Aaron Copland is a man who is hard to pin down. Clearly America\u2019s most well-known and respected \u201cclassical\u201d composer, he was the creator of some of the country\u2019s most beloved compositions that brought the \u201cAmerican\u201d style to the concert hall. Yet, for all that, he was a musician with a remarkably broad range of personal interests and musical styles. His deep intellect and discerning tastes probed and were influenced by about all of the important composers and approaches to composition of the twentieth century. He spent time in his early maturity in France, where he immersed himself in the European musical avant-garde; he was interested in and was influenced by jazz; he maintained a life-long interest in the music of Latin America; he participated fully in the burgeoning interest on the part of the arts community in American folk elements and nationalism during the 1930s and 40s; and later in his life explored the dissonant musical idioms of the European avant-garde, yet again. But, he was not an artistic chameleon, rather a man who saw vitality, authenticity, and artistic possibilities in most of what his probing mind and \u201cbig\u201d ears encountered. <\/p>\n
In 1932 Copland, at the invitation of his friend and fellow composer, Carlos Ch\u00e1vez, visited Mexico City, where the two of them frequented a rather seedy, but evidently vital and stimulating nightclub with the name, \u201cS\u00e1lon M\u00e9xico.\u201d It was a bustling, popular venue, full of music, dancing, drinking\u2014a sign on the wall revealed something of the atmosphere. Apparently, it admonished patrons to not throw lit cigarette butts on the floor to avoid burning the feet of the ladies. It was also at this time that Copland became increasingly interested and committed to socialist causes and found the opportunity to witness Mexico\u2019s revolutionary government of great interest. Trips to the Soviet Union were also in his mind during this period. This growing bent for populism is familiar to American audiences from his works of the later thirties and forties, such as Billy the Kid<\/em>, Rodeo, <\/em>and Appalachian Spring<\/em>. In any case, he developed a deep creative affinity for the music of Mexico, and later, for that of Brazil and Cuba. He returned to Mexico for subsequent visits, and during the years 1932 to 1936 worked on a musical response to the experience, \u201cEl s\u00e1lon M\u00e9xico<\/em>.\u201d Chavez and the Mexico Symphony Orchestra give the world premi\u00e8re in Mexico City in August of 1937.<\/p>\n The single movement work is based upon more than a half dozen traditional Mexican folk tunes, but not necessarily ones that he had remembered from the nightclub. Rather, back in New York, he procured two printed collections of them, and worked from them. They\u2019re relatively well known in the milieu, but probably unfamiliar to most of us. While founding the composition on traditional folk tunes, what Copland definitely did not<\/u> do was simply to string them along in an agreeable medley for the concert stage. This work is a different beast, altogether. While the materials were simple and common, the principles and technique stem from quite a different world. Copland had studied in Paris during the 1920s, hobnobbed with the intellectuals there, and heard all of the most advanced and difficult music of the sophisticated of the world\u2019s leading composers. His own musical style during the late 1920s and early 1930s totally reflects this experience and orientation, and that style was distinctly not<\/u> \u201cyour father\u2019s Oldsmobile.\u201d So, with all that in mind, we should not be surprised by the nature of his desire to utilize these ethnic materials without disrespecting them on the one hand, and yet, on the other, create a thoroughly modern composition that reflected contemporary intellectual art. <\/p>\n In a somewhat similar approach to Picasso\u2019s employment of non-European cultural artifacts as the pictorial vehicle of new ways of seeing, so with Copland and his Mexican folk tunes. These ideas were popular characteristics of the world of art and music in France of the time. In like fashion, the great French composer, Darius Milhaud, whose music Copland heard much of, had written some important music using Brazilian pop tunes as the basis for serious orchestral compositions, including the evergreen Le b\u0153uf sur le toit<\/em> (The Ox on the Roof). In Copland’s hands, the result is a composition that stands as transitional between the really dissonant, modern \u201cPiano Variations\u201d of 1930 and the accessible, populist \u201cBilly the Kid\u201d of 1939.<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a9 2015 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[11],"class_list":["post-72","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\/72","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=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}