Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin ...American press accounts, and Copland’s diaries inform Carol A. Hess’s in-depth examination of the composer’s approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland’s tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history. In Latin America, Copland’s introduced works by U.S. composers (including himself) through lectures, radio broadcasts, live performance, and conversations. Back at home, he used his celebrity to draw attention to regional composers he admired. Hess’s focus on Latin America’s reception of Copland provides a variety of outside perspectives on the composer and his mission. She also teases out the broader meanings behind reviews of Copland and examines his critics in the context of their backgrounds, training, aesthetics, and politics.
One of the country's most enduringly successful composers, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American style and aesthetic in works for a diversity of genres and mediums, including ballet, opera, ...and film. Also active as a critic, mentor, advocate, and concert organizer, he played a decisive role in the growth of serious music in the Americas in the twentieth century. In The American Stravinsky, Gayle Murchison closely analyzes selected works to discern the specific compositional techniques Copland used, and to understand the degree to which they derived from European models, particularly the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Murchison examines how Copland both Americanized these models and made them his own, thereby finding his own compositional voice. Murchison also discusses Copland's aesthetics of music and his ideas about its purpose and social function.
This is an analytical monograph by a Schenkerian music theorist, but it is also written by one performer and enthusiast for another. Tonality as Drama draws on the fields of dramaturgy, music theory, ...and historical musicology to answer a fundamental question regarding twentieth-century music: why does the use of tonality persist in opera, even after it has been abandoned in other genres? Combining the analytical approaches of the leading music and dramatic theorists of the twentieth century— Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) and Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938)— Edward D. Latham reveals insights into works by Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Aaron Copland that are relevant to analysts, opera directors, and performers alike. Latham reveals a strategic use of tonality in that repertoire as a means of amplifying or undercutting the success or failure of dramatic characters.
A SNAPSHOT Walker, Gregory
The American music teacher,
12/2021, Letnik:
71, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In 2000, they both would be inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. During the 2022 MTNA National Conference, George Walker will receive the MTNA Achievement Award-the highest award ...given by the association. An American Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship-winning composer, he is artistic director of the Colorado NeXt Music Fest and former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra.
Musicology and the Middlebrow CHOWRIMOOTOO, CHRISTOPHER; GUTHRIE, KATE; HOWLAND, JOHN ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society,
06/2020, Letnik:
73, Številka:
2
Journal Article
This is the first book devoted to the correspondence of composer Aaron Copland, covering his life from age eight to eighty-seven. The chronologically arranged collection includes letters to many ...significant figures in American twentieth-century music as well as Copland's friends, family, teachers, and colleagues. Selected for readability, interest, and the light they cast upon the composer's thoughts and career, the letters are carefully annotated and each published in its entirety.Copland was a gifted and natural letter writer who revealed much more about himself in his letters than in formal writings in which he was conscious of his position as spokesman for modern music. The collected letters offer insights into his music, personality, and ideas, along with fascinating glimpses into the lives of such other well-known musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Carlos Chávez, William Schuman, and Virgil Thomson.
In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as “imposed simplicity.” Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a ...tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland’s best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland’s politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland’s music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and ‘40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America’s past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals. While much has been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and ‘40s, very little of that attention has been aimed at the world of concert music. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.
Sawyer explores the metaphorical meaning of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, one of the most recognizable and performed of the Lincoln musical memorials. As such, its use reflects changes in ...historical memory and in the artistic appropriation of Abraham Lincoln. Through the interactive processes of performances and listening, Lincoln Portrait, a patriotic work tinged with the progressive ideology of its composer, has invited generations of audiences to subjective and personal reflection on Lincoln's identity while prompting social and political discourse on the essence and morality of the nation he sought to preserve. To interpret its metaphorical meaning and appreciate its enduring appeal, it is necessary to explore the circumstances of its commissioning, the character and motivations of the composer himself, and how the Lincoln tradition was claimed in the early part of the twentieth century.
Other performances preserved feature the Juilliard String Quartet in performances from its own first decade; performances by distinguished faculty members including pianist Rosina Lhevinne, cellist ...Leonard Rose, and singer Jennie Tourel; student performances by pianist Van Cliburn, singers Leontyne Price (in a performance of Verdi's Falstaff) and Shirley Verrett Carter; and a chamber music concert with faculty members Julius Baker (flute), Marcel Grandjany (harp), and Walter Trampler (viola) performing Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp. "The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange records are an ideal example of a collection of a locally grown dance company that ascended to international recognition," says Vincent Novara, curator for Special Collections in Performing Arts at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. The videos document all manner of activity as it pertains to Lerman's vision for dance: rehearsal process, footage of works in development, and performance documentation, as well as Critical Response Process exchanges, which showcase the pioneering four-step process devised by Lerman for giving and receiving feedback on any form of artistic work in progress.
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