aworks :: "new" american classical music

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /full-contact americana/

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Sam Whiting in the Chronicle:

After the third visit from the Atherton police, the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum & Bugle Corps decided it would have to split up its outdoor rehearsal at Menlo College...A neighbor might call in a tornado warning...It's blisteringly loud...For 28 consecutive days, the Vanguard has been moving around California, staying one step ahead of all the noise complaints while rehearsing "Appalachian Spring," the complex 11-minute Aaron Copland masterpiece, as their entry in the competition...A standard day of practice is three four-hour shifts, starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m...The intensity is almost scary...and it's classy and professional....A lot of adrenaline junkies do drum corps...She's only had to be rushed to the emergency room once, when she took a saber tip to the skull...On this day she is wearing a boxer's welt over her right eye, having been hit by her own flag while learning the Martha Graham-inspired modern dance accompaniment to "Appalachian Spring"...Both will come in handy with the color guard, which she describes as "dance, with danger"...

Drum Corps International at Stanford this weekend, championship in Indianapolis August.

I saw Santa Clara Vanguard invade small-town Indiana in the seventies, playing Buddy Rich's Channel One Suite. Or was it Blue Devils who played such jazz and Vanguard who played classical? Last year's show was Adams/Glass/Talvin Singh/Whitacre, so perhaps my memory is wrong. Regardless, I also remember being super impressed with the people around that time who "graduated" from Madison Scouts  ("You'll never walk alone...").

And it's hard to believe it's been almost six years since I linked to Musings of a Music Major who suggested drum corps can be too avant-garde that drum corps sometimes tries to bill "a very nice show of chamber music as some kind of higher concept."

Channel One Suite - The Buddy ...

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /via obama and williams/

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I've decided the Obama inauguration was the apex of post-modernism and we are headed in a different and hopefully better direction. When the conservative David Brooks accuses the Republican Party of nihilism, clearly we are in a time of change.

Back to music, consider the John Williams composition Air and Simple Gifts. I did a crude inventory of the response to the piece. A month later, any outrage over the lip synching has disappeared. How much of that is because Obama now has his sea legs is hard to say. It may also help that the former President has been released to pursue his latest agenda.

And from an aesthetic point of view, I think Russell Platt got it right:

John Adams, responding to the catastrophe of 9/11, wrote a masterpiece, “On the Transmigration of Souls”; Williams, responding to a request for a Presidential entr’acte from Mr. Obama, made a touching little tribute to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” Sure, it’s a response to a different kind of assignment. But it could have been more.

Since my (aesthetic) mission in life is to discover and amplify the best works in American classical music, I'd like to thank John Williams for his help in recognizing and publicizing Appalachian Spring as an official "a" work.

Also, lala has Williams' new "single:" Air and Simple Gifts - Yo-Yo M...

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• Kenneth Woods also suggests Appalachian Spring as America's great work.
• 100 or so Appalachian Spring tracks on lala.
• Clearing the Air about John Williams' Simple Gift (netnewmusic.net)
• Barack Obama inauguration music was mimed (telegraph.co.uk)
• Experts defend pre-recorded inauguration music (thestar.com)

Dumbarton Oaks (1937-38). Igor Stravinsky /tepidity?/

Image via WikipediaAfter immersing myself several years ago in American classical music of the 1920s, I ended up like the later Americana phase of Aaron Copland more than I would have ever thought. Something about how modernism was later put to use for social purposes, albeit in a constrained manner. Although I suppose cynics would say that Copland himself was a cynic or at best an opportunist.

On the other hand, I just don't like the modernism of Igor Stravinsky. I've listened to a fair amount of his music and I can't find anything I really want to hear again. Just to clarify my modernist credentials, that's less true for me with Schoenberg and certainly not true with Webern.

So one pertinent sentence from Out West Arts on an LA Philharmonic concert caught my attention:

The show also featured Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, a bit of tepid Americana à la Copland that didn’t help matters either.

Since I haven't heard this in years, I quickly found a Stravinsky-conducted version on lala:

Stravinsky & Prokofiev Conduct...

And my take? Tepid Americana.

So it's back to Copland's El Salón México for me, via a Lalo Schifrin jazz arrangement. In particular, I like the ride cymbal although others may find the whole thing tepid:

El Salon Mexico - Lalo Schifri...

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /best American work?/

Conductor Kenneth Woods suggests Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring as greatest American work:

I came away from the concert more in awe of it than ever- it is so perfectly put together, so deeply moving and so ferociously challenging. America has produced a lot of great music (and Copland produced a lot of that), but Appalachian Spring may be the great work of American music.

Maybe, although Our Town and Four Piano Blues are probably my favorite Copland compositions. And I am still fond for the piano version of El Salon Mexico.

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aworks: rob kapilow on appalachian spring el salon mexico

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland

For the record (and to dispel a stereotype), I'm continuing to realize that Aaron Copland is America's greatest composer. But I won't make that assertion in this post. Instead, this is preamble for how I found myself attending a Rob Kapilow music appreciation event at Stanford on Sunday. For those who don't know Rob, he educates listeners on the details and meaning of a particular piece through closer examination. I have a CD of his covering Mozart's Jupiter Symphony where he provides musical examples and insights (prior aworks note here):

Remember, things with Mozart are never as simple as you think....The martial flourish versus intimate strings....Contrast transformed into unity...

I found this CD (hi, Amoeba bin) quite annoying but this month's concert with Rob accompanied by an augmented St. Lawrence String Quartet was too much for me to resist since it presented Copland's Appalachian Spring. If I truly believe Copland is the guy, how could I not attend?

And fortunately, at least live, Rob was interesting, funny, entertaining, and memorable. He also worked the sell-out audience effectively. The format was an hour of lecture with examples from the piece, the piece itself in a full run-through and then a Q&A. Pedagogically, it was so-so. I could understand each isolated musical example, but in real-time, since I didn't know exactly the context in which they would appear, I missed many of the examples we had just covered. This may just be a remnant of my jazz days where I learned best by replaying sections ad infinitum.

What was interesting? He talked a lot about the "Appalachian Spring" chord, how the rest of the piece grows out of its use in the beginning, and while seemingly simple, there's more than than you might think. On the other hand, he suggested Copland had the courage to be so simple. I may prefer my simplicity truly simple but I understand his point.

Kapilow did have a particularly clever idea of reciting the text to the familiar Shaker song used as source material in the work while the clarinetist played the melody. I doubt I will ever hear "A.S." again without thinking about that. I'm less enamored about how I may also remember Rob Kapilow everytime I hear this composition. In particular, I have a low threshold for hyperbole; to suggest that the ending is "superb, fantastic and amazing" doesn't help me like it more. Although, that may just be me; at the end of what I thought was a reasonable performance, the crowd applauded more enthusiastically than any concert I've been to in awhile.

Moving beyond specific musical details, Kapilow had some larger insight into what Copland was doing and why we like this piece so much. Copland's intent was to capture the essence of what this music was about but in no way was it an attempt to be authentic. As was pointed out, presumably Shaker music didn't use modulation and counterpoint and yet Copland incorporated these techniques to his benefit. Similarly, Copland's Billy the Kid was given as another example f an imaginative interpretation rather than a factual account. This has me wondering if Doctor Atomic's downfall may ultimately be because it attempted the latter?

Kapilow suggested another reason we respond to Appalachian Spring is that it represents an idealization of America with all the possibility that entails, versus the reality of what we have, and that we want to believe. Well said.

Finally, in the Q&A, I didn't but wanted to ask why does Rob hate "Copland the Modernist?" A presumption on my part, of course...

iTunes. By the way, the Kapilow Mozart CD has a better Amazon sales rank than the Copland conducts Copland CD.

Update: Copland is of course spelled with a "d." Also, I wonder if Appalachian Spring is one of the few pieces after 1915 that Hucbald doesn't hate?

For that matter, I see Copland as the lowest-common-denominator Greatest American Composer. Does anybody really hate the music of Copland? Other choices are surely more contentious -- Stravinsky? Feldman? Glass? Adams? Ives?

Michael West in the comments suggests Duke Ellington as the Greatest American Composer. I suppose no one generally hates the music of Ellington either athough even that pick gets into the relative merits of jazz composition versus classical composition. This does make me want to listen to East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, though.