Word: copland
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...commissioned by NBC, first given in 1939; Four Saints in Three Acts, with Virgil Thomson's gravely melodious music to Gertrude Stein's nonsensical words; Tennessee's Partner, a Quinto Maganini opera on a Bret Harte short story, which has lain unperformed, unorchestrated since 1934; Aaron Copland's play-opera for schools. The Second Hurricane; Deems Taylor's Metropolitan success of 1927, The King's Henchman...
Three composers went to work on a job usually reserved for painters. Aaron Copland dug into a Modern Library version of Abraham Lincoln's life and letters, and tried to write down his impressions in music. Jerome Kern thumbed through his Mark Twain first editions and manuscripts in his Beverly Hills library. Virgil Thomson spent two hours in Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia's City Hall office in Manhattan, watched and jotted down music while the Mayor received visitors. He also spent a morning in Pundit Dorothy Thompson's library while she read and, after her fashion, meditated...
...results, four works for symphony orchestra, were complete this week: Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, a mixture of simplicity, tenderness and nobility; Kern's Portrait for Orchestra (Mark Twain), stringing out typically Kern melodies, portraying Mark Twain's humor in an impudent polka, his "gorgeous pilot house" in a broad andante cantabile; Thomson's brassy Mayor LaGuardia Waltzes and Canons for Dorothy Thompson...
...Aaron Copland's book, "Our New Music," although contributing a few good insights, is on the whole no more valuable than a modern composer's apologia pro arte sua should be, and about as impartial as an epitaph. He brings up the old notion that Beethoven and the Romantics were too "subjective" and personal, while the new music has to "grapple" with the objective problem of the times. Of course, he hastens to add, the old devices of melody, rhythm and strong feeling are still used, only "extended and enriched" and made more "objective." All this is reassuring reading...
...contest, held by a musicians' committee "to aid Spanish democracy," was over. The prize had gone to a young, unknown composer, William Schuman, for his Second Symphony. But the promised publication and performance never materialized. One of the sympathetic judges, genial, large-nosed Composer Aaron Copland, sent Schuman a post card, "Why don't you send your score to Serge Koussevitzky?" He did, and within a week got a letter from Koussevitzky asking for the parts. A performance followed that fall. Since then Koussevitzky has championed William Schuman's music. The Boston Symphony introduced his Third Symphony...