CONCERT IV: Ricardo Morales Plays Copland

No other composer has mastered every musical form as Mozart did, and done so with such ease. For him, it seemed to be almost a nuisance to transcribe his musical thoughts onto paper. Like Handel, but to an even higher degree, Mozart would develop and achieve perfection in his imagination before his hand ever began to write. Whereas most composers, even the great Beethoven, would go through countless drafts and revisions before completing a work, Mozart’s first draft was his final draft.

As a child prodigy, Mozart was immediately recognized as an unprecedented musical genius. Under his father’s tutelage, the young Mozart became a virtuoso performer on the keyboard and violin. By the age of eight, he had composed his first symphony and had toured most of Europe, performing for dignitaries, royalty, and prominent composers of the day, who were simply awed by the youth’s abilities and musical imagination.

During his brief 36 years, Mozart composed over 600 works, including dozens of operas, many mass settings, choral works, songs, ballets, 41 symphonies, divertimentos, instrumental dances, marches, serenades, sonatas, 31 piano concertos, 8 violin concertos, and other concertos for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, a new arrangement of Handel’s Messiah, and a Requiem, his final work.

Born into the Age of Enlightenment – the era of the American and French revolutions, when liberty and fraternity were the centers of thought, Mozart’s scores exhibited an order, balance, and structure associated with the Classical era that was fathered by composer Franz Joseph Haydn.

Standing as we do at the close of the “American century,” the hundred year period during which the United States was, for the first time, a major power and contributor to the world economically, politically, and culturally, the question that composer Antonín Dvořák posed almost a century ago still remains for us: what is “American” music?

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the grand old man of English music, declared that music, above all other arts, is “the expression of the soul of a nation.” Today, Aaron Copland’s name is synonymous with “American music” more than any other composer, even more than George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein.

With the musical world still quivering from the impact of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), Copland sought to recapture an America before the world wars; before its loss of innocence. By comparison, Leonard Bernstein depicted a postwar America, one increasingly divided along racial, religious, and political lines.

After studying with Rubin Goldmark (who studied with Dvořák) and Nadia Boulanger (a student of Gabriel Fauré), Copland learned, and eventually preached, the importance of finding one’s own musical voice. Like most composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Copland composed initially with little or no regard for the listener – composed for the sake of composing.

With technological advances, such as the ability to permanently record live sound or broadcast it over airwaves, Copland changed his way of listening to and ultimately composing music. Copland is perhaps the first major composer who finally realized and appreciated the importance of the listener beyond the concert hall. “I have every reason to be particularly grateful to the creator of the phonograph,” he said. “We composers owe a profound debt to Thomas Edison!”

This son of Russian Jewish immigrants quickly began to lead many of his fellow American artists in a commitment to capturing a wider audience and speaking to the concerns of the average citizen, the everyday American caught up in the dramas of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Copland responded to America’s calling for culture, pride, and patriotism. Though he represented the pinnacle of an intense mid-century Americanism, Copland was not an insular nationalist; on the contrary, he was acutely interested in world politics and in how the United States fit into the larger sphere.

As the United States crept towards and through World War II, Copland was so distracted by what he read in the papers that he found it sometimes difficult to concentrate on composing. During the 1930s Copland was often associated with more liberal ideas, but he was always honest, saying “musicians make music out of feelings aroused out of public events.”

During these times of global uncertainty and fear, Copland produced several works that were specifically and obviously related to the war effort. His Lincoln Portrait, in which a narrator recites Lincoln’s thoughts on democracy and duties of citizenship, premiered in 1942, and several months later Copland accepted a commission “to boost American spirits” and composed his world renowned Fanfare for the Common Man. He continued to capture and honor the roots of America’s heritage and the soul of the country’s present and future with his ballet Rodeo and his Third Symphony – perhaps the true great “American symphony.”