Belonging to the Ages: the Enduring Relevance of Aaron Copland's
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Belonging to the Ages: The Enduring Relevance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait KAYLYN SAWYER On Saturday, April 29, 1865, five days after Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train stopped in the city, the New York Philharmonic opened the last concert of its twenty- third season with the funeral march from Lud- wig Van Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The performance program explained this inclusion—a piece “expressly composed for the occa- sion of the death of a great hero”—as “a fitting tribute to our departed Head.” Indeed, the act of memorializing Lincoln in music began shortly after his tragic assassination plunged the nation into a period of collective shock and deep mourning. Thomas Kernan identifies over one hundred vernacular music pieces composed in the eight-month period following Lincoln’s death, but it was not until the twentieth century that serious concert works were composed to memorialize the fallen sixteenth president. Many of these compositions, which can be described as “musical memorials” or monuments “constructed not of stone, but rather in sound,” laud Lincoln’s accomplishments and attri- butes while challenging the public to attend to Lincoln’s unfinished work.1 With countless performances over the past seventy- five years and a secure place in the canon, Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait is one of the most recognizable and performed of the Lincoln musical memo- rials. As such, its use reflects changes in historical memory and in the artistic appropriation of Lincoln. Through the interactive processes of performances and listening, Lincoln Portrait, a patriotic work tinged with the progressive ideology of its composer, has invited genera- tions of audiences to subjective and personal reflection on Lincoln’s 1. New York Philharmonic Society Program, April 29, 1865; Thomas J. Kernan, “Sounding ‘The Mystic Chords of Memory’: Musical Memorials for Abraham Lincoln, 1965–2009” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2014) 23, 49; James Schmidt, “Cenotaphs in Sound: Catastrophe, Memory, and Musical Memorials,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 2 (2010), 454. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2019 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 26 Copland’s Lincoln Portrait identity while prompting social and political discourse on the essence and morality of the nation he sought to preserve. To interpret the metaphorical meaning of Lincoln Portrait and appre- ciate 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. Composer Aaron Copland was born in Brook- lyn in 1900 to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He studied music first in Brooklyn before going to Paris to work with Nadia Boulanger. He returned to the United States with a desire to create music “that would immediately be recognized as American in character.” After experimenting with jazz, he moved toward a simpler style of music he termed “imposed simplicity” that would appeal to the general public. His incorporation of folk traditions coincided with the Great Depression, which created a demand for functional music appealing to general audiences. Copland shared his belief in accessibility with conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who wrote in the New York Times, “The concert world, formerly the guarded sanctum of the elite, has now become a familiar world to millions of men and women.”2 Copland’s turn toward accessible music was further influenced by his changing political sensibilities. Moved by the desperate suf- fering of people through the Great Depression, he aligned himself with Progressivism and the Popular Front. Indeed, Copland engaged with communism in both cultural and political activities. He wrote an article for New Masses, a proletarian publication, about the benefits of a good “mass song” in creating solidarity for action and as a weapon in the class struggle. In a September 1934 letter to friend and fellow composer Israel Citkowitz, Copland expressed his communist sym- pathies, noting that he spoke at a meeting of the Communist Party in Minnesota. These political leanings are evident in his work. Composi- tions such as El Salón México (1932), Billy the Kid (1938), Appalachian Spring (1944), and Fanfare for the Common Man (1943) employ “cher- ished American myths” to promote the progressive values of radical populism, multiethnic sensitivity, and concern for the oppressed. Yet 2. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Mar- tin’s, 1984) 22–23, 27, 121–22; Copland to Nicolas Slonimsky, August 12, 1960, Aaron Copland Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress; Elizabeth B. Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 3–4; Copland, “Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch,” in Aaron Copland: A Reader; Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, xxvi; Serge Koussevitzky, “Soaring Music,” New York Times, March 5, 1939. Kaylyn Sawyer 27 despite these subtle political tints, his music reached the broad audi- ence he intended and contributed to the definition of an American sound, earning him appellations such as “Dean of American compos- ers” and “the Moses of the modern music movement.”3 With Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the world was on a path toward global conflict. This total war would be mobilized on the bat- tlefront and the home front, employing everything from mechanized weapons to popular music. Just as Copland had referred to music as a weapon in the class struggle, so now “music no less than machine guns has a part to play, and can be a weapon in the battle for a free world.” As the mass song rallied workers in solidarity, the “musical diplomacy” of World War II aimed to rally the hearts and minds of Americans to the fight for democracy. Serious music, a reminder of civilized society, was needed to impress, to inspire, and to reinforce democratic principles. Historian Annegret Fauser contends that no event in history used music “so totally, so consciously, and so unequiv- ocally” in promotion of a national cause as did World War II.4 Composers and musicians participated in this musical mobiliza- tion. Earl Robinson, composer of the Lincoln tribute The Lonseome Train: A Musical Legend, observed, “Songs can be bullets,” and con- ductor Serge Koussevitzky noted, “We, as musicians, are soldiers, too.”5 Conductor Andre Kostelanetz was also part of this musical mobilization, as he explained in a Time Magazine interview, “I want people to get the message of what democracy is, what we are fighting for.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he considered how music might be used “to mirror the magnificent spirit of our country.” Thus he proposed in a letter to commission three American composers to write “three new works . to represent a musical portrait gallery 3. Aaron Copland, “Workers Sing!,” New Masses, June 5, 1934, 28; Copland to Israel Citkowitz, September 1934, in The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, ed. Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 105–6; Elizabeth B. Crist, “Aaron Copland and the Popular Front,” Journal of the American Musicologi- cal Society 56 (Summer 2003), 424, 456–57; Leonard Bernstein, “An Intimate Sketch,” November 1970, Aaron Copland Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress; Donal Henahan, “This Aaron Is a Musical Moses,” New York Times, November 9, 1975; Wil- liam Schuman, “Aaron Copland,” Perspectives of New Music 19 (Autumn 1980–Summer 1981), 52–53. 4. Marc Blitzstein, “Composers Doing Their Stuff,” New York Times, May 3, 1942; Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4, 10. 5. Robinson qtd. in Kernan, “Sounding ‘The Mystic Chords of Memory,’” 117; Fauser, Sounds of War, 15–17 (Koussevitzky quoted on p. 17). 28 Copland’s Lincoln Portrait of great Americans.” Copland proposed Walt Whitman, “the patron poet of all American composers,” as inspiration for his composition. But with composer Jerome Kern having already selected Mark Twain, Kostelanetz suggested selecting a statesman instead of another liter- ary figure. Copland then turned to Abraham Lincoln. As Copland explained, “Lincoln was a favorite during the war years. Furthermore, I recalled that my old teacher, Rubin Goldmark, had composed an orchestral threnody in 1918, ‘Requiem Suggested by Lincoln’s Get- tysburg Address.’” In reflecting on the commission, Copland would write, “From that moment on, the choice of Lincoln as my subject seemed inevitable.”6 The choice by politically progressive Copland to memorialize a nineteenth-century Republican president might seem peculiar. In the early part of the twentieth century, however, Lincoln’s image had taken on new importance with the Lincoln centennial, and the fiftieth anniversary of his death and the Civil War’s end. It was in these early years of the century that Lincoln emerged as a national idol. Politi- cally, the Republicans’ firm hold on Lincoln’s legacy as the party’s founder weakened, as political parties on the left began to advocate economic and social equality for the marginalized and oppressed as being within the Lincoln tradition. While Theodore Roosevelt claimed that Lincoln and his political supporters were progressives in their time, Woodrow Wilson applied Lincoln’s ideas of freedom and opportunity to contemporary issues during the 1912 election. By the mid- 1930s, Democrats led by Franklin D. Roosevelt were invok- ing Lincoln frequently.7 When visiting Lincoln’s birthplace in June 1936, Roosevelt stated, “Here we can renew our pledge of fidelity to the faith which Lincoln held in the common man.” Roosevelt again incorporated Lincoln in his July 1938 monument dedication speech at Gettysburg advocating “opportunity and security for citizens” and imploring that America “live by the wisdom and the humanity of the 6.