Music for the Common Man

Aaron Copland during the Depression and War

Elizabeth B. Crist

Music for the Common Man

Aaron Copland during the Depression and War

Elizabeth B. Crist

Description

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked.
While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals.
Much as been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, but very little on concert music of the era. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.

Music for the Common Man

Aaron Copland during the Depression and War

Elizabeth B. Crist

Author Information

Elizabeth B. Crist is Assistant Professor of Musicology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her writings on Copland have appeared in American Music, The Musical Quarterly, and Journal of Musicology. She won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award for her article "Aaron Copland and the Popular Front," published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She is co-editor (with Wayne Shirley) of The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland.

Music for the Common Man

Aaron Copland during the Depression and War

Elizabeth B. Crist

Reviews and Awards

Honorable Mention: Society for American Music's Lowens Book Award

"By neither taking Copland at his word nor accepting the traditional interpretations that discount or dismiss his political allegiances, Crist nuances what progressivism, the Popular Front, and communism meant and applies her findings to Copland's music from the 1930s and '40s. In doing so, she exposes the intimate relationship between the historical moment and the music, and refashions and enlarges our understanding of some of Copland's most beloved works and the man himself. Readers will wonder how we could have missed so much for so long."--Denise Von Glahn, Florida State University, author of The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, 2004 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner

"Did the progressive movement in the U.S. find a musical voice in Aaron Copland's music? Elizabeth Crist gives us an answer in a book that increases our understanding of his music and its times. Written with the same directness, elegance, and economy that characterizes Copland's music during the depression and World War II, Music for the Common Man deftly employs close readings of several pieces of Copland's music to support Crist's broader cultural observations. In addressing the political perspective of Copland's work during his most famous compositional period, Crist brings together a diverse array of sources and generates a compelling work of music history and cultural studies."--Neil Lerner, Davidson College