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Music for the Common Man

Elizabeth Bergman Crist · ISBN 9780195383591
Music for the Common Man | Zookal Textbooks | Zookal Textbooks
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Publisher Oxford University Press USA
Author(s) Elizabeth Bergman Crist
Subtitle Aaron Copland During the Depression & War
Published 30th April 2009
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Aaron Copland During the Depression & War

Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War 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. In the 1930s Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he called "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln
Portrait, and Appalachian Spring not only brought the composer unprecedented popular success but also came to define an American sound. Yet the political alignment behind this musical idiom--the social agenda that might be heard within
these familiar pieces--has been largely overlooked, even though it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals. His politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism or wartime patriotism, however, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. His music from the thirties and forties relates to the politics of radical progressivism, which affirmed 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. Investing symbols of America--whether the West, folk song, patriotism,
or the people--with progressive social ideals, Copland's music wrestles with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era.
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