{"id":424,"date":"2024-03-18T20:35:45","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T20:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/quiet-city\/"},"modified":"2025-03-30T15:17:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T15:17:39","slug":"quiet-city","status":"publish","type":"program_note","link":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/quiet-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Quiet City"},"content":{"rendered":"

    If there ever was an American \u201ccomposer laureate,\u201d then Aaron Copland is surely he.\u00a0\u00a0 A native of Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants of Lithuanian descent, he established what many call the \u201cAmerican Sound\u201d in art music.\u00a0 He had gone to Paris, like so many during the 1920s, to study advanced composition, and his musical style when he returned was accordingly advanced, some would say \u201cacademic.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 It certainly was often dissonant, and in no way exhibited the popular tunefulness that later made him the darling of mainstream America.\u00a0 But then, like so many other artists during the depression, he then turned to a simpler, more accessible style, rooted in the populism of the time.\u00a0 Thus we have such evergreen compositions as Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Billy the Kid.<\/em>\u00a0 Later, after the war, with the New Deal, the dust bowl, and the popularity of the communist party in America gone, he returned to the austere, more advanced musical style that previously had characterized his work.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless, most audiences today think of his \u201cdepression era\u201d musical style when his name is mentioned.<\/p>\n

    Quiet City\u00a0<\/em>exemplifies Copland\u2019s enormously popular compositions from those times.\u00a0\u00a0Scored for trumpet, English horn, and strings, it owes its origin to the incidental music that Copland had written for a play of the same name in New York in 1939.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0That music was scored for trumpet, saxophone, clarinet and piano.\u00a0\u00a0The success of his music led to suggestions that he rework the material into a composition for orchestra.\u00a0\u00a0In Copland\u2019s words:\u00a0\u00a0\u201c I borrowed the name, the trumpet and some of the themes from the original play.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He finished the work in 1940 and it saw its premi\u00e8re in January of 1941.<\/p>\n

    The entire mood of the work stems from the eponymous play by Irwin Shaw, which is built around the evocation of the infinitude of personal and private thoughts by the many individuals of a metropolis.\u00a0\u00a0Copland was called upon to provide music \u201cevocative of the nostalgia and inner distress of a society profoundly aware of its own insecurity.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The original incidental music featured a solo trumpet that served in some way as the playwright\u2019s voice and that of the main character.\u00a0\u00a0The latter apparently had apparently abandoned his Jewish faith, and had given up artistic aspirations for the life of material success as a businessman.\u00a0\u00a0But, he was reminded of his sacrifice by the \u201chaunting sound of his brother\u2019s trumpet playing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The English horn plays an equal r\u00f4le as the other character, and the interactions between their respective points of view carry the drama.<\/p>\n

    The poignant score is borne by the inimitable chords, voicing, and melodic style so familiar in all of those middle period words so beloved of Copland:\u00a0\u00a0\u201copen,\u201d sparse harmonies that contrast with thick, chordal \u201ccrunches.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Quiet City\u00a0<\/em>is informed by his disciplined economy of motifs, which appear in various guises, and a marvelous tonal ambiguity that avoids banal, superficial conclusions to ambiguous perspectives.\u00a0\u00a0Withal, it\u2019s as if Charles Ives\u2019\u00a0The Unanswered Question<\/em>\u00a0meets Copland\u2019s\u00a0Our Town.\u00a0<\/em>Cast into seven sections, the two more active, digressive interior ones are bookended by the thoughtful, but enigmatic, opening ones.\u00a0\u00a0And at the end, no answers are there.\u00a0\u00a0All in all, it\u2019s a marvelous miniature masterpiece that packs more music and stimulating, existential questions than is largely the norm.<\/p>\n

–Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n

\u00a92023 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[11],"class_list":["post-424","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-aaroncopland"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}