This early affinity for the avant-garde would place Copland at the forefront of change. During the fall of 1921, he relocated to Paris. Within this modernist Mecca, he encountered fresh talents such as the poet Ezra Pound, painter Charles Demuth, writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, and artist/ photographer Man Ray. He immediately gravitated toward the experimental composer Darius Milhaud and the Ballets Suedois, enthusiastically "getting into the action, where the controversial music and dance were happening." This innovative spirit directly impacted Copland's work. Under the tutelage of renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger, Copland embraced the modernist aesthetic, adopting its reverence for shock-value and aversion to mass appeal. Nearly a decade later, the Great Depression would invert this approach to musical composition, as Copland favored accessible, distinctly American themes over esoteric high modernism. With the war winding down and a multiplicity of new voices emerging from Europe, North, and South America, the regenerative spirit of the 1920s provided an optimal compositional backdrop. The Harlem Renaissance offered one of the most exciting contributions, moving art communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The jazz movement initiated a spirited dialogue between modernist artists, writers, and musicians evident in Man Ray and e.e. cummings visual representations of sound within Jazz and Sound Number 1 respectively. By 1925, Copland had reinvented his own music. His Music for the Theatre and "An Immortality"- a response to Ezra Pound's text from Ripostes- further evidence the intermingling of artistic venues, while demonstrating Copland's internalization of jazz. Throughout his career, Copland labored long and hard to rectify Waldo Frank's bleak estimation of the arts in 1919, "America is a giant who cannot speak...his tongue is tied." Copland, along with Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartely, among others, granted his country a comprehensive voice, dynamically coupling innovation with folk tradition. Copland gathered inspiration from a variety of sources. He befriended Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, a musician whose unique sound originated in Aztec culture, spawning Copland's own investigation of folk music and ethnic identity. This resulted in the composition of Vitebsk, homage to the composer's Jewish heritage. Copland describes the fast section of this piece as "a Chagall-like grotesquerie that reaches a wild climax and interrupts itself mid-course," an apt parallel given Chagall's belief that painting personified the energy of folk music. In the late 1930s, Copland fused seemingly disparate elements, successfully adapting a popular western to a ballet, resulting in the production of Billy the Kid. Other projects would include adaptations of Shaker hymns within the Pulitzer Prize winning Appalachian Spring, a statement of patriotism in Lincoln Portrait, and a musical accompaniment to Alexander Calder's kinetic mobiles, entitled Inaugural Fanfare. Aaron Copland's prolific life ended in 1990. Leonard Bernstein best encapsulates the essence of the composer's 80-year musical career stating "Copland has often been called the Dean of American Composers... he is a National Treasure, and if we had a Legion of Honor in this country, Aaron Copland should be commander-in-chief." |