biography that Copland had recently read made him think of Lincoln as a possible subject. Working steadily with one aim in mind—“to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality…and something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit”—he had basically finished the piece by Lincoln’s birthday, well in time for the patriotic concert scheduled in May by Kostelanetz and the Cincinnati orchestra.

As fine as Kern and Thomson were as composers, their pieces for the May concert did not survive their moment in May 1942. In contrast, Copland’s is a hardy perennial of Presidents’ Day and Independence Day celebrations.

After his assassination, Lincoln became a symbol of nationwide unity. But by WWII, Republicans could only watch in annoyance as the first President from their party—one who, be it noted, was a prosperous lawyer for major railroads before he campaigned for the White House—was adopted with alacrity by liberal Democrats and those from more leftist parties. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an effort to tweak his GOP opponents, had taken to quoting Lincoln approvingly, and the American volunteers who fought on the side of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Copland, then, was not merely choosing a towering American hero in Lincoln, but one whose destruction of an old socio-political order--a kind of Second American Revolution--deeply appealed to those with similar ideological sympathies.

Just what those sympathies were became a matter of some contention in 1953, when Copland was hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy to answer whether he had ever been a Communist. That confrontation held deep peril for the composer, who, while never a formal Socialist or Communist Party member, had in the 1930s shared a podium with the Minnesota Communist candidate for governor, S.K. Davis, and supported Communist presidential candidate Earl Browder.

The kindest interpretation of Copland’s testimony—which occurred only a few months after cancellation of a performance of Lincoln Portrait at the inaugural of Dwight Eisenhower, because of the composer’s left-leaning associations—is that it was deeply evasive. For two years thereafter, the foremost classical American composer of his day had trouble obtaining a passport, as charges of perjury were seriously weighed.

The eventual finding—that there were insufficient grounds to proceed with a prosecution—enabled Copland to reestablish his reputation. Like Lincoln, this once-controversial figure became a bipartisan patriotic symbol. Lincoln Portrait would be played at the second inaugural of yet another Republican President, Richard Nixon, and the House of Representatives that had once questioned Copland's patriotism gave him the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor, in 1986.

This Day in Classical Music History (Welles Helms Copland Opera for Students)

April 21, 1937—He was barely older than those he was directing, and his fervid imagination was already turning to a new project, but 21-year-old Orson Welles’ overseeing of Aaron Copland’s opera for high-school students, The Second Hurricane, represented not just a curiosity in two important lives ("Aaron and Orson Go to Glee!"), but also a blueprint for a grander artistic design.

Lehman Engle, conductor of the Henry Street Settlement Music School, enlisted Copland (pictured) to write an opera for the school. The composer already had much on his plate—an orchestra piece commissioned by CBS that he wanted desperately to complete—but he plugged away anyway, in “all-consuming fashion,” as he recalled years later.

By this point in his career, Copland—even then, the leader of a group of composers trying to create an authentic American classical music—was very much on board with the project. According to his memoir, Copland—1900 Through 1942, his motives were “not all unselfish":

“The usual run of symphony audiences submitted to new music when it was played at them, but never showed signs of really wanting it. The atmosphere had become deadening. It was anything but conducive to the creation of new works. Yet the composer must compose! A school opera seemed a good momentary solution for one composer, at any rate."  

In the Thirties and Forties, Copland was hunting for ways to expand the reach of classical music beyond its normal audience. His musical criticism provided one means of doing so; ballet and films (notably, in Billy the Kid and The Red Pony, respectively) another; and musical theater, in the form of opera, yet another. It would take another 15 years before he set to work seriously on his only other work in the latter format, The Tender Land. 

In youngsters, the composer saw more than a potential new audience for classical music: he glimpsed a level of burgeoning technical skill that made feasible his hope of a relatively sophisticated production. It was through school music organizations springing up across the country, giving rise to “tales of creditable performances with charming fresh voices and good orchestral techniques.” In this kind of environment, he felt comfortable introducing what would become an indispensable element of Americana into his work: in this case, a colonial-era folk tune, “The Capture of Burgoyne.”

For his librettist, Copland chose his friend Edwin Denby. The dance critic-poet contributed in many ways to the show, including coming up with the plot, urging that “all stage business was to be simple and natural”—and recommending that Welles, “the most talented person in town,” be hired as director. There was one thing he was not particularly good at, though: Science 101. It might have seemed a good idea to set a play about Middle American kids cooperating in the face of natural disaster in the Midwest, home of populism—except that the particular natural disaster could,most assuredly, not be a hurricane, since these are tropical storms that stay close to the coast. (For something as inland as the Midland, “tornado” or “twister” would have worked better.)

In Copland’s memoir, Denby sounds slightly sheepish about his mistake. If anyone ever heard of a similar odor of embarrassment emanating from Welles, nobody breathed a word about it. These were his glory years, when he communicated confidence and charisma. He might not be the most punctual theater professional, but when he walked into rehearsals he was all intelligence, decision and movement, the way he was before age, weight and mounting career disappointment slowed him down.

Welles helped Copland choose the cast and nixed one of Denby’s less-inspired notions—a ballet pantomime in which the children imagine what rescue work is like. Already, however, he had plunged into something far more titanic in scale and publicity value: Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock, a forerunner of the culture war battles fought a half-century later over government funding of projects loathed by conservatives. With that show set to premiere only two months after Copland’s, Welles passed along his instructions on how to stage the high-school “play opera” to his associate, Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, who followed it faithfully.

A high-society crowd trooped downtown for the show’s premiere. Only one cast member was paid: Joseph Cotten, Welles’ friend and keystone in his Mercury Theater troupe, was given the grand sum of $10. Other cast members got their foot in the door of their profession in this production, notably Arthur Andersen (the real-life inspiration for Zac Efron’s youthful character in Me and Orson Welles) and William Alland (later, a reporter in Citizen Kane).

The anonymous New York Times critic, while praising Welles’ direction and the youthful cast members’ singing, was harder on Copland, complaining about his “lack of melodic inspiration [and] … constant repetition of empty, dry phrases.”

But the show was hardly a complete loss: Three years later, another wunderkind, Leonard Bernstein, would direct the opera at the Peabody Playhouse in Boston, and in 1960—by this time, a titan of the musical theater, not to mention an enormous media presence with his musical broadcasts for young people—he drew fresh attention to the show with a TV production.

Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on Music and His Plays)

''I'm convinced I write amusical plays: that my texts 'swear at' music; that they're after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life . . . Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive 'idea and essence' behind our daily life. I hope my plays don't lack that idea and essence, but they singularly shrink from an explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.''—Thornton Wilder, in a 1951 letter to Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing, quoted in Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (1999)

Ironies abound when you read playwright Thornton Wilder’s views on what he thought was the tenuous connection between music and his plays:

* He broke out of at least one bad case of writer’s block by listening to music;

* Only 10 years before, Wilder formed a mutual admiration society with Aaron Copland, who’d been engaged to compose the soundtrack for his first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town;

* Copland’s lyrical score for the William Holden-Martha Scott film, which premiered 70 years ago last month, remains one of the best parts of that project;

* Copland adapted his score as a suite, which premiered on CBS Radio on this date in 1940 (four years later, a revised version, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, was performed by the Boston Pops);

* Anxious to transform Wilder’s play into an opera, Copland and Bing still, as the letter indicates, couldn’t overcome the playwright’s reluctance;

* By 1954, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen did come up with a musicalized (four songs) TV adaptation of Our Town starring Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, and Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager—yet, after the production aired a year later, even though it produced another hit for Ol’ Blue Eyes (“Love and Marriage”), Wilder exercised his contractual right to ensure it never aired again;

* In the early 1960s, Wilder collaborated with Louise Talma on adapting his The Alcestiad and with Paul Hindemith on The Long Christmas Dinner, two operas that premiered in Germany;

* In 1964, a musical adaptation of Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker, Hello, Dolly, opened on Broadway. Its roaring success finally gave the playwright-novelist what had eluded him for years—financial security;

* At long last, courtesy of Wilder's literary executor, nephew Tappan Wilder, the dream project of Copland and Bing--an opera based on Our Town--premiered at the Indiana University Opera Theater in 2006—68 years after the play opened on Broadway—with the libretto by J.D. McClatchey and music by Ned Rorem.