Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2018 Jazz, Desire, Racial Difference, and Twentieth Century Gender Ideology in Arron Copland's Grohg: A Ballet in One Act Nate J. Ruechel

Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF MUSIC

JAZZ, DESIRE, RACIAL DIFFERENCE, AND TWENTIETH CENTURY GENDER

IDEOLOGY IN ARRON COPLAND’S GROHG: A BALLET IN ONE ACT

By

NATE RUECHEL

A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

2018

Nate Ruechel defended this thesis on March 28 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael Broyles Professor Directing Thesis

Jennifer Atkins Committee Member

Charles E. Brewer Committee Member

Denise Von Glahn Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... iv

Abstract ...... v

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. THE FRENCH HARLEQUIN ...... 21

3. THE AESTHETICS OF COPLAND’S SYMPHONIC JAZZ ...... 38

4. VISIONS OF JAZZ IN GROHG’S “DANCE OF THE OPIUM EATER” ...... 56

5. CONCLUSION ...... 70

APPENDIX: “THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” ...... 72

References ...... 79

Biographical Sketch ...... 83

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1: “Visions of Jazz” Textual Indication ...... 2

1.2: Components to Aaron Copland’s Polyrhythm ...... 6

1.3: Piano Variations (1930) Variation 17, Measures 1-5...... 8

1.4: “The New Woman- Wash Day” ...... 14

4.1: Spatial, Temporal, and Functional Relationships Between the Grohg Scores ...... 59

4.2: Grohg: A Ballet in One Act (1932), p. 64, mm. 9-12”...... 60

4.3: “Visions of Jazz” Polyrhythmic Piano Vamp ...... 61

4.4: Grohg: A Ballet in One Act (1932), p. 67, mm. 6-12; p. 68 m. 1 ...... 62

4.5: Grohg: A Ballet in One Act (1932), p. 70, mm. 1-4 ...... 64

iv

ABSTRACT

This project investigates the explicit jazz idioms in Aaron Copland’s first orchestral composition: Grohg a Ballet in One Act. Composed between 1922-1925, and later revised in

1932, Grohg was never published in Copland’s lifetime but it maintains a significant position in the composer’s catalog. Material from the ballet is directly quoted in many of Copland’s early compositions such as Cortege Macabre (1923), the Dance Symphony (1929), and in sections of his second ballet, Hear Ye, Hear Ye! (1932). Beyond these uses, Copland employed the ballet’s third movement, the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” to illustrate the lectures on symphonic jazz he gave in the 1920s. The structural qualities of this movement’s jazz idioms served as the model for Copland’s theories on jazz style and technique first expressed in the 1927 article “Jazz

Structures and Influence,” and later in a lecture he delivered in 1940 titled “The Influence of Jazz on Modern Music.”

Drawing on historical and musicological evidence housed in the Library of Congress’

Aaron Copland Collection, I interpret the “Dance of the Opium Eater’s” jazz techniques as an example of racialized and sexualized musical discourse. By interpolating what he understood as a feminine vernacular tradition into the precepts of modernist composition, I argue Copland’s jazz-classical fusions approximate an early twentieth century theory of queer subjectivity.

Ultimately, this thesis will demonstrate how Grohg’s jazz idioms articulate an aesthetic model for coalitional unity that would continue to inform Copland’s approach to jazz throughout his career.

v

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1922 Aaron Copland began composing his last student work, Grohg: A Ballet in One

Act. The ballet was never published in its entirety, but it maintains a significant position in

Copland’s catalog. The work’s major dances were derived from an earlier set of waltzes that

Copland completed under Nadia Boulanger’s supervision. Grohg can therefore be interpreted as an early opportunity for the young composer to refine and synthesize the creative skills he learned abroad. In other words, the ballet stands as a musical record of Copland’s transnational education. Beyond its pedagogic function, Grohg’s material resonates in Copland’s professional works. He directly quotes the ballet in Cortege Macabre (1923), the Dance Symphony (1929), and in his second ballet, Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934).1

The ballet’s scenario outlines a “fantastic and symbolic” narrative about a necromancer

(Grohg) who raises three marginalized individuals from beyond the grave: a child, an opium addict, and a prostitute. Grohg “loves the dead,” and seeks their physical affection “despite his ugly exterior.” When the curtain opens, Grohg plods into an “empty courtyard surrounded by a thick, circular wall, from the top of which descend two flight(s) of stairs.” At Grohg’s command, his servants drag coffins containing the three unfortunate victims down the stairs to center stage.

As the ballet unfolds, the necromancer uses his magic abilities to make each victim dance. They remain under Grohg’s control so long as “he does not touch them.” Inevitably, each corpse is overwhelmed by the necromancer’s grotesque appearance, and his unwelcome physical advances. In the final movement, Grohg is publicly ridiculed by his former servants and victims

1 Roberta Lindsey, “A Historical and Musical Study of Aaron Copland’s Grohg: A Ballet in One Act,” PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1996. Pp. 76-126.

1

for his inability to achieve physical intimacy with any of the undead. Angered to rage, Grohg picks up the prostitute and throws her into the audience at the ballet’s climax. When the dust settles, all that remains is a state of “complete obscurity, except for a mysterious light that illuminates the head of Grohg.” The curtain closes after Grohg wistfully meanders offstage, “as if he imagined the entire thing.”2

The ballet’s 1932 revision includes an opening dirge followed by four dances extracted from the original score and miscellaneous sections: “Dance of the Adolescent,” “Dance of the

Opium Eater,” “Dance of the Streetwalker,” and the final “Dance of Mockery.” The “Dance of the Opium Eater” is particularly notable as it features one of Copland’s first explicit references to jazz techniques. After a 32-measure introduction, the words “The opium eater begins to dance

(visions of Jazz),” cue a new polyrhythmic theme from the piano (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 “Visions of Jazz” Textual Indication3

2 Aaron Copland and Harold Clurman, Grohg: A Ballet in One Act, 1922-4 Library of Congress, Aaron Copland Collection (now referred to as CCLC). 3 Aaron Copland, Grohg: A Ballet in One Act, (1932), pp. 67, mm. 5-8.

2

Beyond indicating his compositional resources, Copland’s text also employs certain discursive tactics used at the beginning of the twentieth century to represent Eastern subjects as prone to addictive behavior. As Charles Hiroshi Garrett notes “U.S. companies had shipped opium into China since the early nineteenth century, its evils were linked in the public imagination to China and Chinese America.” In effect, “this stigma served as a marker of racial difference and immorality.” 4 Why did Copland interpolate what he understood as jazz within these Eastern tropes? What can we make of the text’s overt racial references?

This project is a critical evaluation of the jazz techniques Copland references in Grohg’s

“Dance of the Opium Eater.” My interpretation of Copland’s musical fusion is multifaceted.

Grohg’s status as a student composition implies Copland was at least attempting to conform to

Nadia Boulanger’s musical precepts. Her Parisian studio was responsible for Copland’s introduction to Jean Cocteau’s modernist aesthetic theories. As I will demonstrate, Copland’s developing style soon coalesced around Cocteau’s thought. On the one hand, we can think of

Grohg as a trial-run for many of the ideas and compositional methods he absorbed into his mature works.

From a different perspective, the intersection of jazz and Eastern subjectivity in the

“Dance of the Opium Eater” may connote a queer musical subtext. Gay and lesbian criticism became widely accepted in American musicology during the 1980s and 90s, thanks in no small part to pioneering work by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Woods, and Gary C. Thomas.5 Since then,

4 Charles Hiroshi Garret, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 130. 5 Philip Bret, Elizabeth Woods, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, (New York: Routledge, 1994). For a textual study on the complexity of queer aesthetic codes, see Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, Ruth Solie, ed., (Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1993), Pp. 164-183. On absolute music and queer subjectivity, see Maynard Soloman, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th Century Music, 12 (Spring, 1989): 193-206; Kofi Agawu, “Schubert’s Sexuality: A Prescription for Analysis?” 19th Century Music, 17 (Summer, 1993): 79-82; Susan McClary, Feminine Endings:

3

several musicologists have investigated Copland’s aesthetics in the context of his homosexuality.6 I interpret the movement’s jazz techniques as an approximation of Copland’s homoerotic desires, or more plainly, as a conscious act of early twentieth-century queer expression. My interpretation is informed by archival documents housed in the Library of

Congress’ Aaron Copland Collection.

Copland’s published writings and documented aesthetic theories confirm he understood jazz in racial and sexual terms. As I make plain, Copland and other affluent gay men regularly participated in orientalist discourses as a strategy to combat mainstream sexual ideals. Borrowing from non-western cultural traditions allowed Copland to freely express his private sexual desires in a public setting, without risking his own social status. From the relative security of his urban homes (first in New York, and then in Paris), Copland was spatially removed from the objects of his fantasy. If his motives were ever questioned, he could simply maintain he was only propagating Cocteau’s transnational aesthetic. The possibility of queer desire in an early twentieth-century composition like Grohg was thus facilitated by Copland’s advantaged social position in relation to the cultures and subjects he chose to musically represent. Nonetheless, if

Grohg’s text and jazz structures are on some level encoding queer desire, the composition can be interpreted as a valuable record of early twentieth-century queer agency, and even as an

Music, Gender, and Sexuality, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 69-79. For a documentary account of queer identification with classical opera, see Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, New York: Poseidon Press, 1993). 6 Among other works, Howard Pollack finds “homosexual subtexts” in Copland’s Billy the Kid (1938), Of Mice and Men (1939), and in the “macabre eroticism of Grohg.” See, Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 525-6. In her analysis of Rodeo (1942) Beth E. Levy discovered a short-lived “subversive potential” for sexual discovery in ballet’s frontier setting. See Beth Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 340-50. Gayle Murchison hears a “camp sensibility,” or comedic/ironic queer agency, in the “Burlesque” movement from Music for the Theatre (1925). Murchison, The American Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetics of Copland’s New American Music, The Early Works, 1921-1938, (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 116-9.

4

an example of creative social resistance.

Exotically Mundane

Many scholars have observed a preponderance of jazz themes and allusions in Copland’s earliest compositions. In his pathbreaking 1953 biography, Arthur Berger divided Copland’s oeuvre into four stylistic epochs. He distinguished Copland’s “formative period” (1920-25) from his more mature “second style, [which] came to the public’s attention with Music for the Theatre

[1925].” According to Berger, Copland’s earliest works are marked by “a personal nostalgia and wiriness, with a liberal use of dissonance idiomatic of the twenties … but there is a strong

American flavor.”7 In Berger’s estimation, this national quality manifests as “a trend towards an indigenous idiom through incorporation of jazz.”8 His commentary on Copland’s works from

1925-1930 continues with an examination of the rhythmic and melodic structure of their jazz motives.

Berger’s analytical method is consistent with Copland’s documented belief that “the essential character of jazz is its rhythm.” 9 Stanley Kleppinger has closely examined the structural techniques Copland referred to as “jazz rhythm” in the composer’s published writings.

In a 1927 article, Copland opined, “possibly the chief influence of jazz will be shown in the development of the polyrhythm.”10 As Kleppinger explains, Copland understood “polyrhythm” as a specific subdivision of 8 eighth notes (3+5; 3+3+2) played over two or more consecutive measures. In Copland’s view, this rhythmic formula becomes “jazzed” when it is set over a steady quarter note bassline that emphasized beats 2 and 4. As Figure 1.2 shows, the resulting

7 Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 38. 8 Ibid., Pp. 38-9. 9 Aaron Copland, “Jazz Structure and Influence,” Modern Music, (January 1927): 14. 10 Ibid., p.13.

5

“syncopation” is actually a series of agogic accents that naturally result from the juxtaposition of a triple meter against a duple meter.11

Duple Meter Bass

Triple Meter Melody

Composite Rhythm

Figure 1.2 Components of Copland’s Polyrhythm

The 1927 article did not address the 12-bar blues, (or any other idiomatic jazz forms), nor common performance practices like glissando slides or extended improvisatory breaks. In fact, as

Kleppinger notes, Copland’s thoughts on jazz’s origins betray his limited knowledge of the popular genre. “It began, I suppose, on some Negro’s dull tomtom in Africa … it is the music every American has heard as a child.”12 These attitudes painted jazz as a genre that is simultaneously exotic/removed from elite social conventions, and, (because of its ubiquitous presence in the United States), as a symbol of the commonplace. Perhaps this “exotically

11 Stanley Kleppinger, “On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron Copland,” Faculty Publications: University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music, 51 (Spring 2003). Accessed 12/28/2017 at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/51, pp. 76-80. 12 Copland, “Jazz Structure,” pp. 10; 12.

6

normal” quality was appealing to Copland because of its resonance with Jean Cocteau’s aesthetic theories.

Transnational Influences

Copland scholars have largely retreated from Berger’s Americanist paradigm. The new model does not necessary reject Copland’s musical nationalism, but musicologists now contextualize his early stylistic affinities within international aesthetic and cultural trends. Gayle

Murchison argues that Copland’s Parisian musical circle was largely responsible for his developing opinions on jazz and popular music. She highlights Nadia Boulanger’s professional relationship with Igor Stravinsky and the “second stage” of French neoclassicism “now shaped by Jean Cocteau, a group of six young French composers, and their musical godfather, Eric

Satie.”13

Carol Oja has similarly argued that Copland strategically employed Cocteau’s aesthetic theories to promote American musical culture to a transnational audience in the late 1920s.14

When Copland returned to the United States in 1924, he published a series of articles on modern music.15 His writings advanced other American composers by comparing them to established

European artists. For instance, in 1926 Copland praised Roy Harris and Avery Clafin for their

“contact with the Cocteau-Satie group.”16 This juxtaposition at once elevated Copland’s

American contemporaries while also confirming his individual aesthetic affinities.

13 Murchison, “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland Between the Wars: Style and Ideology,” PhD. diss., Yale University, 1999, p.194. 14 Carol Oja, “The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland,” in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920’s, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 237-52. 15Notably, Copland’s earliest articles praised French masters like Gabriel Faure and Darius Milhaud. See “Gabriel Faure: A Neglected Master, Musical Quarterly, 10 (1924): 573-86, and “Music Since 1920,” Modern Music, 5 (March-April 1928): 16-20 16 Aaron Copland, “America’s Young Men of Promise,” Modern Music, 3 (1926): 18.

7

Four years later, Copland completed the Piano Variations (1930). In the seventeenth variation, Oja finds an abstracted example of the polyrhythmic techniques Copland described in

1927 as “jazz rhythm.” She writes “the syncopations of jazz—incorporated so literally in

Copland’s Piano Concerto of 1926—have been subtly integrated and personalized [into] a two- voice counterpoint [that] is set up in octaves, [and] grouped in shifting, cross-accented compounds of two and three. (Figure 1.3).”17 Could Grohg’s similar rhythmic structure musically evidence Copland’s affinity for Cocteau’s aesthetics? Or was Copland’s symphonic jazz simply a marker of his individual American identity?

Figure 1.3: Piano Variations (1930), Variation 17, Mm. 1-5.

Elizabeth Crist’s scholarship has focused primarily on evaluating the musical implications of Aaron Copland’s well-documented leftist political sympathies. Her 2005 essay,

“Copland and the Politics of America,” considers the mutable nature of “Americanness” and its political implications in musical texts. For Crist, Copland’s published works from the 1920s-50s

17 Oja, “The Transatlantic Gaze,” p. 243. My emphasis.

8

illustrate “moments when musical and cultural strands entangled to form a particular image of

America.”18 From 1920-1927, Crist believes jazz was an aesthetically flexible genre that symbolized for white Europeans “a sonic marker of modernity and modernism.”19

In Crist’s view, the jazz allusions in Music for the Theatre’s (1925) “Dance” and

“Burlesque” movements recall the social complexity of the American metropolis. These distinctive themes highlighted the ethnic heterogeneity claimed by large cities like New York or

New Orleans. Crist thus interprets Copland’s jazz as a signifier for his urban identity, or as a symbol of his lived experiences in the Bohemian neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Paris. Again, these factors appear consistent with nationalist sympathies and reflect Copland’s early tendency to interpolate popular entertainments into his serious compositions. Like Crist, Annegret Fauser has recently evaluated Copland’s identification as an “American” musician in the 1920’s. She bluntly argues that the symphonic jazz found in Copland’s early compositions represented an artistic alignment with American musical nationalism. In Fauser’s estimation, Copland’s patriotic stance was forged during his European training as a strategy to resist anti-American cultural sentiments that typified interwar France.20

Does Grohg’s jazz signify an American identity? It is useful to remember that Grohg was originally composed as a pedagogic exercise. As mentioned, Copland extracted many of the ballet’s dances for use in works published as late as 1934. His unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to publish the ballet in its entirety, even after a complete revision, suggests the original

18 Elizabeth Crist, “Copland and the Politics of America,” in Aaron Copland and His World, Carol Oja, and Judith Tick Editors, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 278-9. 19 Ibid., p. 279. 20 Annegret Fauser, “The Making of An ‘American’ Composer,” in The Politics of Musical Identity, (Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), p. 134. France and America’s shifting geopolitical and economic positions following World War One likely contributed to this hostility.

9

edition may have been written exclusively for Nadia Boulanger’s ears.21 After all, as Fauser notes, Boulanger’s instruction was “refreshing and highly promising for it opened the possibility of American music becoming the precise locus for the flourishing of a fresh national school in dialogue with the rest of the musical world.”22 Perhaps the transnational nature of Boulanger’s instructional program implies Copland’s jazz was a musical representation of America. This thought seems consistent with Berger’s taxonomy, which defined Copland’s second style by its jazz quality. Still, as other scholars have argued, jazz was simply one musical resource Copland mined for his early works. The genre was only a single component of his developing modernist idiom.

Recently, Murchison described Grohg as an “ultramodern neoclassical work with

American sensibilities.”23 Murchison thinks that while in Paris, Copland understood jazz as

“international modern, urban vernacular music.”24 Contrasting Berger’s system, her analysis of

Grohg’s polyrhythmic finale sheds light on the variety of popular musical resources Copland used in his earliest works.25 Among other modernist allusions, her study highlights Copland’s employment of Stravinskian rhythmic ostinati in both his student and professional works.26

According to Murchison, these practices evidences Copland’s desire to conform to Cocteau’s aesthetics. Unfortunately, Murchison reaches her conclusions without considering Grohg’s

“Dance of the Opium Eater.” This omission is curious in light of Copland’s specific indications

21 The 1932 revision is currently the ballet’s most complete edition (the original score has been lost). Since Copland rarely revised his earlier compositions, the time he devoted to reworking the ballet perhaps evidences his desire to see the work produced in his lifetime. The complex circumstances of Grohg’s composition are examined in greater detail in Chapter Four, “Visions of Jazz in Grohg’s ‘Dance of the Opium Eater.’” 22 Fauser, “The Making of An ‘American’ Composer,” Pp. 134. My emphasis. 23 Murchison, The American Stravinsky, p. 93. 24 Ibid., p. 93. 25 Including social dances like rags, and tangos, along with popular Tin Pan Alley songs. 26 Murchison, The American Stravinsky, pp. 83-90.

10

that marked this movement as jazz-inspired. A closer examination of the “Dance of the Opium

Eater” is therefore necessary to nuance the complex layers of aesthetic significance that Copland ascribed to his symphonic jazz, both in Grohg and in his later works.

Alternative Appetites

Copland may have been attracted to Cocteau and his disciples because of their strong distaste for nineteenth century Romanticism. Reflecting on his time in Paris, Copland stated, “It was Milhaud who interested me most...When other people were thinking ‘Down with Wagner!’ he was the one who yelled ‘Down with Wagner!’”27 Similar anti-Romantic rhetoric is present in a letter Copland wrote to Nadia Boulanger in 1923:

I might get really sentimental about the rue Ballu [the street where Boulanger lived and held her salon sessions] and all that it has meant and still means to me… Not being romantic, I mustn’t get ‘sentimental’ about anything, must I? But I am sure you will understand what I feel I owe you after two years of work, just as you understood the emotion in my apparently cold Passacaglia [1922].28

The above letter implies multiple layers of aesthetic signification within one of Copland’s student works: the overtly present anti-romanticism, and the more personally encoded sentimentality. This synthesis can be read as embodying a social reconciliation practiced by

Copland and other gay men at the start of the twentieth century.29

Copland finished much of Grohg’s original material during a trip to Germany in 1922.30

While traveling, he maintained correspondence with his French mentor. He wrote to Boulanger

27 Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1920 Through 1942 (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), p. 71. Emphasis in the original. 28 Aaron Copland, Aaron Copland letter to Nadia Boulanger, July 25, 1923, CCLC. 29 The structural similarities between Cocteau’s aesthetics and queer experience are further enumerated in Chapter Two: The French Harlequin. 30Historical evidence documenting Copland’s trip aboard is rather limited. We know Copland attended performances featuring works by Arnold Schoenberg, but his musical activity was not limited to the concert hall. As Howard Pollack observes, Copland also visited Vienna’s Weinberg Bar in 1923 where he may have heard jazz musician Arthur Briggs. It is likely Copland frequented other vernacular performances spaces during his time outside Paris such as social dance halls and cabaret clubs.

11

“I must explain to you that my friend [Harold] Clurman, and myself are now ardent ‘disciples’ of

[André] Gide.”31 Marsha Hanna’s criticism of Gide’s Corydon (1911-1920; 1924), illuminates an ideology of natalism that was characteristic of interwar French society.32 Natalists privileged fatherhood and male reproductive capacity as the most desirable masculine traits. In France, wartime homophobia was encouraged by a nationalist belief that colored homoerotic desire as a

“German vice.” The war had decimated France’s male population, consequently resulting in greater female participation in the country’s workforce, and in a general decline in the birth rate.

Effeminate men became socially suspect; not because of their potentially deviant sexuality, but due to their presumed inability/unwillingness to reproduce and bolster the ranks of the French military. Natalistism was therefore a rigid gender ideology, rather than a moral condemnation of same-gender sexual behavior. A queer subject’s sexual orientation, as we know this identity category today, was less important than their willingness to conform to established reproductive expectations.

In the context of interwar natalist thought Gide’s text can be read as an argument for the social necessity of male sexual minorities. Gide cast his protagonist as physically capable, extroverted, and most importantly, with a temperament that facilitated his successful mentorship of the community’s younger men. Corydon’s homoerotic desires are thus reimagined as social assets rather than liabilities. Corydon’s mentorships were successful because his queer subject position exonerated him of the time commitments associated with a straight male’s domestic role

31 Aaron Copland, Letter to Nadia Boulanger, 1923, CCLC. Harold Clurman shared an apartment with Copland in Paris. Both men are credited as authors of Grohg’s scenario. Paul Anderson has commented on Copland’s intensive engagement with Andre Gide’s philosophical texts during his European studies. See Paul Anderson, “‘To Become as Human as Possible’: The Influence of Andre Gide on Aaron Copland,” in Aaron Copland and His World, Judith Tick and Carol Oja editors, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp.52-55. 32 Marsha Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Croydon,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, Jefferey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. ed., (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 203-4.

12

as the head of the nuclear family. His alternative sexual proclivities were tolerated because of his willingness to take on the extra social responsibilities assigned to any mentor or educator in the public sphere. Like Corydon, Copland’s professional success hinged on his ability to reconcile his private effeminate or homoerotic desires with his public masculine persona. Emotional/sexual expression was not rejected in this model, but it was set in a space that sounded only for those who knew what to listen for.

Nadine Hubbs offers an alternative explanation for Copland’s affinity for French culture and Cocteau’s aesthetics. Hubbs observes several biographical and stylistic similarities between

Aaron Copland and other American composers like Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, David

Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, and Ned Rorem. Some of the six men were Jewish, most had middle- class upbringings, all studied with Boulanger, and all were sexually deviant. All the composers wrote in a generally tonal idiom, and they often drew from popular American musical resources.

Hubbs highlights their shared identification with Cocteau’s theories. She believes this consistent affinity was bred from an oppositional stance against German expressionism. In Hubbs’ view,

Cocteau’s aesthetics offered Copland and other queer members of the Boulangerie a common lexicon to construct a feminized or queer strain of musical modernism.33 Here, Copland’s identity informed his aesthetic affinity, more so than his musical tastes.

Hubbs’ work answers Catherine Parson Smith’s call to investigate a “less hostile or more gender-inclusive form of modernism in American music.”34 Smith argues that musical

33 Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity, (Berkeley and Los Angles: The University of California Press, 2000), p. 117. Like Hubbs, I use the term “queer” to denote the wide spectrum of non-normative sexual desire. George Chauncey has argued that the creation of American male homosexual subculture was a reaction to the modern invention, and subsequent medicalization, of sexuality. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, (New York, Basic Books, 1994), pp. 274-5. 34 Catherine Parsons Smith, “‘A Distinguishing Virility’: Feminism and Modernism in American Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994) p. 100.

13

modernism in the United States developed as a reaction to increased female participation in the public sphere. She points to the violent misogyny that peppers Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist

Manifesto, George Antheil’s hyper-masculine “bad boy” persona, and Charles Ives’ writings as evidence that certain musical styles drew their aesthetic supremacy based on their separation from connotations of femininity. Smith believes these discursive tactics were a reaction to the first wave of American feminism, and their symbolic standard-bearer, the “New Woman.”

Figure 1.4 is a satirical representation of this ideal from 1901.

Figure 1.4 “The New Woman- Wash Day”35

In the photo, the female subject has assumed domestic authority over her male companion. An unequal social relationship is suggested by her straightforward, masculine attire, stance, and conspicuous cigarette. The power imbalance is further reinforced by the male subject’s

35 Underwood and Underwood, “The New Woman- Wash Day,” New York, 1901, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Online Catalog. Retrieved 1/21/2018 from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b44488/.

14

engagement in domestic responsibilities conventionally understood as female. This role reversal was designed to objectify certain turn of the century male anxieties. In the photo, the unquestioned authority males enjoyed in the public sphere was not dismantled, but rather it is assumed by the female subject in an effort to subvert her assigned social role.

In 1979, Michel Foucault wrote: “There is little question that one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body.”36 In his History of Sexuality, Foucault narrates the medicalization of middle-class sexuality that began in the nineteenth century. “The aristocracy,” he writes, “had already asserted the special character of its body … its ancestry and value of its alliances … The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex … The concern with genealogy became a preoccupation with heredity.”37 For the elite, deviant sexual behavior was of little moral concern, since their privileged economic and social status was guaranteed by birth and tradition. Conversely, since the bourgeoisie’s social status could be questioned, the moral legitimacy of their progeny was of critical import. Twentieth-century psychoanalysis offered the middle class an opportunity to objectively “cure” potential blemishes on their family trees.

Despite these developments, the working classes avoided these newly invented “sexualities” to a certain degree, as their low social position, which would never be questioned, created space to resist discursive ideals of sexual normativity. If we accept Foucault’s History, it is reasonable to conclude that before the Second World War, public queer expression was imagined as an exclusive praxis of the elite and proletariat. As I demonstrate, Cocteau’s aesthetics advocated for a mediation between high and low-class entertainments. In other words, Cocteau was after an art that lived exclusively in the domains of the queer-friendly classes. This structural similarity lends

36 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction, Robert Hurley Trans., (New York: Random House, 1978). Pp. 126 115-131. 37 Ibid., Pp. 124.

15

credence to Hubbs’ assertion that there is more than a superficial relationship between neoclassical aesthetic affinity and queer agency.

Other contemporary musicologists have also interrogated Copland’s style in the context of his unique social position. David Metzler’s study of Copland’s early songs has uncovered the composer’s previously unacknowledged experimentation with Eastern tropes.38 Though

Copland’s later music is quickly associated with instrumental bravado and rugged American settings, Metzler has drawn attention to the homoerotic sympathies found in his early vocal works. “Spurned Love (1917),” “Pastorale (1921),” and “Alone (1922),” sonify two fantasies that may have appealed to Copland’s personal sensibilities: gender ambiguity and cultural transformation. Though the songs are clearly documenting romantic relationships, the texts quoted bellow do not specify the gender of the parties involved. 39

“Alone.”

I shall never see your tired sleep In the bed that you made beautiful, Nor hardly ever be a dream That plays by your dark hair; Yet I think I know your turning sigh And your trusting arm's abandonment For they are the picture of my night, My night that does not.

“Spurned Love”

Ah! sad are they who know not love, Drift down a moonless sea, beyond The silvery coasts of fairy isles. And sadder they whose longing lips Kiss empty air, and never touch The dear warm mouth of those they love-- Waiting, wasting, suffering much.

38 David Metzler, “‘Spurned Love’: Eroticism and Abstraction in the Early Works of Aaron Copland,” Journal of Musicology, 15/4, (Autumn, 1997), Pp. 419. 39.Ibid., Pp. 420-24.

16

“Pastorale”

Since you love me and I love you The rest matters not; I will cut grass in the fields And you will sell it for beasts. Since you love me and I love you The rest matters not; I will sow maize in the fields And you will sell it for people.

From Metzler’s perspective, this degree of ambiguity allowed queer listeners, performers, and even Copland himself, “a broad refuge from the ubiquitous heterosexual love lyric.”40 In the early twentieth century, middle-class gay westerners were accustomed to embodying contrasting private and public sexual identities. Even the possibility of public queer expression could function as a reconciliation between these opposing models.

Copland’s texts come from two publications by E. Powys Mathers: The Garden of Bright

Waters (1920), and Colored Stars: Versions Of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems (1919). According to

Metzler, these publications facilitated voyeuristic journeys through imagined and racialized

Eastern worlds. Mathers’ poetry colored the East as essentially hedonistic; the Eastern subject’s refusal to adopt the Western sexual ethic was, for Mather’s and his readers, further evidence of their innate barbarity. Queer subjects may have been attracted to this exotic/erotic literary trope, because these cultural parodies represented the East as a place that willingly permitted alternative sexual expression. Reading Mather’s poetry allowed these individuals to envision public acceptance of queer desire from the safety of their own bedrooms.41 “For Copland and

40 Ibid., p. 424. Or an escape from the amorphous hegemony of heteronormativity. 41 These texts are a constituent part of what Edward Said called orientalist discourse. “Orientalism,” he notes, “depends for its strategy on [a] flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without every losing him the relative upper hand.” As a consumer, and disseminator of Mathers’ “Asiatic” poetry, Copland manipulated Eastern subjectivity to meet his own aesthetic ends, without ever risking his own social status. See Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 7.

17

many other queer subjects, such journeys provided an escape from an erotic confinement; however, … those readers ruefully realized that such escapes [were] limited to the geography of the imagination.”42 The texts’ promise of sexual freedom was ontologically ephemeral: the possibility of public queer expression vanished just as soon as one stopped reading. Copland’s decision to publish “Pastorale” in 1921 and “Alone” in 1922 extended this private fantasy into the public domain.

I argue that Grohg’s “Dance of the Opium Eater” participates in a similar type of musical orientalism. Positioned as an object of Grohg’s unfulfilled desire, the Opium Eater is imagined as essentially Eastern by virtue of his vice. The later character’s associations with racial difference are reinforced by the movement’s text. The Opium Eater’s “vision’s of jazz” is an explicit reference to a popular American genre that Copland understood as categorically Black. I believe this type of racialized musical discourse served two significant social functions. First it facilitated a metaphorical separation between Copland’s own subject position as a Jewish-

American and the location of the individuals his text references. Second the movement’s racialized text connotes a primordial or primitive expressive space. Here expressions of non- normative sexual desire are viewed not with alarm, but as evidence of the racial Other’s innate irrationality. Thus, the homoerotic desires embodied in Grohg’s “Dance of the Opium Eater” are presented as normative to White heterosexual through the lens of racial exoticism.

Project Organization

The remainder of this project is organized as follows: chapter Two: “The French

Harlequin,” situates the “Dance of the Opium Eater’s” racialized tropes within Copland’s transnational education. I begin with a biographical narrative that documents Copland’s early

42 Quoted in Metzler, “Spurned Love,” p. 422.

18

musical training and aesthetic identification. Between 1921 and 1924, Nadia Boulanger’s studio facilitated Copland’s introduction to the cutting edge of interwar French music and European culture. Significantly her instructional program facilitated Copland’s earliest encounters with modernist composers like Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky. These interactions contributed to

Copland’s adoption of Jean Cocteau’s neoclassical aesthetic. I continue with an examination of

Cocteau’s 1918 essay, Cock and Harlequin. This analysis elucidates similarities between his ideology, and how Copland understood his queer subjectivity at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Chapter Three, “The Aesthetics of Copland’s Symphonic Jazz,” analyzes the resonance of Cocteau’s thought in Copland’s written aesthetic theories. As Oja’s work shows, when

Copland returned to the United States in 1924 he produced a series of published articles on modern European and American music. We know from Kleppinger that in 1927, Copland understood “jazz rhythm” as a specific polyrhythmic effect: one that juxtaposed a triple meter melody against a duple meter bass. For a speech he gave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on

January 1st, 1940, Copland wrote a set of handwritten lecture notes titled “The Influence of Jazz on Modern Music.” These pages explain his understanding of the structural and affective advantages of jazz in greater detail than any of his earlier articles. The lecture identified two distinct ways modern composers effectively merged jazz into their serious or classical works: first the incorporation of polyrhythmic techniques, and second, the symbolic approximation of what Copland called the “jazz spirit.” A close examination of Copland’s remarks thus provides a useful frame of reference for interpreting his symphonic jazz.

Next, I offer a critical interpretation of the racialized jazz in Grohg’s “Dance of the

Opium Eater.” I begin with an analysis that suggests the “Dance of the Opium Eater’s” musical

19

structure reflects Copland’s understanding of his queer subjectivity. I then conclude with a evaluation of Copland’s early compositional practices. I consider his fusion of jazz and Eastern allusions alongside similar trends in early twentieth century American popular music, and against his own unique status as a racial and sexual other.43 Lastly, I end with a reflexive narrative on Copland’s methods of borrowing. This final passage details how I believe Copland’s early aesthetic ideologies articulate a coalitional theory of cultural reconciliation.

43 Like sexuality, definitions of race are malleable, and often shift alongside cultural and political trends. It is useful to remember that between 1880-1945, Jewish and other Eastern and Southern Europeans were classified as non- White by the American government. In 1911, Vermont senator William P. Dillingham chaired a commission tasked with documenting the country’s immigrant population. The final report qualified Jews with 36 other European nationalities as racial Others. On Dillingham’s recommendation, Congress soon passed the draconian Johnson Act of 1924. Expanding the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, this legislation placed heavy restrictions on immigration from all countries outside of Northern Europe. See, United States Congress, Reports of the Immigration Commission (1907-1910), William Paul Dillingham chairman, (Washington, Government Print Office, 1911), p. 4. Retrieved 12/30/2017 from https://archive.org/details/reportsimmigrat00dillgoog.

20

CHAPTER 2

THE FRENCH HARLEQUIN

Aaron Copland traveled to France for the first time on June 16th, 1921. After nearly a week aboard an ocean liner, the young composer was nauseous; his long body ached from his cabin’s small bedframe. He wrote to his parents: “Yesterday, the sea was at its roughest, and after having decided I would never be sea sick again, I felt it worse than ever … We expect to arrive at Havre sometime during the night, and leave for Paris about 7 A.M. to-morrow (sic) morning.”44 Copland’s parents were both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father,

Harris, left the town of Shavli, Lithuania in the 1870’s for economic advancement, and to avoid military conscription.45 His son’s return to the Old World was perhaps motivated by a similar desire for the possibilities promised by modernity.

A Solid American Foundation

Paris was an opportunity for Copland to explore his developing interest in composition.

In 1907, Copland began to study the rudiments of the piano in Brooklyn, New York with his sister Laurine. He continued to train as a classical pianist with Leopold Wolfsohn from 1913-

1917. During the Wolfsohn years Copland produced many of his early compositional experiments, but he soon understood the limitations of his harmonic vocabulary. He observed in his autobiography, “In 1916 I was still lacking a finished composition. I sent for a mail-order harmony course, but … I realized that in order to develop I needed a real teacher of harmony and counterpoint.”46 On Wolfsohn’s recommendation, Copland arranged to take composition lessons

44 Aaron Copland, Letter from Aaron Copland to his parents, June 16, 1921, CCLC. 45 Pollack, Aaron Copland, pp. 15-7. 46 Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 27.

21

with Rubin Goldmark in the fall of 1917. Goldmark’s reputation as a preeminent American composer was undoubtedly bolstered by his studies in the Vienna Conservatory with Johann

Fuchs, in addition to his later training in New York City with Antonín Dvořák. Goldmark’s studio at 140 West 87th Street in Manhattan was a full nine miles away from the Harris

Copland’s department store on 628 Washington Avenue. The distance was apparently of secondary importance to Goldmark’s European pedigree, and his many famous students like

Frederick Jacobi, Leopold Godowsky II, and George Gershwin.

Goldmark’s curriculum was grounded in two texts: Ernst Richter’s Manual of Harmony

(1873), and Arthur Foote and Walter R. Spalding’s Modern Harmony In Its Theory And Practice

(1905). Despite Goldmark’s fin de siècle musical tastes, Copland remembered his early teacher fondly. “The lessons,” he recalled, “were clearly presented and stayed close to the subject under discussion.”47 Goldmark’s pragmatic style provided the young composer with a foundational understanding of conventional nineteenth-century harmonic, and formal procedures. “In

[Goldmark’s] mind,” Copland explained, “the sonata form was the pinnacle of our work together

… He considered especially the first-movement sonata-allegro form the key to all future composition, and would not allow me to leave town without it!”48 Copland later discussed the significance of Goldmark’s 1924 Juilliard appointment, and expressed gratitude “for the kind of solid basic training that he gave me … which accounted for the high opinion in which he was held as one of the leading composition teachers of his day.”49

Goldmark’s conservative instructional program encouraged Copland to work on multiple projects simultaneously. During 1920 and 1921, Copland composed a series of incidental piano

47 Ibid., p. 27. 48 Ibid., p. 35. 49 Quoted in Pollack, Aaron Copland, p. 35.

22

works including The Cat and Mouse, and Trios Esquisses (Three Moods). Since their “modern harmonies and unconventional rhythms” contrasted with Goldmark’s Romantic aesthetics,

Copland finished these compositions in secret, while also working on a three-movement piano sonata for his American teacher.50 These private endeavors placated Copland’s growing interests in modern music, while their clandestine nature certainly safeguarded the young composer from the ire of his instructor.

Copland premiered The Cat and Mouse and Trios Esquisses in France, on September 21st,

1921.51 He wrote from Europe, “I am to play 5 (sic) of my shorter pieces. The last one is based on two jazz melodies and ought to make the old professors sit up and take notice!”52 Copland was describing “Jazzy,” the final movement of Trios Esquisses and his first attempt at setting jazz idioms in a classical style. As Howard Pollack explains, the contrasting “jazz melodies” may have been inspired by popular Tin Pan Alley songs Copland heard before his transnational sojourn.53 It seems that even before Copland arrived in Europe he understood the vernacular as a vibrant musical resource.

Modern Possibilities:

Copland’s decision to pursue a French rather than a more traditional German musical education, was likely influenced by his constraining experience with Goldmark. At least as

50 Leo Smit, “A Conversation With Aaron Copland on His 80th Birthday,” Keyboard, 6/11, (1980): 6-35. 51 Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 51. 52 Aaron Copland, Letter from Aaron Copland to his parents, 9/23/1921, CCLC. 53 Pollack, Aaron Copland, Pp. 44. Pollack hears similarities between “Jazzy’s” first theme, and Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson’s popular show tune, “Makin’ Whoopie,” (1928)” It is unclear whether Copland knew of this tune prior to 1921. Copyright dates were often applied to popular American songs well after preliminary editions were publicly circulated, but it is impossible to know if Copland heard a pilot performance. As its suggestive title implies, “Makin’ Whoopie’s” lyrics highlight male sexual conquest, and the emotional repercussions of infidelity. At first, the song’s male subject appears excited about his new marriage, and its potential to create a new nuclear family. His original commitment is partly evidenced by his willingness to take on new domestic tasks, “He's washin' dishes and baby clothes/He's so ambitious he even sews.” But the man’s cooperative spirit is short lived. To his wife’s dismay, he turns to sex to express his dissolution with their failing marriage. “She sits alone, most every night/He doesn't phone; he doesn't write … she feels neglected, and he’s suspected/Of making Whoopie.” Apart from the overt sexual connotations, the male’s domestic affinities and extramarital sexual desires connote a distinct homosexual subtext that Copland would have quickly recognized. See Chauncy, Gay New York, p. 79.

23

important were the geo-political shifts that followed the First World War. Strong anti-German sentiments arose in the U.S. during the war and were substantiated beyond the conflict due to the country’s successful intervention on behalf of the Triple Entente. America’s distance from

Europe’s battlefields quickly positioned the nation as an emerging economic and military power.

Yet musically, U.S. composers and conservatories trailed behind their European counterparts in terms of prestige and popularity. Trade publications like Musical America regularly reported on this perceived incongruity. Headlines in like “Music Blends With Patriotism in Post-War Paris

Celebration,” accompanied exposés on contemporary musicians who usually encouraged

American composers to look to Europe for creative inspiration.54

Copland clearly valued this periodical’s inside perspective on U.S. music culture. While still in Europe he wrote his parents, “I have not been able to find “Musical America” in Paris and

I am losing track of music in N.Y. without it.”55 In 1921 the magazine ran an advertisement for

The Conservatoire Américain, a summer academy that the French government had established at

Fontainebleau to attract young American artists.56 Copland interpreted this message as an opportunity to extend the training he began with Goldmark. In France he would finally be among peers with similar modernist musical tastes and aesthetic desires.

54 Margaret McCrae, “Music Blends With Patriotism in Post-War Pairs Celebration,” Musical America, (November 29th, 1919): 18; Francis Grant, “E. Robert Schmitz Bringing Artistic Message from France,” Musical America, (November 29th, 1919): 11. 55 Aaron Copland, Letter from Aaron Copland to his Parents, October 23rd, 1921, CCLC. 56 Fontainebleau is a small village on the outskirts of Paris. It appears the French government and the village’s residents were willing to take advantage of the economic advantages offered by this type of cultural tourism. In his autobiography, Copland recalled the numerous American visitors that commonly populated Fontainbleau’s cityscape, (Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 47). He also wrote to his parents, “I noticed that [the movie theatres] advertised only American pictures, with Charles Ray and Norma Talmadge and Charlie Chaplin. I already noticed that there are a great many tourists who come here daily to see the Palace and the Forest. And I must say, they are worth coming to see,” (Copland, Letter from Aaron Copland to his parents, June 25th, 1921,. CCLC)..

24

Copland hoped his studies at Fontainebleau would be “an easy way of making contact with French culture, especially musical culture”57 Despite this early optimism, he quickly found the academy’s instruction to be just as conventional as Goldmark’s. Still, he did not wish to forfeit his opportunity to study modern French music at its source. “I was quite pleased with Paul

Vidal [The Conservatoire’s composition professor]. He is a man with Mr. Goldmark’s tastes, and was therefore, quite satisfied with the stuff I showed him and played for him. However, he is not the sort of man I shall want to study with when I get to Paris in the winter.”58 The hunt continued for an instructor more in line with Copland’s aesthetic sensibilities. Fortunately, his search ended when fellow student Djina Ostrowska suggested that he attend a harmony class taught by Nadia

Boulanger.

At first Copland balked at the prospect of re-learning the fundamentals of music, but he was soon smitten with Boulanger’s passion and enthusiasm for her craft. “She created a kind of excitement about the subject … I suspected that day that I had found my composition teacher.”59

We know from Murchison that Boulanger’s curriculum acquainted Copland with Europe’s main strains of musical modernism. Careful examination of works by Piotr Tchaikovsky, Claude

Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Béla Bartók, and especially Igor Stravinsky endowed her students with an appreciation for classical music’s contemporary artistic location. These lessons were further contextualized through an intensive study of the styles of historic composers like J.S. Bach, and

Hector Berlioz.

For a select group of her most promising students, Boulanger hosted a weekly salon session at her summer home in Gargenville. Copland recalled, “I was rather surprised and

57 Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 47. 58 Aaron Copland, Letter from Aaron Copland to his parents, June 28th, 1921, CCLC. 59 Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 50.

25

flattered when Mademoiselle invited me with a group of her students to come to the other side of

Paris for tea … It felt like special attention. So I went, and that day I made the decision to study with her after returning to Paris in the fall.”60 Boulanger’s preferential treatment, personal touch, and modernist musical proclivities all contributed to Copland’s decision to study with her, which he did until 1924. The length of Copland’s stay in Europe (1921-24) suggests that the young composer valued Boulanger’s instruction at least as much as Goldmark’s more musically conservative curriculum.

A Transnational Musical Circle

Outside of his formal instruction, Copland continued to frequent vernacular performance spaces in Paris as he did during his earliest years in Brooklyn. In 1924, he likened his experience with Paris’ jazz scene to a metaphysical obsession, noting that he had “nightly been haunting the

Paris cafes where Jazz is played.” The music Copland heard likely served as a source of inspiration for Copland’s later jazz/classical fusions. Copland would later be encouraged to abstract these experiences into his own compositions while studying in Nadia Boulanger’s studio.

After the summer ended, Boulanger continued her salon sessions in her winter home on

Paris’ rue Ballu. “The musical greats,” Copland observed, “came to Mademoiselle’s Wednesday teas … I met Stravinsky there, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Roussel. I saw Ravel and Villa-Lobos, and on one occasion I shook hands with Saint-Saëns.”61 During the next three years, Copland continued his composition lessons with Boulanger while he absorbed modern musical culture both in Paris, and in trips abroad to England, Italy, and Germany. Significantly, Boulanger’s

60 Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 50. 61 Ibid., p. 66.

26

salon facilitated Copland’s introduction to Erik Satie’s musical circle and their literary promoter

Jean Cocteau.

Performances of works by Darius Milhaud and Georges Auric made Copland aware of

Europe’s thirst for classical idioms rooted in American popular musics. Between 1918 and 1923,

Milhaud and Auric sought to distinguish themselves from the previous generation of French impressionists by interpolating American jazz into their new compositions.62 While watching a

1923 performance of Milhaud’s La Création du Monde, Copland recalled the French composer’s intention to “make wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling.”63

Milhaud’s ballet opens with a fugal passage scored for double bass, trombone, saxophone, and piano. This curious arrangement evokes the unmistakable timbre of an American Dixieland combo. After the introduction, the group realizes a polyrhythmic effect similar to what Copland describes in “Jazz Structure and Influence” as “jazz rhythm.” By juxtaposing a melody in a duple meter against the piano and bass drum’s triple meter accompaniment, Milhaud’s music approximated his imagination of primordial African expression.

While visiting Harlem in 1919, Milhaud described jazz in racial terms that resemble

Copland’s own writings. “The music I heard was absolutely different from anything I had ever heard before and was a revelation to me. Against the beat of the drums the melodic lines criss- crossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms … This authentic music had its roots in the darkest corners of the negro soul, the vestigial traces of Africa, no doubt.”64 Joseph

Auner notes that Milhaud’s essentialist attitudes were consistent with an interwar French

62 Gayle Murchison identifies Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920), and La Création du monde (1922-23), and Auric’s Huit Poèmes de Cocteau (1918), and Adieu New York (1919) as the jazz-influenced works Copland heard in Boulanger’s salon. See Gayle Murchison, “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland,” p. 194. 63 Copland, Aaron Copland: Notes on Darius Milhaud. CCLC. 64 Quoted in Murchison, The American Stravinsky, p. 76.

27

obsession with l’arte négre or black art.65 As Milhaud’s diary implies, this type of musical exoticism elevated African expression not for its own sake, but for its assumed authenticity, or by its proximity to an imagined rural past that had been lost to the throes of modern industry. Of course, this historical journey is at least as fantastical as Copland’s escape into Mathers’ Eastern poetry.

Milhaud’s racial attitudes may have been indirectly influenced by prevailing turn-of-the- century ethnographic theories. Between 1877 and 1922 Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) and other classical cultural evolutionists devised grand schemes of social progress that placed

Victorian England as the teleological end of civilization. In these models, “primitive” or underdeveloped communities lacked intellectual markers of modernity like architecture, or writing systems, and instead occupied their daily lives with carnal or material pleasures.66 To maintain this delusion, Milhaud needed to create distance between his own subject position, and the creators of his musical resources. The value of African creativity was thus determined by its capacity to meet Milhaud’s artistic ends, (the full sail exploitation of Africa’s “vestigial traces” in his modernist idiom). Since they had no say in how they would be represented, Milhaud maintained complete control over the subjects and musical cultures he represented in his ballet.

Reading Cocteau

On January 19th, 1922, Copland expressed his dissatisfaction with mainstream French

65 Joseph Auner, Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013), pp. 120-3. 66 Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), organizes the history of human development into three general stages: Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. Advancement from one stage to the next requires that a society undergo a fundamental cultural shift. Morgan believes the adoption of literary systems, and the invention of cities, (in place of bands, or kinship groups) are two hallmarks of the civilized community. A society with greater access to material resources often advanced through Morgan’s stages quicker than those that were industrially constrained. See Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, (Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985). Classical cultural evolutionism’s foundational texts include: John Lubbock’s, The Origin of Civilization, and the Primitive Condition of Man, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), and James Frazer’s, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, (New York: Macmillan, 1922).

28

music in a letter to his brother Ralph. “The concerts and operas here have been distinctly disappointing. One has the same number of musicians and programs and performers as at home—only in greater quantity. Yet I never miss the occasional performance of stuff by Satie, or

Honegger, or Fauré and other … ‘discoveries’ I’ve made since coming to France.”67 Copland’s early correspondence with his parents rarely discussed music in technical or aesthetic terms.

Perhaps he thought Ralph would identify the artistic/historical context of his musical affinities to an extent that his parents were either unable or unwilling to match. In any case, the letter’s references to specific musical figures suggests that within months, the transnational interactions facilitated by Boulanger’s studio solidified Copland’s embrace of and identification with Jean

Cocteau’s aesthetic theories.

In his 1918 essay Cock and Harlequin, Cocteau enumerates an aesthetic system that simultaneously rejected Richard Wagner’s Romantic style and the previous generation of French

Impressionists.68 Cocteau maintains that the vernacular is a virile compositional resource in tune with the cultural sensibilities of interwar France. “Reality alone,” he writes, “motivates the important work of art … in the same way as Machinery, animals, natural scenery, or danger.…

Good music arouses emotion owing to its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which have motivated it.”69 Cocteau’s aesthetics thus positioned the familiar as a source of inspiration, but not as an artistic end. In lieu of accurate musical representation, hyperbole became an artistic ideal. For Cocteau, “The music-hall, the circus, and the American negro bands

… fertilize an artist just as life does…. It is only by distributing lots of bric-á-brac and imitating

67 Aaron Copland, Aaron Copland, Letter to Ralph Copland, July 19th, 1922, CCLC. 68 Jean Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin: Notes Concerning Music, Rollo H. Meyers, Trans., (London: The Egoist Press, 1921). Retrieved 1/4/2018 from https://archive.org/stream/CockAndHarlequin/Cock%20and%20Harlequin%20%28Jean%20Cocteau%29#page/n0/ mode/2up. 69 Ibid., p. 23; 34. My Emphasis.

29

the phonograph hard that you will succeed in taming the negroes and making yourself understood”70 Though these vernacular spaces and performance ensembles functioned as sources of artistic inspiration, Cocteau did not value their associated products as independent creative ends. Popular creativity, and the subjective agency implicit in its production, were simply raw materials. The role of the serious artist, in Cocteau’s estimation, was to cast these resources in service of their creative inventions.

In Cocteau’s thought, great artists innovate while mediocre artists organize that which already exists. He wrote “Beethoven is irksome in his developments, but not Bach, because

Beethoven develops the form and Bach the idea. Beethoven says: ‘This penholder contains a new pen; there is a new pen in this penholder; the pen in this penholder is new,’ … Bach says: ‘This penholder contains a new pen in order that I may dip it in the ink and write.’”71 In this imagined scenario, Cocteau’s syntax functions as a literary representation of his aesthetics. Both statements relay that the new pen is in the penholder, but Beethoven’s words appear fragmented and redundant; as though they were written by an amateur. In contrast, Bach’s statement flows freely and employs an extended vocabulary that connotes creative possibility. Bach’s greatness is thus evidenced in his statement’s formal originality, and organic fluidity, or in other words, by his ability to formulate new artistic ideals that approximated what Cocteau called the “spirit of the age.” 72 We can understand Cocteau’s aesthetics as neoclassical, in part, because his text elevates well-known Baroque composers like Bach at the expense of Enlightenment/Romantic figures like Beethoven. Since “Beethoven develops the form, and Bach the idea,” the latter is admired as a creator, while the former is condemned as an imitator. These theories created an

70 Ibid., p. 23; 37. My Emphasis. 71 Ibid., p. 11. 72 Ibid., pp. 23.

30

ideological separation between Cocteau and his followers, and older French composers like

Debussy who only offered an impression of Wagner’s Romantic style.73 After the First World

War, the new French avant-garde looked to the past for an aesthetic foundation, but their creative products were original and remained consistent with the spirit of the times.

Mediating Desire

When Copland landed in Europe in 1921, he traveled from the port in Havre to Paris, where he stayed for ten days at the Hotel Savoy on 30 Rue du Vaugirad. Copland prioritized acquainting himself with Parisian music before he began his summer studies at Fontainebleau.

On June 18th, he told his parents, “I finally landed at a Swedish Ballet performance, which I enjoyed immensely.”74 The Hotel Savoy was only two short miles away from the Théâtre des

Champs-Élysées, the performance home of Rolf de Maré’s Swedish Ballet or Ballets Suédois.

Copland often recorded the performances he attended in his travel diaries. He lists both

Cocteau’s play/ballet Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, and Milhaud’s L’Homme et son desir, as the two Ballets Suédois productions he attended during his first days in Europe.75 It seems likely that

Copland heard L’Homme et son desir first. In his autobiography, Copland recalled that he did not see Les Maries until June nineteenth, the day after he wrote his parents, and the generallyaccepted date of the work’s Parisian premiere.76

This otherwise quixotic chronological detail takes on new historical significance when we consider the content of Milhaud’s ballet. In 1916, Milhaud traveled to Rio de Janerio with his

73 Cocteau believed that the music of Debussy and other French impressionists was merely an extension of the German Romantic idiom. In this way, his contempt for his older French contemporaries can still be interpreted as a nationalist stance. The new French avant-garde, was, above all other considerations, defined by its distinct French quality. Interpolating vernacular entertainments into their modern art, ensured that their end products remained consistent with interwar French cultural sensibilities. 74 Aaron Copland, Aaron Copland letter to his parents, June 18th, 1921, CCLC. 75 Aaron Copland, “Performances Attended, 1921,” Travel Diary, CCLC. 76 Copland and Perlis, Aaron Copland, p. 44.

31

friend, the poet Paul Claudel.77 In Brazil, Milhaud was introduced to the indigenous rhythms and melodic motives he evokes in both Le Création du Monde and in L’Homme et son desir. In the latter work, the division between the exotic and the erotic is unequivocally blurred. Claudel’s scenario is set in a jungle, in the dead of night. A sleeping dark-skinned man is soon visited by le fantòme de la Femme morte, a female incarnation of the cosmos. Still asleep, the man begins to suggestively sway in the “Danse de la passion,” presumably in an attempt to seduce his new acquaintance. The ploy works, the man unwraps the Spector’s veil, and proceeds to symbolically penetrate her domain by wrapping himself in her clothing. 78

Milhaud’s music experiments with polytonality, a technique he would return to throughout his career. To facilitate this effect, he divided the orchestra into five distinct instrument groups, perhaps with the intention of having them face each other to achieve the ballet’s antiphonal quality. Yet Milhaud’s modernist techniques were not the most controversial aspect of this production. Paul Claudel’s costuming caused a bit of a critical uproar, as his scenario called for full male nudity. This made principal dancer Jean Börlin’s performance, “one of the first times a male dancer appeared naked on stage.” 79

Börlin’s costuming was intended to contrast the essential vulnerability and simplicity of the human condition within the mysterious and complex realities of the feminized cosmos. Their separation was reinforced by Claudel’s three-dimensional stage design (the ballet was performed on different levels connected by staircases). Most of the action unfolds on a level that rests between planes representing the moon and its reflection. The stage’s multiple platforms allowed

77 Paul Anderson has observed that Claudel maintained a significant presence in Boulanger’s salon. The poet’s presence in this musical space is a testament to the holistic nature of Boulanger’s cultural curriculum. Paul Anderson, “To Become Human,” p.48. 78 Pascale De Groote, Ballets Suédois (Ghent, Belgium: University of Ghent, 2002), pp. 11-12. 79 Ibid., pp. 11-12.

32

for successive and even simultaneous action; while the man struggled to reconcile his humanity with his base passions, the cosmos could continue to function undisturbed. Börlin’s choreography was spatially limited by this three-dimensional design, yet the dancer still managed to embody the raw desires essential to his character’s thematic development.

Milhuad immediately associated Börlin’s body with the primitive, calling his performance an “eternal dance of nostalgia, of desire and of banishment.”80 Reviewer Maurice

De Waleffe took the metaphor further by associating Börlin’s movements with animal behavior.

“This is all abnormal … [Börlin] wringed himself for an hour like a reptile or an ill person.”81

These comparisons reinforced the primitive associations embodied by Claudel’s jungle man. The abnormal and animal-like qualities ascribed to Börlin’s choreography imply a degree of irrationality that may have been conveyed through improvised movement—a practice that sharply contrasted the conventions of Old World court dances.82 It is likely that Copland found

Börlin’s performance provocative as well, if for no other reason than the dancer’s slow gestures and non-existent outfit positioned his body as a central location for the ballet’s dramatic development.

80 Darius Milhaud quoted ibid., p. 41. 81Ibid., p. 41. 82 Court traditions like the waltz and minuet required dancers to maintain an upright posture and a certain distance from their partner throughout the performance. These rigid conventions were intended to convey the sophistication and refinement of both the dancers and their hosts. Some early twentieth century American social dances were similarly associated with animal behavior and irrationality. Nadine George-Graves argues that ragtime dancing in the Northern United States often reflected creative elements from both African and African-American vernacular practices, and European court dances. Despite this syncretic reality, the specifically Black contributions to the ragtime idiom were either ignored, erased or couched as evidence for the genre’s association with prostitution and other morally degrading vices. Improvisation, angular motion, and preference for movement close to the floor (as opposed to the upright rigidity of European court conventions), were commonly highlighted as evidence of ragtime dancing’s explicitly black and sexual nature. Like readers of Mathers’ “Asiatic” texts, White ragtime dancers embodied these exotic qualities as a means of escaping the restrictive sexual ethos of Western nations. By “dancing black,” white subjects indulged their fantasies and further reinforced the imagined dichotomy between essentially African and European behavior. Copland’s experiences with American social dancing is discussed further in Chapter 4.

33

According to my chronology, L’Homme et son desir was Copland’s first live experience with French modernism. Pollack believes that Copland “came to terms” with his homosexuality before he left for Paris, as though any queer subject’s coming-out process could be reduced to a single event.83 What occurs more commonly is a series of self-realizations that first positions the queer individual as different, and only later, as normal. If Copland began exploring his alternative sexual desires in the U.S., he likely experienced a full-fledged sexual awakening after watching Milhaud’s ballet. For the first time in his life, he could publicly indulge in his sexual fantasies, which had previously been confined to the privacy of his imagination. Like Mathers’

Eastern poetry, Milhaud’s exotic musical representations facilitated a fantastic escape to an earlier state of human existence. Spatially removed from western sexual morality, these imagined utopias remained sexually tolerant, and therefore queer-friendly.

For the young composer, L’Homme et son desir’s impression was clearly profound. Its affect is first evidenced in Copland’s correspondence. Though he rarely discussed music with his parents, he nonetheless relayed his enthusiasm to them, (though in the June 18th letter, he skillfully omitted the work’s title). His excitement quickly transformed into an obsession. Seeing

83 Pollack, Copland, Pp. 39. I use the phrase “coming-out,” to refer to a cognitive process by which a queer individual recognizes, and then accepts their alternative subject position. Pollack’s views undoubtedly reflect his generational status. Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, organized gay liberation was frequently relegated to the private sphere. In fact, in some American jurisdictions, public displays of homoerotic desire remained illegal until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all sodomy laws in 2003. In the last 15 years, an unprecedented turn in public opinion has made homosexual expression a common facet of mainstream American culture. Older queer individuals have responded to this new degree of acceptance and visibility by imagining their coming-out as a single moment. In the twenty-first century, this strategy certainly colors the newly liberated queer elder as a maverick; an individual who has overcome past adversity to prove that queer lives do indeed get better. But such a tactic is only possible in the first place because of the older generation’s general financial security. From this advantaged position, the social risks of coming-out are diminished. For younger queer subjects who lack this degree of financial leverage, a single coming out moment remains a fantastic prospect. As mentioned, accepting one’s queer subjectivity is procedural, and typically non-linear. The inevitable setbacks often encourage queer individuals to actively seek out creative spaces amiable to their identity. According to Wayne Kostenbaum, “Historically, music has been defined as mystery and miasma, as implicitness rather than explicitness, and so we have hid inside music, in music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal without saying a word. Queers identify with shadow because no one can prosecute a shadow.” Kostenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, Pp. 189-90. In other words, even though Copland kept his sexuality private in Brooklyn, if he perceived Paris, as Milhaud’s ballet, (i.e. sexually permissive), he may have been more comfortable with publicly expressing his sexual desires in his European compositions.

34

Milhaud’s music on the playbill, Copland attended Cocteau’s Les Maries the very next day.

Perhaps he thought Cocteau’s production would play on similar themes as L’Homme, or maybe he wished to evaluate Milhaud’s music in a different narrative context. If Satie’s Parade (1917) informed Cocteau’s written aesthetic theories, Les Maries represented their creative realization.

The play is loosely centered on a wedding taking place in the Eiffel tower. The formal behavioral conventions associated with this nuptial ritual soon dissolve into unmitigated chaos. An ostrich, a hunter, a swimmer, a lion and the engaged couple’s unborn child crowd the stage with a series of exploits that can be described as carnivalesque. Milhaud and other followers of Cocteau’s ideology supplied a disorganized musical patchwork that reinforces the play’s ethos of organized chaos. Jean Hugo’s costuming reinforced the play’s associations with the absurd. He designed full body masks for the performers that exaggerated the character’s most stereotypical features.

For instance, the swimmer wore a mask that obscured her body as well as her face, but the costume still accentuated her physique with added padding. The grotesque outfits had a direct influence on the nature of Les Maries’ choreography. As Pascale de Groote observes, “the dancers resembled walking sculptures. Their movements were entirely determined by the possibilities or rather the limitations of their costumes and hats and by the character they performed.”84

As in L’Homme, Les Maries’ choreography was defined by hyperbole. The performer’s exaggerated costumes encouraged short and angular gestures that connoted a similar degree of irrationality as Milhaud’s Amazonian fantasy. By exaggerating their physical features, Cocteau removes their subjective agency and provides a justification for his use of their bodies as aesthetic objects. A similar type of depersonalization is present in Grohg’s scenario. Each

84 De Groote, Ballets Suédois, p. 45.

35

character (child, opium eater, and prostitute) is presented first as the object of the necoromancer’s physical desires; the dancer’s perspectives are considered only after Grohg fails to touch them. The final movement’s titled, “The Dance of Mockery,” was specifically chosen to evoke sympathy for the sorcerer at the expense of his victims. Grohg’s last fit of anger clears the stage of these irrational temptations; he alone is allowed to leave the chaos of Copland’s imagination.

It is clear that Copland knew before he arrived at Fontainebleau that Milhaud, Cocteau, and the rest of the “French group of six” were producing modern music that appealed to his personal sensibilities. While Boulanger was not responsible for Copland’s original aesthetic identification, the micro-social interactions facilitated by her salon nonetheless solidified his indoctrination into Cocteau’s ideology. Copland’s early style can thus be understood as a reaction to his social position, as much as a reflection of his musical tastes. Cocteau’s theories were one among many strains of musical modernism that competed for artistic supremacy in the interwar years. While still in Brooklyn, Copland expressed musical affinities for Debussy and

Scriabin. 85 But when he became aware of the artistic and erotic potential of works derived from

Cocteau’s thought, Copland became an adamant defender of the second generation of French neoclassicists.86 As his final student work, Grohg was Copland’s European treatise; a musical litmus test of the skills and ideas he absorbed during his four-year stay. In this light, the polyrhythms that Copland introduced in the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” and later outlined in

1927 as “jazz rhythm,” can be interpreted as a new artistic form that attempted to fuse a vernacular tradition with classical conventions. Thus far, the connections I have drawn between

Copland’s music and Cocteau’s thought have been circumstantial. However, a closer

85 Copland and Perlis, Aaron Copland, p. 29. 86 Or the “Cocteau/Satie Group.”

36

examination of Copland’s published writings illuminates a deeper resonance of Cocteau’s theories within the composer’s own aesthetic ideology.

37

CHAPTER 3

THE AESTHETICS OF AARON COPLAND’S SYMPHONIC JAZZ

“In point of fact I have been concerned with it for more than thirty years, with no lessening of my sense of humility before the majesty of music’s expressive power— before its capacity to make manifest a deeply spiritual resource of mankind.”87

Music and the Human Spirit

This chapter’s epigraph comes from remarks Aaron Copland delivered in 1954 as part of

Columbia University’s Bicentennial Celebration. Drawing thousands of the “world’s most renowned citizens” (including U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had formerly served as president of the university), the year-long celebration took place against the backdrop of

McCarthyism. Historians use this term to reference the aggressive political tactics that Wisconsin

Senator Joseph McCarthy employed during a series of Congressional hearings between 1950 and

1954. As chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on

Investigation, McCarthy sought to expunge what he imagined as systemic communist infiltration into the U.S. State Department.88 His reckless actions destroyed the reputations of countless U.S.

87 Aaron Copland, “Music As An Aspect of the Human Spirit,” Remarks delivered to Columbia University, 1954, CCLC, Pp. 1. My emphasis. 88 Robert Erichson, “Columbia University, 1954 in Review: The Year of the Bicentennial Celebration,” Columbia Spectator, 99/56 (12/21/1954): Pp. 1. Accessed 1/14/2018 at http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/cgi- bin/columbia?a=d&d=cs19541221-01.2.2&e=------en-20--1--txt-txIN------. Joseph McCarthy’s political power was obtained (and for a time maintained) by his expedient manipulation of the domestic fears that accompanied Cold War geo-political tensions. McCarthy rose from a rank-and-file senator to one of the most well-known (and feared) individuals in America after he claimed to have personal knowledge of a Communist infiltration into the U.S. State Department. In his now infamous “Enemies from Within” address, he remarked “I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy,” (Joseph McCarthy, “Enemies from Within” Speech Delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia, 1950, accessed 1/14/2018 at https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/1950%20McCarthy%20Enemies.pdf). The claim was unsubstantiated and was likely an attempt to bolster the public’s awareness of the senator’s already-known position. American anti-Communist purges were certainly not McCarthy’s own invention. As early as 1936, the House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC) began subpoenaing individuals to testify before congress on the basis of their political sympathies. The consequence of this familiar fusion of fear and power was the systematic destruction of the organized American left.

38

citizens. His subversive rhetoric, and maniacal ambition color many pages of American political history. Copland’s leftist political activity had reached a climax in the 1930s.89 These former associations soon caught the attention of the upstart senator, and the composer was forced to testify before congress on May 25th, 1953.

If Copland was rattled by McCarthy’s cross-examination, there was no public evidence to reinforce the notion. However, his private notes seem to unveil a defiant spirit, one roused into action only after the immediate danger of his present political and social situation became manifest in the Senate hearing.90

"When [McCarthy] touches on his magic theme, the 'Commies' or 'communism,' his voice darkens like that of a minister. He is like a plebeian Faustus who has been given a magic wand by an invisible Mephisto—as long as the menace is there, the wand will work. The question is at what point his power grab will collide with the power drive of his own party."91

Like his Jewishness, Copland’s queerness and political affinities had become scapegoats for the world’s maladies. The “menace,” was simply a mirage designed to distract the masses from

McCarthy and his unprecedented vitriol. Against such contexts, the theme to Columbia’s

Bicentennial, “Man’s Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof,” was certainly chosen by

89 In 1934, Copland spoke in Bemidji Minnesota on behalf of communist gubernatorial candidate S. K. Davis. In 1936, he supported communist Earl Browder during his run for president. That same year, Copland was apparently enthralled by the pragmatic philosophy of Minnesota’s farm labor movement. “It's one thing to think revolution, or talk about it to one's friends, but to preach it in the streets—OUT LOUD—I'll probably never be the same … What struck me particularly was that there was no "type-communist" among them, such as we see on 14th St. [in New York]. They look like any other of the farmers around here, all of them individuals, clearly etched in my mind. And desperately poor." Quoted in Bill Morelock, “Conscience vs. McCarthy: The Political Aaron Copland,” Minnesota Public Radio, May, 3rd, 2015. Transcript retrieved 1/14/2018 from http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/05/03_morelockb_unamerican/. 90 Warren Johansson documents how McCarthy accused Harry Truman’s Administration of shielding “security risks,” among which included “sexual perverts.” Warren Johansson, “Mattachine Society,” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990), retrieved 1/14/2018 from http://williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Mattachine.pdf Pp.1. McCarthy couched much of his rhetoric in what he viewed as a divine struggle between Christian Capitalists, and Atheistic Communists. The resulting “Lavender Scare,” (a contemporaneous purge of queer men and women from government positions), was politically justified on religious grounds, but also by the essentialist belief that effeminate men were mentally and emotionally weak, and thus more susceptible to communist conversion. These developments certainly sat at the forefront of Copland’s thoughts when he appeared before the Senate in 1953. 91 Aaron Copland Notes on Joseph McCarthy, May 26th, 1953. Quoted in Morelock, “Conscience vs. McCarthy.”

39

New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey as a stark challenge to McCarthy’s political methodology. For Copland, it seems the opportunity to participate in another conscience act of defiance was simply too seductive to pass up.

Copland’s Bicentennial remarks illustrate the degree to which Cocteau’s thought influenced the composer’s aesthetic positions. Though Copland was asked to speak on “music as a fundamental aspect of the human spirit,” he altered slightly the topic of his remarks to be the

“expression by way of music of a basic need of the human spirit.”92 This small change quickly distinguished the musician/creative artist from the consumer by contrasting the former’s agency against the latter’s passivity.

The art of music demonstrates man’s ability to transmute the substance of his every-day experience into a body of sound that has coherence and direction and flow, that unfolding its own life in a meaningful and natural way in time and in space. Like life itself music never ends, for it can always be re-created. Thus, the greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music. 93

By Copland’s definition the production of serious music required a mediation between the mundane realities of daily life, and the abstract nature of the sonic medium. A composer’s inspiration came from individual experiences that inevitably varied according to temporal and cultural circumstances. These filters modified the material objects that flesh out daily life in accordance with technological innovation, practical considerations, and aesthetic preferences.

It was not enough for the modern composer to abstract the vernacular, they needed to present it in a manner that was universally understood and reproducible. The classical composer also had a social responsibility to approximate the symbolic qualities of what Cocteau had identified as the spirit of the age.

92 Copland, Music as an Aspect,” p. 1. 93 Ibid., p. 3. My emphasis.

40

Copland’s conflation of pragmatic experience with musical/idealized inspirations resonates with Cocteau’s outline of the creative process. Reflecting on his own compositional approach, Copland discussed the aesthetic ends of his musical works:

It cannot be claimed that when I do compose I am thinking precise thoughts, in the usual meaning of the term. Neither am I mooning over conceptions in the abstract. Instead, I seem to be engrossed in a sphere of essentialized emotions. I stress the word essentialized; for these emotions are not at all vague—it is important to grasp that fact. They are not vague because they present themselves to the mind of the composer as particularized music ideas. From the instant of their inception they have a specific identity; but it is an identity beyond the power of words to contain or circumscribe. These germinal idea—or essentialized musical thoughts, as I call them—seem to be begging for their own life—asking their creator, the composer, to find the ideal envelope for them; to evolve a shape and color and content that will most fully exploit their creative potential. In this way the profoundest aspirations of man’s being are embodied in a pellucid fabric of sonorous materials.94

Copland’s “essentialized emotions,” or “particularized music ideas,” can be thought of as kernels of creative agency that are irrational or emotional because of their associations with the unfamiliar or exotic. 95 Copland’s search for an “ideal envelope,” or an original musical form, resonates with Cocteau’s aesthetic ideology. As the writer explained in 1918, one’s creative innovations needed to serve as emblematic models for other artists interested in pursuing a similar craft: “Instinct needs to be trained by method; but instinct alone helps us to discover a method which will suit us and to which our instinct may be trained.”96 In Les Maries, Cocteau embraced the irrationality of the mundane as an aesthetic object, but not as a final product. The artist, in his view, was responsible for first identifying these ideas, and then organizing them so they could be easily recognized and recreated by the masses. The jazz references in Grohg’s

94 Copland, “Music as a Fundamental Aspect,” p. 2. 95 This artistic goal is facilitated by the new form/creative model’s consistency with contemporary cultural sensibilities. In this light, it’s plain why Copland understood jazz as a valuable resource. The genre was exotic by virtue of its associations with racial difference, yet it maintained a significant degree of popularity in the 1920s (at least in the US and Western Europe). 96 Copland, “Music as a Fundamental Aspect,” p. 8.

41

“Dance of the Opium Eater,” perform a similar function. Explicitly associating the work with the everyday at once removed Copland’s music from the restricting precepts of nineteenth century

Romanticism, while also connoting an exotic musical space by way of the movement’s racialized text.

Recalling Cocteau’s dismissive attitudes, Copland viewed non-Western creativity as a resource but not as an artistic end in and of itself. “The exciting rhythms of African drummers, the subtle melismatic singing of the Near East, the clangorous ensembles of Indonesia, the incredibly nasal sonorities of China and Japan—all of these, and many others, are so different from our own Occidental music as to discourage all hope of a ready understanding.”97 These categorical assessments may imply that as late as 1954, Copland thought of some musical traditions in racialized terms in the same manner as Cocteau. Yet later in his lecture, Copland observed that non-Western creativity could also be understood as a metaphoric representation of an unrecognized component of our collective human nature that could nuance our understanding of cultural difference. “We realize,” he observed, “that each (tradition) in their way musically mirror (sic) cherishable aspects of human consciousness. We needlessly impoverish ourselves in doing so little to make a rapprochement between our art and theirs.”98 Copland’s remarks thus suggested that all music, regardless of ethnic origin, was an objectively universal expression of a facet of our shared humanity. The quickest way to approximate this ubiquitous yet unfamiliar ideal was to interpolate the diverse expressive practices of multiple cultures into a single artistic product. The goal was a mediation between one’s essentialized emotions, (or the material aspect of human experience), and the creative forms/abstract ideals of high European art. In this way,

97 Copland, “Music as an Aspect,” p. 6. 98 Ibid., p. 6.

42

much of Copland’s symphonic music can be understood as an amalgamation motivated by reverence, or more simply, as a musical representation of our collective human consciousness.

An Original Creative Form?

Copland’s 1954 remarks can be viewed as an extension of the aesthetic theories he was first introduced to in Nadia Boulanger’s studio.99 Per these models, Copland was expected to design and communicate innovative musical forms that approximated an essentialized emotion consistent with contemporary cultural sensibilities. The content of Copland’s published articles, implies that he began this task shortly after returning to the United States. In 1925 he broadly defined jazz as an urban folk tradition that could function as the foundation for a modern

American compositional school.100 Later in 1927, Copland’s writings started to address the aesthetic significance that he associated with jazz music. Despite what its title may suggest,

Copland’s essential argument in “Jazz Structure and Influence,” is mostly concerned with the specific affective ends made possible by polyrhythmic techniques. Copland acknowledged that

“polyrhythms in and of themselves, are not an innovation … but the polyrhythms of jazz are of a different quality and effect (sic) not only from those of the [English] madrigals but from all others as well. The peculiar excitement they produce by clashing two definitively and regularly marked rhythms is unprecedented in occidental music.”101

Was excitement the “essentialized emotion,” or “particularized musical idea,” that

Copland wished to convey by fusing jazz rhythms into his art music? Even though polyrhythms had been used in Western composition before the twentieth century, Copland’s creative manipulation of its affective qualities into an idealized or classical form were evidence of his

99 Certainly, the later date implies that Copland’s distinct style periods, (as theorized by Arthur Berger), may be more closely interrelated than previously acknowledged. 100 Aaron Copland, “Jazz as Folk-Music” interview for Musical America (Dec 19th, 1925). CCLC. 101 Copland, “Jazz Structures,” p. 13. My emphasis.

43

artistic originality. In other words, Copland’s reputation as a great composer, per his own aesthetic paradigm, was premised in part on his ability to meld the irrational/emotional/excited quality he heard in pure or authentic jazz rhythm alongside the conventions of the European classical tradition. At the same time, by viewing jazz only as an object of inspiration and not as a musical end, Copland maintained control over the public representation of his musical resources, and by extension the subject positions from which they emerged. Since jazz performers lacked the ability to interpolate their individual creative productions (or daily experiences) into a supposedly higher or more refined tradition, Copland valued them only as musical resources, not as legitimate, or serious creators of art music.102

In Copland’s writings, jazz’s melodic inventions were always of second importance to the excited quality he heard in the polyrhythm. “Whatever melody is subjected to this

[polyrhythmic] procedure comes out jazzed … it is not the melody which determines this point, but the interplay of rhythms around, above, and under it.103 The critical importance of this distinction, and perhaps the reason Copland omitted a discussion of individual or collective improvisation in this particular article, is illuminated when we consider the composer’s later writings on jazz’s musical structure and its multivalent aesthetic significance.

102 These reductive attitudes remained consistent throughout Copland’s career. In 1963, he implied that this perspective was molded during his childhood in Brooklyn. “The juxtaposition of ‘jazz’ and ‘classical’ has been going on for a long time now. I can remember it as an amusing vaudeville act when I was a boy. No one took it seriously then and there is no reason why it should be taken seriously now.” Later, Copland reaffirmed that he viewed Western art music as aesthetically superior to all other traditions. “To imagine that serious music is endangered by the wide acceptance of our popular music, or that one may be substituted for the other, is to be utterly naïve … It is undeniable that [the progressive/innovative] jazz composer is well aware of and helps himself to devices of the serious modern composer, and more often than not turns out to be a pupil of one.” Aaron Copland, Copland on Music, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963), pp. 258-9. 103 Copland, “Jazz Structures,” p. 11.

44

The Influence of Jazz on Modern Music

Despite his earnest promotion of symphonic jazz in 1927, by the 1930s Copland’s style was nearly devoid of the explicit jazz qualities heard in works like Music for the Theatre (1925), and the Piano Concerto of 1926.104 Indeed, in 1941 Copland characterized his earlier techniques as aesthetically naïve: “With the Concerto I felt I had done all I could with the idiom, considering its limited emotional scope. True, it was an easy way to be American in musical terms, but all American music could not be possibly confined to two dominant jazz moods—the blues and the snappy number.”105 This observation may suggest that beginning in the 1940s, jazz had become passé in Copland’s ideology. Yet by 1948, Copland was again overtly marking some compositions as jazz-inspired. That year, both his revised Four Piano Blues and the Clarinet

Concerto, written for Benny Goodman, indicated that Copland still understood jazz as a valuable musical resource. For Howard Pollack, this incongruency suggests a change in symbolic meaning instead of actual musical content. In his view, the 1941 statement “essentially meant that [Copland] had renounced the parodistic mannerisms of symphonic jazz.”106 Copland would continue to employ the polyrhythmic technique he identified in 1927, but by 1941 the composer had fundamentally reevaluated the aesthetic significance, or “excited” quality he had previously ascribed to it.

It is difficult to determine the accuracy of Pollack’s interpretation from the composer’s published writings alone. However, a close examination of Copland’s contemporaneous lecture materials provides useful insight into his later opinions on jazz’s technical and affective features.

104 A notable exception to this trend is Copland’s second ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934). This is Copland’s first professional work that used material from the “Dance of the Opium Eater.” By assigning the “visions of jazz” theme to the ballet’s only African American character, Copland further reinforced the popular genre’s associations with social difference. 105 Aaron Copland, Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America, (New York and London: Whittlesey House, 1941), p. 227. 106 Pollack, Aaron Copland, p. 114.

45

On January 1, 1940, Copland gave an address to the Brooklyn Academy of Music titled “The

Influence of Jazz on Modern Music.”107 For the composer, this homecoming event held obvious biographic significance. Beyond the Academy’s proximity to Copland’s childhood home, the institution was the locus of his earliest experiences with Western art music.108 Taken together, these intimate associations undoubtedly reinforced the personal nature of Copland’s remarks, and perhaps imply that the lecture was intended as a distillation of his experiences beyond Brooklyn.

This was an opportunity for Copland to showcase the fruits of his transnational training, and to inspire his former community to follow him down a similar path. A record of Copland’s speech exists in a set of handwritten notes that the composer referenced for the event. All seven pages have been reproduced and placed in the Appendix.

In terms of its content, and its similar racial subtext, Copland’s lecture notes detailed a structural and aesthetic theory of symphonic jazz that was nearly identical to what he had outlined in 1927. In each case Copland avoids an extensive discussion of the qualities of jazz melody, focusing instead on the genre’s rhythmic innovations including polyrhythm. As in 1927, he defined this technique as “two independent rhythms in one bar” played over an unchanging bass that emphasized beats 2 and 4.109 Again, he grounded many of his ideas in racial terms.

Copland thought that, “Negro sources,” in both Africa and America, were the roots of this now crystallized musical tradition.110 He clarified that “the Negro rhythmic sense is essentially polyrhythmic,” implying that he understood this specific technique, in origin and affect, as

107 Aaron, Copland “The Influence of Jazz on Modern Music,” Manuscript/Mixed Material CCLC. 108 Aaron Copland, “Culture in Brooklyn,” Notes for an Autobiography, CCLC. Perhaps memories of the popular music Copland heard in his youth, inspired the lecture’s topic. “Music making at home,” he wrote, “took on a glow that the development of the phonograph tended to dissipate … I would sit for hours with my ear to the horn listening to popular records.” Copland and Perlis, Copland, p. 20. 109 Copland, “The Influence of Jazz,” p. 4. 110 Ibid., p. 1.

46

categorically black. 111 According to Copland, “the Negroes development of several simultaneous rhythms,” in a single measure, was a comparatively equivalent musical innovation to “[Europe’s] development of several simultaneous melodies.”112 For Copland, polyrhythms were a substantial expansion of the Euro-American composer’s technical arsenal. Its associations with black subjectivity justified the composer’s free manipulation of this invention to meet his own compositional ends. The comparison with Western creativity constructs a symbolic dichotomy between African rhythm and European counterpoint.113 Neither European, nor African himself,

Copland’s musical fusions can on one level be interpreted as a cultural reconciliation, or as a musical synthesis of each continent’s greatest creative innovation.

This musical fusion of racially divergent resources, can also be thought of as a mediation between the social classes. Copland believed in 1940 that the “spirit” of symphonic jazz, could approximate multiple socio-economic experiences. Aesthetically, Copland valued symphonic jazz for its exotic qualities and cultural ubiquity.114 He thought the “ordinariness of jazz,” could temper the “reconditeness,” or abstract nature of classical music.115 When interpolated into a modernist composition, jazz’s vernacular associations transformed the final creative product into a liminal representation of both refined and popular modes of expression. At the same time, jazz’s capacity to evoke an “enclosed, abandoned, primitive, and emotional feeling” was

111 Ibid., p. 2. 112 Ibid., p. 3. 113 Unlike his essay in 1927, Copland briefly discusses jazz melodies “used for characteristic turns.” In his view, lowered 3rds, and 7ths (and occasionally 5ths), evoked the greasy glissandos and blue notes employed by many early jazz musicians. However, these effects were of secondary importance to rhythmic innovations, as the later nuanced the complexity of a single musical element in an original fashion (the polyrhythm), while the former is simply an alteration or development of a previously established technique. Ibid., p. 5. 114 His notes seem to assume the cultural ubiquity of jazz in United States. However, Copland goes to great lengths to point out the numerous European composers who have also used jazz in their recent works. These include familiar figures like Debussy and Stravinsky, but also “The Jazz Group of Six,” still another reference to the “Cocteau-Satie group.” Copland goes on to note that these composers valued the genre as an “everyday music.” Ibid., p. 6. 115 Ibid., p. 1.

47

evidence of its irrational or exotic associations. In Copland’s view, jazz’s multivalent aesthetic ends reinforced the genre’s intimate identification with the modern zeitgeist.116 Recognizing and manipulating these complex possibilities was to be among Copland’s most innovative contribution to Western art music.

Wild, Hysterical, Grotesque

Copland observed that jazz’s “enclosed and primitive” qualities were expressed in two distinct affective sentiments: the nostalgic or blues, and what he called the wild, hysterical, and grotesque, (i.e. the “snappy number”).117 The descriptors bear a striking resemblance to the

“excited” quality Copland ascribed to polyrhythm in 1927, perhaps impling that jazz carried a more consistent symbolic value across Copland’s catalog than Pollack’s text acknowledges.

“Wild” holds connotations of danger, and unfamiliarity, but the unknown’s ambiguity also carries a distinct subversive potential for any subject unsatisfied with definable social precepts.

Within the permissive space of unconquered nature, human experience could be observed in its ideal, or primordial form. These primitive associations depicted jazz as essentially carnal or material; as a creative phenomenon that, on its own, was demonstrably removed from the aesthetic ends of serious art music.

Copland’s second descriptor, “hysterical,” reaffirms these associations of difference.

Before the Enlightenment Era, medical professionals understood hysteria as a physiological disorder specific to the uterus and so the special providence of women. According to Nicole

Edelman and Olivier Walusinski, “the illness has been attributed to several causes: the uterus understood as a small living animal within women’s bodies that moves around when unsatisfied,

116 Ibid., p. 2. Copland distinguishes between the collective “spirit of the times,” (the zeitgeist), and the specific/individual approximations of this ideal, the “jazz spirit.” 117 Ibid., p. 2

48

clogging or poisoning of the uterus by feminine seed, vapors from fermentation in the womb that rise to the brain, and satanic possession.”118

This physical etiology was challenged in the nineteenth century when scientists started to recognize that ovulation was a natural and recurring process, akin to a heartbeat or respiration.

Since no associations could be made between the hysteric’s abnormal behavior and their reproductive faculties, the condition was reimagined as a cognitive disorder. Significantly, this development expanded the diagnostic category to include male “inverts, who had a feminine sensibility.”119 As victims of a mental deficiency, the “invert,” or male hysteric, was socially suspect because his behavior did not conform with his biological sex. The diagnostic goal was not to fundamentally alter a patients’ basic sexual preferences, but to reinforce a rigid gender ideology founded on a clear division between men and women. Male hysteria can therefore be interpreted as an early attempt to scientifically pathologize homoerotic desire, but not necessarily homosexuality.

By characterizing jazz as “hysterical,” Copland (definitively) marked the genre as exotic by virtue of the adjective’s feminine associations. However, the word’s connotations also resonate with some discursive strategies commonly practiced by queer subjects in the early twentieth century. Along with “degenerate,” and “pervert,” “invert,” was an interwar vernacular term often used in reference to effeminate (or visibly) gay men. As George Chauncey explains,

“[Homoerotic] desire was seen as simply one aspect of a much more comprehensive gender role inversion (or reversal), which [Western gay men] were also expected to manifest through the adoption of effeminate dress and mannerisms; they were thus often called inverts.… In the dominant turn of the century cultural system governing the

118 Nicole Edelman, and Olivier Walusinski, “Socioeconomic Background of Hysteria’s Metamorphosis from the 18th Century to World War One,” in Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma, Julien Bogousslavsky, ed., (Basel Switzerland: Karger Publishers, 2014), p. 11. 119 Ibid., p. 14.

49

interpretation of homosexual behavior … one had a gender identity rather than a sexual identity.”120

The “dominant turn of the century cultural system” Chauncy refers to, was derived from Karl

Heinrich Ulrichs theories on Uranianism. Like his contemporaries, Ulrichs believed an individual’s anatomy determined their natural sexual inclinations. As a rule, biological males were ordered towards heterosexual attraction, the abnormality of homosexuality was simply a manifestation of natural female desires in an otherwise well-adjusted male subject.

Metaphysically, Ulrichs thought that the Urning, or male individual who sexually desired other men, could be understood as “a woman’s spirit in a man’s body.” In other words, Ulrichs concluded that homoerotic desire was evidence of an unacknowledged subjectivity, one formed from a cognitive synthesis between the pure or authentic sexes.121 The German physician called this unique subject position the “third sex.” In this model, homoerotic impulses were not necessarily evidence of a homosexual orientation, in the contemporary sense, but simply an expression of one’s intrinsic feminine nature.122 If gay men were psychologically female, their sexual appetites could be understood as natural, even mainstream. As a member of this liminal

“third sex,” Copland understood the female qualities he attached to jazz as an approximation of his own consciousness.

Lastly, Webster’s New World Dictionary defines grotesque as a quality “characterized by distortions or striking incongruities in appearance, shape, and manner (as in the tuba’s grotesque intonation ruined the sonata), and as something “ludicrously eccentric or strange, ridiculous, or absurd (as in a grotesque shadow arose from the forest canopy).123 In each case, that which is

120Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 48. Emphasis in Original. 121 Quoted Ibid., p. 49. 122 Theories of contemporary queer experience are briefly surveyed in the Conclusion: Grohg After Queer Theory. 123 Joseph Friend, and David Guralnik, eds., Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, (Cleveland, and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1959), p. 640.

50

grotesque is antithetical to that which is aesthetically beautiful, or ideal. Since it is a distortion or parody, the grotesque cannot be an artistic end in and of itself. It remains only as a means to enliven a syncretic creative product.

Why did Copland find jazz grotesque? Taken with the other two descriptors, he may have simply been reinforcing the foreign connotations that he previously mapped onto the genre. In the West, classical composers who source their works in popular or folk musics risk being criticized as unoriginal. Calling jazz “wild, hysterical, and grotesque,” paints the genre as unfamiliar, and therefore as potentially innovative. In Copland’s view, it was a composer’s job to abstract the genre’s exotic qualities to enliven one’s musical creations.

In this project, I have argued that queer subjects in the early twentieth century regularly took advantage of the ambiguous distinction between the exotic and the erotic in the Western cultural imagination. For these individuals, indulging in this type of orientalist discourse was an effective means to imagine an alternative social order that was more sexually tolerant, and therefore, from a certain subject position, more egalitarian. Evidence suggesting Copland’s participation in a similar strategy is found in his published writings and press interviews. Pollack notes that Copland often associated jazz with the grotesque and “piquant,” (or pleasurable), throughout his career.124 One year after his lecture at the Brooklyn Academy, Copland used some language from his shorthand in a published article. “From the composer’s viewpoint, jazz had only two expressions: either it was the well-known “blues” mood, or the “wild, abandoned, almost hysterical and grotesque mood so dear to the youth of all ages.”125 Here the genre’s grotesque quality is understood as an approximation of some experience specific to the young.

Unfortunately, the 1941 essay did not clarify the exact practice Copland was referring to.

124 Pollack, Aaron Copland, pp. 114-5. 125 Copland, Our New Music, p. 88.

51

However, an interview the composer gave to The New York World in 1929, further nuances the multiple degrees of aesthetic significance Copland assigned to his symphonic jazz. Specifically, he suggested that the genre was particularly well-suited for evoking the sensual nature of a sexual encounter. For Copland, jazz could only be a component aspect of an American classical tradition. Since the genre was “essentially limited, … jazz,” in Copland’s view, “means either the excitement of New York City or the super sensuality of Negro blues.”126

Was sex/sensuality the sentiment “so dear to the youth of all ages?” A generally accepted notion in human development is that the degree of sexual desire we experience (or libido, to use

Freud’s language), peaks in young adulthood. This climax coincides with the completion of one’s physical and mental maturity, and it once served the evolutionary purpose of encouraging procreation between the human race’s most able-bodied persons. Queer subjects also experience a heightened level of sexual awareness in their young adulthood, though their actions are not restricted by a strict heterosexual reproductive teleology. In short, the biological responsibilities

(i.e. children) that temper heterosexual promiscuity are not an obstacle for queer interpersonal relationships. The party, as it were, could go on long after one’s 20s.

Creative Synthesis

The written aesthetic theories I have surveyed in this chapter demonstrate the deep resonance of Cocteau’s aesthetics in Copland’s own thought. Both men believed that artists ought to draw inspiration from their daily experiences. The key to this process was the artist’s capacity to tune into contemporary cultural sensibilities, and then morph their ideas along those

126 Martha Dreiblati, “Lack of Tradition Blocks Musical Progress Here, Personalities of Composers One Solution, Says Aaron Copland,” New York World, July 7th, 1929, Metropolitan Section 3, CCLC. My emphasis. As previously mentioned, syncretic social dances derived from ragtime and jazz idioms were often criticized as being overtly sexual in nature. This discursive practice was intended to paint the entertainment’s African/African- American influences as foreign or irrational. These essentialist opinions reinforced the social separation between Black and White subjects, but they also connoted an expressive space that was more tolerant of alternative sexual desires.

52

lines. In this way, every new generation of artists/composers approximates a component aspect of our shared human consciousness specific to the age they are writing in.

Copland’s adherence to Cocteau’s thought as late as 1954, suggests that the aesthetic ideas he was introduced to in Nadia Boulanger’s studio continued to influence the composer’s style throughout his career. He consistently portrayed jazz as a genre ubiquitously known, yet still removed from the artistic mainstream. Its “excited,” “wild,” “hysterical” and “grotesque” qualities reinforced these associations of difference, but they also justified Copland’s free manipulation of “jazz rhythm.” Interpolations of jazz in Copland’s art music can therefore be understood as a mediation between what the composer thought of as disparate traditions/cultural elements. The European consciousness, approximated by their simultaneous melodies or counterpoint, was melted into the African consciousness, as approximated by its simultaneous rhythms. Each element was abstracted and fused into Copland’s new music to represent an amalgamation of our collective human experiences.

Essential to this synthesis was Copland’s rigid distinctions between high, classical, or ideal creativity, and low, vernacular, or pragmatic modes of expression. Such a dichotomy bestows an inordinate degree of control on a composer, like Copland, who freely borrows materials from each pole. At the same time, Copland’s professional success casts jazz as a legitimate resource for serious or art music. No longer was the popular entertainment an obtrusive noise, or an uncomfortable reminder of unequal American race relations. In Copland’s music, the genre was simply one of many styles that could connote a syncretic cultural, or human, identity. Since it was the classical composer’s responsibility to represent, and then communicate, this collective nature in their creative products, Copland’s symphonic jazz can basically be understood as a creative technique designed to suggest social reconciliation.

53

The musicians in the circle that formed around Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau were already fusing other “foreign” or popular musics into their works when Copland arrived in Paris in 1921.

The young composer’s adoption of their ideologies opened him to criticism based on the sources of his musical materials. The very suggestion that jazz could invigorate a high-art tradition ensured that Copland’s early jazz-derived compositions enjoyed a succès de scandale. As the genre’s novelty wore off both at home and in Europe, however, Copland was forced to reaffirm jazz’s associations with difference. Its “excited,” and “grotesque” qualities were discursive tools employed to maintain this illusion. These descriptors helped Copland avoid criticisms that painted his style as out of touch, and thus provided an aesthetic justification for jazz interpolations in works published after the 1926 Piano Concerto.

Copland’s “inverted” gender status, (i.e. neither male nor female) provides a further explanation as to why such a syncretic aesthetic philosophy was attractive to the young composer. As a member of the “third sex,” Copland was accustomed to reconciling his “feminine sensibilities,” or homoerotic desires, with hegemonic social ideals that expected him to publicly present himself as unequivocally masculine.127 The sheer volume of jazz idioms found throughout the composer’s catalog, suggests that these associations of difference were not criticisms, but precisely the reason Copland regularly drew from the genre. The synthesis of a feminized vernacular tradition with a masculine ideal (i.e. a modernist style) suggests that

Copland’s symphonic jazz can also be viewed as metaphorical representation of his unique queer perspective.

127 Though Copland never denied his queer subjectivity, he always took great care to obfuscate this identity while in public. Even late in life, Copland would commonly attend concerts with a female escort, implying the public/private expressive dichotomy he practiced as a teenager consistently informed his behavior throughout his adult life.

54

Many of the manuscripts I analyzed in this chapter are chronologically removed from the completion of Grohg’s original edition (1922-24), and its later revision (1932). I have argued, however, that these documents evidence Copland’s consistent affinity for Cocteau’s aesthetic theories throughout his professional career. A closer examination of Grohg’s musical text demonstrates that many of these ideas were at the forefront of Copland’s thought before he left

Europe in 1924. We know Copland abstracted Grohg’s polyrhythms for use in his 1927 article

“Jazz Structure and Influence.” In turn, the aesthetic significance Copland associated with

Grohg’s jazz was similarly consistent in his later writings. The next chapter tests this assertion through a structural analysis of Grohg’s “Dance of the Opium Eater.” I argue that a combination of polyrhythmic and polytonal techniques, cast into an increasingly dense orchestral texture, portends the “excited” and “sensual” qualities Copland ascribed to jazz in 1929. Grohg’s symphonic jazz thus encapsulates the aesthetic model that Copland worked to refine his entire professional career: the full synthesis of his feminine and masculine modes of personal expression, or the approximation of his early twentieth century queer subjectivity.

55

CHAPTER 4

VISIONS OF JAZZ IN THE “DANCE OF THE OPIUM EATER”

The Grohg Project

In its complete form, Grohg’s original 1924 edition has been lost.128 What remains preserved in the Library of Congress is a set of piano reductions, unfinished sketches, and extracted musical excerpts each containing a single piece of the ballet’s larger puzzle. In the

1980s, Michael Feldman, then head of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, asked the Library of

Congress to search for the rest of the original score. “The Grohg Project,” as it came to be known, sought to produce a performable edition of Copland’s original ballet (they even suggested Twalia Tharp as a potential choreographer). The team looked at extant versions of the score, including Copland’s early pencil sketches, and several incomplete works such as: “Three

Dances From Grohg,” “Two Grohg Dances,” as well as several loose manuscript leaves known collectively as the “Grohg Orchestral Pages.” It soon became evident that too much re- orchestration would be required to produce a performance edition. After the team combed through all the known extant copies written before the 1932 revision, they found that 408 measures would need to be reimagined in a style consistent with Copland’s early techniques.129

“The Grohg Project,” was part of a larger Copland revival in the U.S. that lasted roughly from 1980 until the new millennium. This movement was motivated by Copland’s failing health

(he died in 1990 at the age of 90). It seems the American musical community was aware they were about to lose an icon. In 1988, a young British musician named Oliver Knussen was asked

128 Though it is missing two dances from the original score (the “Dance of the Young Child,” and the “Dance of the Major Domo), the ballet’s 1934 edition remains the most cohesive version currently known. 129Ronald Caltabiano, “The Grohg Project,” April 27th, 1988, CCLC. No musicologists participated in this reconstruction. For the ballet to be performed with its original musical text, a critical edition compiled from the extant sketches and professional excerpts would be necessary.

56

to conduct Copland’s Hear Ye! Hear Ye!. Like Grohg, this ballet had also been recently

“discovered” in the Copland papers. While preparing it, Knussen noticed curious similarities between Copland’s second ballet, and some of his other earlier compositions. Knussen confirmed his suspicions in 1994 when he found that much of Grohg’s “missing” material was filed in boxes associated with later professional compositions. These included: Cortege Macabre (1923), the Dance Symphony (1930), as well as the ballet Knussen had been tasked with conducting.130

That same year, Knussen conducted Grohg’s 1932 revision with the Cincinnati Orchestra as a prelude for their performance of Hear Ye! Hear Ye!. To date, this remains the only public performance of Copland’s first ballet.

That Copland did not use material from the “Dance of the Opium Eater” in any orchestral works prior to 1934, suggests he thought the dance could serve different function than the rest of the original ballet.131 In 1926, Copland used the movement as a centerpiece for a lecture he gave at the Eastman School of Music. As Mary Eretz Will reported, “Mr. Copland analyzed jazz rhythms and showed the effect of jazz on a number of modern composers. He illustrated his talk by playing some of his own piano compositions, notably, ‘The Dream of An Opium Eater.’”132

Copland’s use of the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” to illustrate these early lectures, reinforces my belief that the movement was composed as a way for the composer to communicate a new creative innovation (his affective manipulation of the polyrhythm’s excited quality), and further evidences the movement’s musical significance in Copland’s catalog. As Will’s review implies,

Copland’s lecture was an early proving ground for the technical and aesthetic positions he

130 Oliver, Knussen, “In Search of Grohg,” Tempo, New Series, 189 (June, 1994): 6-7 131Copland cut the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” from all of the ballet’s existing short scores. Some of the “Grohg Orchestral Pages,” resemble portions of the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” as it exists in the 1932 revision, but it is impossible to determine whether Copland sketched these fragments before or after he completed the ballet’s original edition in 1924. 132 Mary Eartz Will, “Aaron Copland Lectures on Jazz,” New York Musical Courier, (December 26th, 1926), CCLC. Certainly the “Dream of the Opium Eater,” included the original dance’s “jazz visions.”

57

articulated both in “Jazz Structure and Influence” (1927), and in “The Influence of Jazz on

Modern Music” (1940). In all three instances, Copland commented on the structural and affective qualities of jazz rhythm.

I have argued that the polyrhythmic techniques first introduced in the “Dance of the

Opium Eater” became the foundation for Copland’s theories on jazz rhythm that he would refer to throughout his career. Copland’s decision to include the full movement in the ballet’s 1932 revision, provides further evidence suggesting that he wished to make its techniques known to the broader public.133 The movement’s gradual dramatic development and racially parodic text connote the unfamiliar, exotic, and excited affective qualities Copland ascribed to jazz techniques in the written aesthetic theories I have surveyed. These associations are reinforced by the structural similarities between Grohg’s textually denoted jazz, and Copland’s operational definition of polyrhythm.

Figure 4.1 charts the spatial, temporal, and functional relationships between Grohg’s original manuscript, and the remaining extant copies. A work’s vertical position represents the distance between the site of its premiere or completion (chosen only if the work has never been performed) and Copland’s Brooklyn home. Compositions finished in Paris, such as the original score, are plotted towards the top of the graphic. Conversely, works composed or premiered in the U.S. are placed near the bottom. Since the “Dream of the Opium Eater,” and the ballet Hear

Ye! Hear Ye! were premiered in the U.S. but not in New York, their vertical position is lower than the other American works. The chart’s horizontal axis connotes each composition’s year of completion/first performance. Newer works are charted towards the right, and older works are

133Copland preferred not to revise his works after publication. His inclusion of material from the “Dance of the Opium Eater” in both the 1932 revision and later in Hear Ye! Hear Ye! suggests that Copland understood the material as more than a pedagogic exercise.

58

positioned closer to the left. Black squares refer to compositions that served an educational or private function, while yellow squares indicate that the work was intended as a professional or public project. Lines between works suggest musical connections. These could include reductions, revisions, or direct quotations.

Original Edition More Recently Premired/Completed Three Dances From Grohg

Grohg Orchestral Pages

Two Grohg Dances Greater Distance From Brooklyn

Dance Symphony Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1929) (1934)

Cortege Macabre 1932 Revision (1923) Dream of an Opium Eater

Figure 4.1 Spatial, Temporal, and Functional Relationships Between the “Grohg” Scores.

The “Dance of the Opium Eater,” is the third movement in Copland’s 1932 revision. Like the other movements, Copland begins with a sparsely orchestrated introductory dirge. These early motives contain most of the dance’s thematic material, but in a more condensed temporal space. Copland’s text soon introduces Grohg and his servants. The necromancer takes centerstage, and “he begins to dance about the opium eater, exerting his powers.”134 Grohg’s

134 Copland, Grohg, 1932, p. 64, System 3, mm. 1, CCLC.

59

“powers” are in reference to his ability to bind his victims into a dream-like state. This action is accompanied by an intervallically constrained dialog between the first violin and the viola

(Figure 4.2). The former provides a consistent ostinato pattern that rises to a quarter note climax.

Copland emphasizes this arrival in both string parts with a tenuto articulation marking. Though more reserved than a punctuating accent or marcato indication, the tenuto nonetheless provides a subtle emphasis that suggests the viola’s theme maintains a triple meter subdivision (3 + 5;

3+2+3) that is reinforced by the first violin’s motive. Thus rhythmically, Grohg’s theme contains half the material necessary to realize the polyrhythmic technique Copland outlined in “Jazz

Structure,” and later in “The Influence of Jazz.” All that was missing was an unchanging quarter note bass.

Figure 4.2 Grohg: A Ballet in One Act, (1932), p. 64, mm. 9-12

The dance’s most dramatic musical events occur after the viola/violin material at measure

418. Copland’s text says, “The Opium Eater Begins to Dance, (Visions of Jazz).” The theme’s

“jazz” quality is derived from the polyrhythmic piano vamp that expands on the strings’ previous motives (Figure 4.3). The piano’s right hand maintains the same triple meter subdivision as the viola’s ostinato. This time, however, Copland includes a steady quarter note bass in the piano’s left hand that regularly emphasizes beat four. The juxtaposition satisfies the technical requirements of Copland’s polyrhythmic theories. The right hand’s triple meter subdivision, cast over the duple meter bass engenders a series of interlocking rhythms. Symbolically, the union of

60

the triple meter rhythm heard in Grohg’s original theme with the left hand’s duple bass pattern represents the fulfillment of a past desire. The limited pitch range, and repetitive nature of

Grohg’s original theme, implies the character cannot achieve his innermost wishes on his own accord. Perhaps this is why the necromancer needs his undead victims: alone Grohg is incomplete, but in the presence of others, his own limitations become a constituent part of a larger social whole.

Figure 4.3: “Visions of Jazz,” Polyrhythmic Piano Vamp135

Four measures later, a new trumpet melody is layered on top of the piano’s unchanging polyrhythm. The trumpet line alternates between a C# and A# in a duple meter subdivision. After three measures, these oscillations lead into a held G# that is prepared in the previous bar by an

F# on the and of beat four. The motive’s voice leading thus suggests that the trumpet melody is tonally grounded in in F# major.136 Conversely, the established piano vamp is more harmonically ambiguous. The piano’s left hand consistently sounds a Gb in the tenor voice, perhaps implying the instrument is operating in a similar tonal area as the trumpet. However, a recurring F natural in right hand obscures this harmonic relationship. Copland reinforces this dissonance every eighth beat. At these instances, the left hand’s Gb ostinato switches to an F natural played in octaves. The change is emphasized by the piano’s articulation, and by the entrance of the

135Ibid., Page 64, System 3, Measure 1-4. The triplet indication above the right hand’s final three grace notes appears in Copland’s revised manuscript. 136 The trumpet follows the same melodic contour in all five repetitions of its motive.

61

contrabass. On the last beat of the trumpet motive, the bass doubles the left hand’s F natural.

Copland’s orchestration appears to suggest two distinct tonal areas sounding at once: F# as implied by the trumpet melody, and F natural as introduced in the piano’s right hand, and later reinforced by the bass voices.

Figure 4.4 Grohg: A Ballet in One Act (1932), p. 67 mm. 6-12; p. 68 m. 1.

Copland’s polytonality was likely inspired by Darius Milhaud who as mentioned earlier, employed a similar technique in L'Homme et son désir, and in Le Création du Mundo. Beyond this technical consistency, Milhaud’s ballet and the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” were both imagined as dream sequences. Removed from reality, each narrative created a subversive space

62

for social reimagination. Milhaud’s sexual encounter between primitive man and the feminized cosmos is only possible in his ballet’s fantastic setting and choreographic split from the conventions of European theatre. Börlin’s quasi-improvisational movements embody the essential irrationality of his character. By contrast, the female spirit’s sweeping and fluid descent from the heavens connotes a degree of refinement that is beyond the pale of the male character’s ontology. Fused together during their symbolic sexual union, the male and female archetypes ultimately form a new syncretic relationship.

As the “Dance of the Opium Eater” progresses, the polytonality and the polyrhythms persist as equally significant musical phenomenon. The dance’s remaining drama is established through Copland’s orchestration. After the trumpet melody is introduced, each successive repetition becomes increasingly denser. The remaining winds and strings do not double the piano and trumpet motives in their entirety, but instead buttress fragments of each instrument’s respective motives. For instance, when the trumpet solo begins its second repetition, the piccolo and clarinet in D reinforce its duple meter patterns, while the oboe and strings support the piano’s vamp. Copland’s orchestration is augmented by a gradual universal crescendo that was subtly introduced when the trumpet solo began. As each instrument group is layered in, the effect is a gradual increase in the dance’s overall dramatic intensity. Reaching an almost frenzied state, the trumpet melody’s fourth repetition leads into the dance’s climax (Figure 4.5). Here a cluster chord provides no harmonic resolution for either tonal area. Instead the chord’s dissonance, encouraged by its tightly packed chromatic intervals, creates a moment when each distinct rhythm and tonal area converge to form a new artistic experience.

63

Copland’s text reads, “The Opium Eater has calm visions,” indicating that a musical and symbolic reconciliation has been achieved within the chord’s temporal duration. Copland’s juxtaposition of a vernacular tradition he would later feminize as “hysterical,” against a modernist polytonal technique, seems to suggest a contested space between that which is exotic, and that which is civil or modern.137 Yet, neither technique subsumes the other in the course of the opium eater’s “jazz visions.” In fact, not only do the polyrhythms and polytonality coexist in relative stasis, when they converge in the final cluster chord, the audience is treated to the new musical possibilities made manifest by the chord’s ethereal dissonance.

Figure 4.5 Grohg: A Ballet in One Act (1932), p. 70, mm. 1-4, reduction.

137 The polyrhythm’s exotic subtext is reinforced by Copland’s racialized text.

64

Interpreting the “Dance of the Opium Eater’s” Jazz Idioms

Grohg’s jazz idioms carry multiple layers of aesthetic significance. First, Copland’s symphonic jazz can be understood as a confirmation of his endorsement of Cocteau’s ideology.

In this light, the “Dance of the Opium Eater’s” polyrhythms evidence Copland’s sourcing in popular or vernacular entertainments, while the movement’s polytonality confirms his reverence for the specific compositional techniques of the “Cocteau-Satie” group of six. Copland’s text may also reinforce these stylistic associations. The “opium eater,” could simply be a nod to Jean

Cocteau. The writer’s recovery from a severe opium addiction was the subject of Cocteau’s 1930 treatise Opium: Diary of His Cure.138 By referencing Cocteau’s not-so-private habits in his textual instructions, Copland may just be acknowledging his acceptance of the writer’s neoclassical aesthetic.

Copland understood Milhaud’s music as refined, lyrical, and above all else, modern.139

Through his interpolation of polytonal techniques, Copland definitively marked the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” as an example of ultramodern art music. Contrasting this ideal is Copland’s polyrhythmic piano vamp, a technique that the composer understood as vernacular and as I have shown, evocative of the feminine. Existing together in “The Dance of the Opium Eater,”

Copland’s music can be interpreted as equal parts masculine and feminine, or in other words, as an approximation of his “inverted” or dual gender identity.

While a composer’s style, taste, and aesthetic philosophy are undoubtedly influenced by micro-social relationships similar to those I have foregrounded in this project, these interactions do not occur in a vacuum. Indeed, as I have demonstrated, Copland’s affinity for popular musics

138 Jean Cocteau, Opium: Diary of His Cure, (London” P. Owen, 1957). Accessed, 1/21/2017 at https://utmedhumanities.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/opium-the-diary-of-a-cure-jean-cocteau/ 139 Aaron Copland, “The Lyricism of Milhaud,” Modern Music, 6 (January-February, 1929): 15-17.

65

was well developed before he left for Paris in 1921. While still in Brooklyn, Copland enjoyed

Tin Pan Alley’s latest trends, both in live performances and through his family’s multiple phonograph machines. The development of this technology exponentially increased the degree of

Copland’s childhood exposure to American popular music. In the interwar years, this meant that jazz and other social dances routinely sounded through the Copland home.140 A second consequence of this technological innovation was the broader public dissemination of Tin Pan

Alley’s exotic representations of America’s newest immigrant communities.

Before the Second World War, Asian-Americans, particularly those of Chinese descent, were viewed as socially suspect because they sometimes competed with certain Anglo populations in low-wage economic sectors. Compounding this economic reality were the imagined biological differences between Chinese and Anglo subjects. The later population often justified their racial supremacy by arguing European brains were larger, and therefore capable of more complex cognitive functions than their Asian counterparts. Judy Tsou’s study of over 300

Tin Pan Alley songs unveils three distinct methods used to musically represent Chinese-

Americans that were designed to reinforce these physical differences: exoticization, comparison to animals/non-humans, and emasculation.141 Grouping Chinese immigrants in the same category as women and children effectively moved their social position further away from the white-male ideal.142 Sheet music covers often provide vibrant visual representations of these racial caricatures. For instance, the cover to the Tin Pan Alley standard “China We Owe a Lot To

You,” (1917) prominently featured a Chinese man at its center. The man is represented with

140 A second technological innovation indispensable to any account of Copland’s early life is the modern advancement made in nautical engineering and navigation. The invention of the ocean liner like the one Copland took to Paris, reduced the transatlantic journey from a month to just over a week. 141 Judy Tsou, “Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music,” Repercussions, 6/2 (Fall, 1997): 27-9. 142Tsou believes that a social structure which positioned white men as the most biologically “civilized,” or modern, developed out of Charles Darwin’s theories on biological evolution. Ibid., pp.25-6.

66

exaggerated feminine traits including: his “long fingernails, which are normally associated with women in western society, his hands [that] strike a feminine pose, and [his] colorful (orange and blue) embroidered robe, more like a women’s dress than a traditional man’s robe.”143 This song’s cover and many other Tin Pan Alley products operated as discursive tools of social control. By design, these representational practices maintained the privileged social position of the song’s creators at the expense of the subjects they chose to represent.

Copland was certainly aware of this common example of musical exoticism before he left for Europe. When he encountered a similar degree of racial parody in Milhaud’s ballets, he was likely comfortable with its familiarity. At the same time, musical emasculation of Chinese-

American subjects many have appealed to Copland’s own feminine sensibilities, since he was also a racial other in the 1920s both at home and in Europe. Copland’s feminized musical representations of other immigrant communities (as implied by his “opium eater,” indication), recast these exotic qualities as a component of his queer subjectivity.

Copland’s childhood exposure to American popular culture extended beyond his consumption of Tin Pan Alley’s musical products. Archival documents suggest that in his teenage years, Copland accompanied his father on at least one outing to Minsky’s Burlesque

Company.144 Prior to 1922, Minsky’s operated out of the National Theater in Manhattan’s lower

East Side. Like other traditional Burlesque establishments, the shows featured suggestive jokes, light musical accompiment and striptease dancing. In many ways, these performances extended the practices of vaudeville theater by positioning Black, immigrant, and working-class bodies as objects of entertainment and sexual desire. Between 1910-1921, club bands at establishments like Minsky’s typically played a mixture of Broadway ballads, Tin Pan Alley standards, original

143 Ibid., p. 31. 144 Aaron Copland, “The Family,” from Notes for an Autobiography, CCLC.

67

arrangements, and selections from African-American vernacular traditions. Copland’s teenage experiences at Minsky’s, established for him a clear association between sexual fantasy and popular music. In other words, the imagined social distinctions between Copland and the creators of his popular resources were already being modeled to the young composer before he left for

Europe. Perhaps these considerations account for the intersections of jazz and sexual desire in

Copland’s orchestral works. By embodying and exaggerating ragtime dancing’s African qualities, White subjects adopted their licentiousness associations as a means to escape to constraints of European behavioral expectations. “Dancing Black,” was meant to contrast the rational nature of mundane reality, but the practice nonetheless reinforced the social distinctions between Black and White Americans. Thus, the liberation experienced by White ragtime dancers was realized via parody of the racial other.

Danielle Robinson calls this unequal negotiation “participatory minstrelsy,” in reference to the White consumer’s active role in bolstering these social boundaries. Jewish and other

Eastern Europeans did not fit neatly into this racial dichotomy. As noted, by 1925 the U.S. government considered Jews along with Italians and other non-Norther Europeans to be non-

White. Still, the liminal position Copland and other European immigrants occupied did not prevent them from engaging in America’s Black vs. White racial dialectic. As Robinson notes, immigrant dancers also embodied markers of Blackness as means to articulate a White identity.

Even though these practices challenged the categorization of Eastern Europeans as foreign, their performance did little to contest White domination. Ultimately these empowering gestures elevated the social status of immigrant communities at the expense of African American subjects.145

145 Danielle Robinson, “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy, Dance Chronicle, 32 (2009): 120-21.

68

The ephemeral utopia Grohg (the character) creates in the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” runs parallel to how Copland presented his sexuality/gender identity in the public sphere.146

While Copland gave no indication that he was ever ashamed of his queer nature, he nonetheless limited direct expression of homoerotic desire to his private letters and interactions. Like Grohg, a reconciliation between Copland’s feminine and masculine sensibilities remained confined to the composer’s imagination. In the fantastic space of the opium eater’s dream, both masculine civility, (as connoted by his modernist polytonal interpolation), and feminine irrationality (as implied by the hysterical associations Copland ascribed to jazz) intermingle to create a new artistic amalgamation of two component parts Copland’s own subconscious. The “Dance of the

Opium Eater’s” symbolic fusion between a feminized vernacular, and modern “high” art musical techniques reflected the syncretic nature of Copland’s queer subjectivity. The dance reconciles these disparate elements and presents them as equally important to the movement’s dramatic development. In the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” Copland convincingly demonstrates how this metaphysical fusion is artistically functional, and therefore mainstream or normative.

146 Perhaps suggesting that Grohg was imagined as an autobiographical narrative device.

69

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

Nearly 30 years after Grohg was “discovered” in the Copland papers, the work remains an enigma. At once reconciliatory, racialized, and musically innovative, the “Dance of the

Opium Eater,” is a challenging reminder that even our most canonic musical figures struggle identifying themselves in relationship to the rest of the world. Copland’s choice to exoticise his jazz techniques articulated an unequal social dichotomy between his own position as a Jewish-

American and the location of the ethnic communities he references.

Since his later works seem to retreat from the employment of Eastern tropes, perhaps

Copland’s racial markings simply exemplify the young composer’s desire to conform with

European artistic trends. The jazz in Grohg’s “Dance of the Opium Eater,” evidences Copland’s desire to exploit the creativity of other cultures for his own benefit. In effect, these fusions functioned as evidence for Copland’s artistic sophistication, but the dance’s racial connotations nevertheless perpetuated certain stereotypical representations of Black and Chinese Americans.

These associations were simply another layer of intrigue added to convince audiences that despite its familiarity, jazz interpolations were the mark of a modern American composer.147

Copland’s practices, however uncomfortable, are rather mild when compared to contemporaneous Tin Pan Alley musical products. As mentioned, Copland’s “opium eater,” could be a reference to a Chinese-American stereotype, but it also could simply be a nod to his aesthetic affinity. At the same, Copland’s racial subtext can also be interpreted as an articulation of coalition unity.

147 Of course, my own subject position as a queer male complicates this perspective, since I have vested interest in portraying Copland as an ethical artist. We live in a world where the morality of public queer expression is still a contested issue, and Copland’s practices could be easily cast as further evidence of our collective degeneracy.

70

I have outlined an interpretation that implies the “Dance of the Opium Eater,” is a musical representation of how Copland understood his subconscious. Both masculine polytonality and feminine polyrhythms fuse together in the “jazz visions,” to reflect Copland’s

“inverted” gender identity. The possibilities realized by their convergence are not limited to a mediation of the gender binary. I have also shown, Copland understood jazz as an essentially

African tradition. The juxtaposition of the polyrhythm against European musical conventions may stand as metaphor for a certain kind of queer futurity founded on cooperation rather than entrenchment.148 The dance, in other words, was an opportunity for Copland to suggest a coalitional ethic that included marginalized queer desire as a natural, but not an exceptional aspect of human experience. This method effectively positioned queer experience as an undifferentiated component of the social whole, thus directly resisting cultural ideals that claimed this specific perspective did not (or perhaps should not) exist

Copland, like many of us, is a contradictory figure. He is a bourgeois Communist, a masculine-presenting (or “straight acting”) queer subject, and an American who found his national pride while living in Paris. He is, in short, one version of human. His accomplishments and setbacks can be mapped along our ubiquitous desires to create, to leave the world in a better state than the one we entered into, and above all else, to claim a sense of normalcy, or more simply, to feel as though we belong to something larger than ourselves.

148 Neither Copland’s text, nor his musical text suggest that the composer wrote “The Dance of the Opium Eater” as a parody of Black subjectivity.

71

APPENDIX:

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC”149

149 The documents included in this appendix are publicly accessible through the Library of Congress’ online catalog. 72

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 2

73

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 3

74

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 4

75

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 5

76

“THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 6

77

“THE INFLUECNE OF JAZZ ON MODERN MUSIC” P. 7

78

REFERENCES

Primary Sources

Archives:

Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D C. Aaron Copland Collection.

Articles By Aaron Copland:

“The Lyricism of Milhaud.” Modern Music, 6 (January-February 1929): 14-19.

“Music Since 1920.” Modern Music, 5 (March-April 1928): 16-20.

“Jazz Structure and Influence.” Modern Music, 4 (January-February 1927): 9-14.

“America’s Young Men of Promise.” Modern Music, 3 (1926): 13-20.

“Gabriel Faure: A Neglected Master.” The Musical Quarterly, 10/4 (1924): 573-586.

Lectures By Aaron Copland:

“Music As An Aspect of the Human Spirit.” Remarks delivered to Columbia University, 1954.

“The Influence of Jazz on Modern Music.” Remarks delivered to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1940.

Books By Aaron Copland:

Copland on Music. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963.

Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America. New York and London: Whittlesey House, 1941.

Books By Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis:

Copland: 1920 Through 1942. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984.

79

Published Interviews:

Dreiblati, Martha. “Lack of Tradition Blocks Musical Progress Here, Personalities of Composers One Solution, Says Aaron Copland.” New York World, July 7th, 1929, Metropolitan Section 3.

Smit, Leo. “A Conversation with Aaron Copland on His 80th Birthday.” Keyboard, 6/11, (1980): 6-35.

Other Primary Documents Consulted:

Cocteau, Jean. Cock and Harlequin: Notes Concerning Music, Rollo H. Meyers Trans.. London: The Egoist Press, 1921.

—————. Opium: Diary of His Cure. London: P. Owen, 1957. Accessed, 1/21/2017 at https://utmedhumanities.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/opium-the-diary-of-a-cure-jean- cocteau/.

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Paul. “‘To Become as Human as Possible’: The Influence of Andre Gide on Aaron Copland,” in Aaron Copland and His World, Judith Tick and Carol Oja editors. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 47-80.

Auner, Joseph. Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013.

Berger, Arthur. Aaron Copland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York, Basic Books, 1994.

Crist, Elizabeth. “Copland and the Politics of America,” in Aaron Copland and His World, Carol Oja, and Judith Tick Editors. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 278-9.

De Groote, Pascale. Ballets Suédois. Ghent, Belgium: University of Ghent, 2002.

Edelman, Nicole and Olivier Walusinski. “Socioeconomic Background of Hysteria’s Metamorphosis from the 18th Century to World War One,” in Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma, Julien Bogousslavsky, editor. Basel Switzerland: Karger Publishers, 2014.

Erichson, Robert. “Columbia University, 1954 in Review: The Year of the Bicentennial Celebration.” Columbia Spectator, 99/56 (12/21/1954): 1.

80

Fauser, Annegret. “The Making of An ‘American’ Composer,” in The Politics of Musical Identity. Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. Pp. 121-152.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction, Robert Hurley Trans.. New York: Random House, 1978.

Garret, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.

George-Graves, Nadine. “‘Just Like Being At The Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader ed. Julie Malig. Champaign: University of Illinois Press October 2000.

Grant. Francis. “E. Robert Schmitz Bringing Artistic Message from France.” Musical America, (November 29th, 1919): 11.

Hanna, Marsha. “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Croydon,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, Jefferey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. editors. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkeley and Los Angles: The University of California Press, 2000.

Kleppinger, Stanley. “On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron Copland.” Faculty Publications: University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music, 51 (Spring 2003). Accessed 12/28/2017 at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/51.

Knussen, Oliver. “In Search of Grohg.” Tempo, New Series, 189 (June, 1994): 6-7.

Levy, Beth. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Lindsey, Roberta. “A Historical and Musical Study of Aaron Copland’s Grohg: A Ballet in One Act.” PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1996.

McCrae, Margaret. “Music Blends With Patriotism in Post-War Pairs Celebration.” Musical America, (November 29th, 1919): 18

Metzler, David. “Spurned Love”: Eroticism and Abstraction in the Early Works of Aaron Copland.” Journal of Musicology, 15/4, (Autumn, 1997): 417-443.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society. Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Morelock, Bill. “Conscience vs. McCarthy: The Political Aaron Copland.” Minnesota Public Radio, first broadcasted May, 3rd, 2015.

81

Murchison, Gayle. The American Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetics of Copland’s New American Music, The Early Works, 1921-1938. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2012.

———————. “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland Between the Wars: Style and Ideology.” PhD. diss., Yale University, 1999.

Oja, Carol. “The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland,” in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920’s. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 237-52.

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Random House, 1999.

Robinson, Danielle. “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy.” Dance Chronicle, 32 (2009): 89-126..

Said, Edward. Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1978.

Smith, Catherine Parsons. “‘A Distinguishing Virility’: Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, Susan Cook and Judy Tsou, editors. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Pp. 94-96.

Tsou, Judy. “Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music,” Repercussions, 6/2 (Fall, 1997): 25-62.

Will, Mary Eartz. “Aaron Copland Lectures on Jazz.” New York Musical Courier, December 26th, 1926.

82

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Nate Ruechel

EDUCATION M.M. Historical Musicology, Florida State University, May 2018 (anticipated) B.M. Music Education, St. Norbert College, May 2016

CURRENT RESEARCH “Jazz, Desire, Racial Difference, and Twentieth Century Gender Ideology in Aaron Copland’s Grohg: A Ballet in One Act.”

This project explores the jazz idioms in Aaron Copland’s Grohg: A Ballet in One Act as a racialized and sexualized musical discourse. Drawing from historical and musicological evidence housed in the Library of Congress’ Aaron Copland Collection, I conclude that Copland’s symphonic jazz functioned as an aesthetic model for coalitional unity. Thesis Committee: Dr. Michael Broyles (advisor), Dr. Jennifer Atkins, Dr. Charles E. Brewer, and Dr. Denise Von Glahn.

CONFERENCE PAPERS “Irish Traditional Music in Southern Oconto Country.” Presented at the Southern Graduate Music Research Symposium. Athens Georgia, September 2016. “The Influence of Jazz on Aaron Copland’s Aesthetics.” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Southern Chapter. Baton Rouge Louisiana, February, 2018.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE Reader for Brian Wilcoxson, MUL 2010, Music Literature, Listening, and Understanding, Florida State University, Spring 2018 Reader for Amy Dunning, MUL 2010, Music Literature, Listening, and Understanding, Florida State University, Fall 2017 Reader for Carrie Danielson, MUH 2051, Music in World Cultures, Florida State University, Summer 2017. Reader for Ryan Whittington, MUL 2010, Music Literature, Listening, and Understanding, Florida State University, Spring 2017. Reader for Kurt Carlson, MUL 2010, Music Literature, Listening, and Understanding, Florida State University, Fall 2016. Interim Director of Bands. Oconto Unified School District, Spring 2017.

83

RELEVANT PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Presenter Advisor, Undergraduate Music Research Symposium, Spring 2017 Research Assistant to Michael Broyles, Florida State University, Spring 2017 Research Assistant to Douglas Seaton, Florida State University, Fall 2016

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS The American Musicological Society The Society for American Music The American Musical Instrument Society National Association for Music Education The College Music Society

PERFORMANCE EXPERIENCE

St. Norbert College Wind Ensemble 2012-2015 St. Norbert College Jazz Ensemble 2012-2015 St. Norbert College Knight Theatre (Pit Member) 2013 St. Norbert College Saxophone Quartet 2014 St. Norbert College Dixieland Jazz Ensemble 2014 University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Jazz Festival 2014-2015 St. Norbert College Jazz Combo 2015 Florida State University Irish Ensemble 2016-2018 Florida State University Early Music Ensemble 2016-2017

84