Crist - Critical Politics

Critical Politics: The Reception History of Aaron Copland's Third Symphony
Author(s): Elizabeth Bergman Crist

Source: The Musical Quarterly , Summer, 2001, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 232-
263
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600912
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American Musics
Critical Politics: The Reception History

of Aaron Copland's Third Symphony
Elizabeth Bergman Crist
In the summer of 1946, Aaron Copland rushed to complete his long-

awaited Third Symphony for its premiere on 11 October with Serge
Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.1 He finished com-
posing the finale only on 29 September, and the first performance was
then rescheduled to allow another week's rehearsal.2 Koussevitzky and
the BSO presented the Third Symphony on Friday afternoon, 18 Octo-
ber, and again the following evening. The symphony occupied the entire
first half of the program, which included in its second half more standard
fare: Tchaikovsky's D-Minor Violin Concerto and Strauss's Till Eulen-
spiegel. Copland himself wrote most of the program notes for the Third
but declined to offer any interpretative comments, choosing instead "to
let the music 'speak for itself'."3 Boston's leading newspapers sent music
critics to the Friday afternoon concert, and their reviews appeared on
Saturday morning.
Thus begins the reception history of Copland's most significant
symphonic work. Spanning fifty years, from the premiere in 1946 to per-
formances in 1996, this account of the symphony's reception reveals
what writers found most important in American symphonic music and
how their standards were influenced by political and social circum-
stances increasingly different from those so crucial to Copland at the
time of composition.4 I engage journalistic criticism not to locate mean-
ing in the musical work at hand but to explore the symphony's fluid im-
port as perceived by various individuals listening in different historical
and cultural contexts. Reviews may be read not only as musical criticism
but also as sociocultural commentary, documenting the critical construc-
tion of significance and its subsequent transformations-the mutable in-
terpretations of and sympathies toward Copland's compositional aes-
thetic and that of wartime American concert music more generally.
The vast critical literature of newspaper and magazine reviews,
articles, and scholarship can be organized by categories of comment and
phases of reception. In terms of categories, reviews of the 1946 premieres
The Musical Quarterly 85(2), Summer 2001, pp. 232-263

? 2001 Oxford University Press 232

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Politics and Copland's Third Symphony 233
in Boston and New York introduce three recurrent topics that disclose
what critics considered most notable in serious symphonic music and
how this particular work fit within their symphonic standards.5 Nearly
all writers evaluated the Third on the basis of Copland's workmanship,
his musical style, and the symphony's grand tone. These critical cate-
gories are remarkably consistent in early commentary on the Third Sym-
phony and allow for comparison between otherwise divergent reviews
and opinions.
In attempting to evaluate the symphony as a piece of music, critics
first measured technique: musical workmanship and competence. Raised
for discussion were such aspects as orchestration, thematic unity, and
formal design. Though some disliked moments of Copland's orchestra-
tion, in general his compositional skill was undisputed. Not everyone
discussed these matters. Compositional technique was certainly the as-
pect most difficult to apprehend at a first or even second hearing, and
perhaps some reviewers considered specific musical comments to be of
little interest to the general concert-going public.
Second, reviewers assessed the individuality of the symphony's mu-
sical style, taking care to accredit perceived influences. Many associated
the Third with Copland's accessible manner, heard in such folk-flavored
ballet scores as Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. Also mentioned as stylistic
companions were Prokofiev and Shostakovich, testimony to the wartime
renown of the Russian symphonists and their populist idiom, so clearly
echoed in Copland's Third.6 Of paramount importance for most review-
ers was assessing stylistic individuality. As a general principle, a com-
poser was expected to have absorbed the symphonic tradition and trans-
formed his influences to create a personal voice.7
Lastly, descriptions of expressive posture, aesthetic quality, and
emotional impression can be grouped together as a single category evalu-
ating "tone." Critics generally agreed that the tone of the Third Sym-
phony was grandiose and optimistic, but they frequently disagreed about
the success of that tone, especially in response to the unabashed fourth
movement and its quotation of the Fanfare for the Common Man. More
than one reviewer seemed uncomfortable with Copland's celebratory,
communal rhetoric, as delivered in a traditional, four-movement sym-
phony, and located his or her disapproval in the symphony's tone.
While critical appraisal of the symphony's workmanship, percep-
tion of its style, and evaluation of its tone remained fairly uniform
through the years, the interpretation-as more than the sum total of
these elements-changed more noticeably. Here reception history inter-
sects with cultural history as reviews show a developing interest in sym-
phonic Americanism and an understanding of the Third as a cultural

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234 The Musical Quarterly
monument dating from World War II. In the course of fifty years, as the
symphony moved from present to past, reviewers adopted an increasingly
historicist perspective evident in their judgment of the work as represen-
tative of an era and ethos.
The reception history of the Third Symphony can be further sepa-
rated into stages. Following the premiere performances in 1946, review-
ers focused on workmanship and style. Interpretation and significance
became pressing concerns only in the second series of reviews from 1947,
when the symphony's rhetorical tone was considered in more detail. As
will become clear in the following discussion, shifting political and artis-
tic values in the cold war era affected critical appreciation of Copland's
accessible musical aesthetic, although younger ears may be newly recep-
tive. Such chronological and historical periodization delineates reactions
to the Third Symphony as well as to Copland and his symphonic lan-
guage more generally.
Understanding the reception of the Third and documenting the
transition from purely journalistic criticism to historiographic interpreta-
tion thus allows for a more judicious assessment of the work's place in
American musical and cultural history. Given the representative nature
of this piece as but one work amongst the spate of imposing yet acces-
sible wartime symphonies, reactions to Copland's Third may stand for
the genre's broader reception, explaining at least in part the waning in-
terest at mid-century in the American symphony and significance of its
revival in recent decades.8
First Performances: Koussevitzky and the BSO in 1946
In 1946 alone, critics in Boston and New York had the opportunity to
hear the Third Symphony six times. Table 1 lists the early performances
by Koussevitzky and the BSO between 18 October and 14 December.
Table 1. Performances of the Third Symphony by the BSO in 1946

Location Date
Boston, Symphony Hall 18 Oct.

19 Oct.
New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music 15 Nov.
New York, Carnegie Hall 16 Nov.
Pittsburgh 3 Dec.
Chicago 6 Dec.
Boston, Symphony Hall 13 Dec.
14 Dec.

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By contract, no other orchestra was allowed to perform the Third Symphony

until May 1947, when Leonard Bernstein led the Czech Philharmonic in
Prague, in the work's first performance outside of the United States.
On the whole, the reviews in 1946 from Boston and New York-as
well as from single performances in Pittsburgh and Chicago-were favor-
able, especially toward the formal integrity and logic of the symphony. In
the Boston Daily Globe, Cyrus Durgin described Copland's workmanship
as "beautifully clear and ordered, logical, with admirable development
and continuity,"9 an impression he confirmed after hearing the work for a
second time the following December. "Hearing it again only strengthens
one's first impressions of its structural solidity and logic, its salience of
ideas, and the skill with which it is put together." It was, he concluded,
"one of the most impressive works in all American music."10 In Chicago,
Claudia Cassidy noted the Third's large scale and "complex design," per-
haps having perceived in the symphony such cyclical elements as a recall
of the opening theme at the conclusion of its finale.11 The New York
critic Robert Hague agreed that the symphony was "clear in form,"12 and
Irving Kolodin praised its "lucidity and logic."13 Louis Biancolli, of the
New York World-Telegram, evaluated Copland's technical skill: "Analyze
any one of the movements, and a sense of fierce logic grows from them,
and then go one step further and analyze the symphony as a whole, and
the same logic seems quadrupled into a firm synthesis."'4 Similarly, Noel
Straus praised the coherence of individual movements, "all of which
proved polished in their workmanship" (though he could not have lis-
tened too attentively, having counted five movements in Copland's
"Fourth" Symphony).15 The Pittsburgh critic Ralph Lewando called Cop-
land a "master craftsman" whose work "reveals skilled handling" of form
and rhythm.16 While not all reviews mentioned technical matters, those
critics who chose to discuss compositional technique praised Copland's
execution of the symphonic form.
Almost all had something to say about the style of the Third Sym-
phony, and here questions of influence and originality pervade the criti-
cal commentary. Reviewers often compared the symphony to Copland's
own recent functional scores, indicating a growing consensus about the
aural signature of his individual style. L. A. Sloper heard echoes of Ap-
palachian Spring in the symphony's tuneful themes and lean textures.17
Writing for the New York Sun, Kolodin compared the opening move-
ment's atmosphere to that of another dance score, Billy the Kid.18 Com-
pleting a trio of ballet references was Cassidy's recognition in the sym-
phony of Copland's "own musical fingerprints from Rodeo, in the sense
of haunting memories from that lovely score which open vistas in the
deep distance and are uniquely American."19 Significantly, these

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reviewers associated Copland's new symphony not with his earlier works
in the same genre but with the more recent functional music, with
which they were no doubt more familiar.20
Alexander Williams scoffed at the critical need "to search dili-
gently for reminiscences of other men's music" in any new work and
maintained that the symphony was original "in the best sense of that
much abused term."21 Copland was frequently recognized even in the
earliest reviews as having a unique and consistent style, and through the
years reviewers continued to note this sound, which was at least once
dubbed "Coplandesque."22 In the New York Journal American, Miles Kas-
tendieck concurred that "there is no mistaking Copland's individual
style.... The sense of spaciousness created in the opening movement is
as typical as it is American. No other composer writes that way."23 Yet
occasionally at issue was the value of such consistency: to some it repre-
sented an admirable unity of style, but to others it signified a lack of cre-
ative imagination or development.
What was described as consistent could also be considered repeti-
tious. Despite his words of praise, for example, Kastendieck heard too
many influences in the Third, "especially Shostakovich" and Copland's
own music from Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring.24 Biancolli de-
fended the symphony in his review for the World Telegram, responding to
such comments as Kastendieck's with a touch of symphonic nationalism:
The temptation ... is to whisper "Shostakovich!" to a neighbor. The

identification is true, but only insofar as both the Russian and the Ameri-
can find the same means of freeing fresh stores of feeling. Just as
Shostakovich long ago found Mahler a good guide in some phases of tech-
nic, without aping him, so Copland permits himself one or two borrowed
liberties of idiom without in the least sounding imitative. Shostakovich
may still return the compliment, if he hasn't already... The symphony is
all-Copland, and being all-Copland, it is all-American.25
Actually, Shostakovich offered no compliments when in 1947 he heard

the symphony, which he thought was "influenced too much by Rimsky-
Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Stravinsky."26
Behind Biancolli's review lie elements of early cold war ideology.
The need to whisper an alleged association with the Soviet composer is
particularly evocative of postwar liberal anticommunism and the nascent
climate of suspicion. To be "all-American" apparently meant to be any-
thing but Soviet. The issue of how closely Copland's Third should be
compared to Shostakovich's music likewise has its extramusical dimen-
sion in connection to anticommunist cultural politics, which established
guilt by association. A similarly disparaging reference to Shostakovich

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appeared in a review of the symphony's world premiere by Warren

Storey Smith for the relatively conservative Boston Post. After citing
Copland's "peculiar way of treating the orchestra" as derivative of Ap-
palachian Spring, Smith suggested that
you might title the Symphony "Shostakovich in the Appalachians." Into

this mountain retreat come the boys from Mr. Copland's Rodeo and also
Richard Strauss with the score of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra open to the
fugue, "Of Science." In the end, the whole company is transported to Rus-
sia to participate in the restoration of the Great Gate at Kiev to music a la
Moussorgsky-Ravel (Pictures at an Exhibition).
The derisive comparison of Copland to Shostakovich here becomes a

damning condemnation, further intensified by the mention of Strauss,
who had been president of the Reichsmusikkammer (the Nazi state music
office) under Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. If Smith considered Cop-
land's style somehow weak, however, at least the technique seemed
strong. "While there are reminiscences and resemblances," Smith con-
ceded, "the work is no mere stylistic hodge-podge. It has physiognomy."27
Style was also the focus of the first review with national circula-
tion, in Time on 28 October 1946. Ignoring the praise from the Boston
critics Durgin, Sloper, and Williams, the anonymous author chose to
quote only Smith's comments with the addition of his own, equally dis-
missive introduction.
If the 45-year-old Copland could be considered the top U.S. composer,

the small stature of his colleagues has something to do with it. His techni-
cal competence far outshone his inventiveness. His first popular success,
El Salon Mexico (1936), was full of Mexican folk tunes. He borrowed folk
and hymn themes for his ballet scores (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring)
and his movie music (Our Town). The Third Symphony ... varied from
tenderness to brassy choirs, which led a Boston critic to call it
"Shostakovich in the Appalachians."28
This reviewer considered Copland's borrowings of preexistent music a

salient but undesirable feature of his Americanist style and seemed un-
comfortable with the composer's success, doubting the ability of the pub-
lic to judge the new symphony. The conclusion was that "there was
enough original music in the Third's forty minutes, and so skilled a re-
working of the old, that it would undoubtedly add to Aaron Copland's
popularity-a kind of popularity that seemed to keep him too busy to be
a great composer."29 Such snobbery betokens a prejudice implied in
other reviews: a symphony cannot (or should not) be both popular en-
tertainment and high art. Despite Time's cynical prediction, however,

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many critics did not assume that the Third Symphony would be a popu-
lar success; Felix Borowski for one believed the work would be "left soli-
tary in the tomb of forgotten things."30
Compared to discussions of workmanship and style, questions of
tone seemed less important as a topic in the 1946 Boston and New York
reviews. Few critics tried to interpret the symphony's grandiose manner
or assess its rhetorical significance. Only Robert A. Hague in New York
offered the following interpretation of the symphony's expressive intent:
"Whether the symphony proclaims a bright new world is perhaps beside
the point. The music leaves that impression because of the clarion calls
which echo through its pages. The composer writes with a conviction
and directness which people may not relish in music any more than they
do in everyday life. Nevertheless, it expresses an index to our age."31
While later reviews were preoccupied with the relationship between the
symphony and its context, interpreting the music's tone as evocative of
wartime culture, initially critics seemed to locate significance only in the
elements of workmanship and style. Hague's is the most striking example
in early reviews of a connection drawn between the symphony and the
larger cultural circumstances of its creation. He arrived at a conception
of the work empathetic to Copland's own through an appreciation of the
symphony's expressive mood.32
Observations about the symphony's tone-that is, its emotional
impression on a listener-concerned mostly the finale, which garnered
more attention, and often more criticism, than any other movement. In
Pittsburgh, Donald Steinfirst admitted that the finale was rousing but
felt that "that this last movement was far too long for the content."33
Such qualms about the finale's populist pomp only intensified through
the years as more reviewers called into question the application of the
Americanist aesthetic and accessible ideal, so successful in Copland's
functional music, to the symphonic genre.
Other reviewers in New York and Boston waited until after a sec-
ond hearing to describe the symphony's tone. Responding to the Decem-
ber concert in Boston, Winthrop P. Tryon dubbed the Third "the Sym-
phony of the Fanfare," emphasizing the significance of the finale without
actually interpreting it.34 Durgin considered the finale "overwritten" and
prophetically mentioned possible cuts to the ending.35 Alexander
Williams decided that the fourth movement "does not stand up so well
and emerges as more bombastic than eloquent,"36 while Kolodin found it
tainted with "synthetic assertiveness."37 In these examples and in subse-
quent writings through to the present day, the finale served as the locus
of criticism, in terms not of workmanship or style but of tone, and pro-
vided an interpretive index for the entire symphony.

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The most influential critic of his day was Virgil Thomson, who
heard the Third Symphony on 16 November at the BSO's Carnegie Hall
concert. In his review Thomson described the symphony as "a com-
manding and original work," admiring its "urgency of communication."38
Like so many others, he found composers to whom he could compare
Copland, particularly Beethoven and Shostakovich. The latter reference
was again a subtle criticism, both in terms of general postwar antipathy
toward Russia and Thomson's specific critical prejudice. (He had previ-
ously turned up his nose at Shostakovich's symphonies.39) In closing his
first review of Copland's symphony, Thomson ultimately deferred judg-
ment and promised a more detailed discussion in a future article.
The next week Thomson published "Copland as Great Man," a sub-
stantial consideration of the Third that first appeared in the New York
Herald-Tribune on 24 November 1946 and was later reprinted in the Boston
Symphony Orchestra program book of 13 December.40 In this article he
praised Copland with the curious ambivalence typical of his reaction to his
friend's music. Thomson disliked the Third Symphony's orchestration, that
"imperfect element in Copland's musical mastery,"41 but on the whole
workmanship was not crucial to Thomson's evaluation of musical signifi-
cance. The symphony was to him a success because it satisfied two primary
critical criteria: specificity and sincerity of expression.42 In meeting these
requirements, Copland's symphony qualified as "great music":
I think Copland has said what he meant to say, minor inefficiencies of

rhetoric notwithstanding. If this is true, and if it is also true that Copland
is emotionally sincere, as he has always given both friends and public
every reason to suppose, then he is a great man. And his Third Sym-
phony, whether it is a masterpiece or not and whether or not it ever be-
comes a popular favorite, is great music, if that term has any meaning.43
Thomson found technical flaws but nonetheless appreciated in the sym-

phony a personal expressivity and rhetorical commitment conveyed in
sincerity of tone.
Unlike the reviewer in Time, Thomson had no reservations about
the simple, populist style of the Third Symphony, and with an ironic
twist he turned the tables on those who found the work's transparency
too calculated:
Many have found the piece confusing. It is the very simplicity of Cop-
land's musical language, in fact, that has long made his music seem diffi-
cult. Laymen and even musicians are so accustomed to composers' ex-
ploiting prefabricated stylistic complexities that obscure more thought
than they express that they easily mistake transparency for willfulness. I

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have known him and his work too long to believe him capable of obfusca-
tion. The will that is involved is a determination to communicate, to
share with others through music thoughts and feelings that by their com-
mon humanity all men can recognize. Copland aspires, I assure you, to no
Jove-like pronouncements. Nor is he any double-tongued oracle. He is
much more, for all his skill and personal enlightenment, Henry Wallace's
"Common Man."44
Thomson was the only reviewer to suggest a connection between musi-

cal style and progressive ideology by alluding to the source of the Fan-
fare's title in the speeches of Henry A. Wallace. Copland and the vice
president were both politically and socially progressive, a view that influ-
enced the composer's desire to communicate with his audiences.45 Re-
gardless of Thomson's own political sympathies, he was seemingly sup-
portive of Copland's aesthetic of accessibility and its manifestation in
the Third Symphony.
In sum, the 1946 reviews of Copland's Third Symphony devoted
the most ink to evaluating the workmanship and style of the new piece.
While many critics praised Copland's compositional technique, they
were divided on the degree of originality in the symphony and compared
the music to Copland's own ballets as well as to the symphonies of
Shostakovich so recently in vogue.46 Less effort was exerted on inter-
preting the Third's expressive tone, except to question the triumphant
manner of its finale. Though Copland's program note explicitly invited
individual interpretation, emphasizing perceived significance over au-
thorial meaning, critics seemed reluctant to interpret the symphony so
soon after its world premiere.
New York and Boston, 1947
In response to subsequent performances, writers focused increasingly on

tone as a key to the symphony's meaning and significance. This shift in
critical attention was particularly evident in New York, where reviewers
had the opportunity to hear the piece for a second time when Kousse-
vitzky and the BSO returned to Carnegie Hall on 8 January 1947 to per-
form the symphony in a new pairing with Beethoven's Third. Reviewing
that concert, Biancolli confirmed his earlier impression of the work and
expanded his interpretation of the piece in Copland's career and in sym-
phonic history:
Last night I felt even more convinced that this sturdy new score is a turn-
ing point, for Copland as much as for his brother American composers.

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With this vital score, the American symphony may now be said to have
truly come of age, ready to make the rounds of the world's concert halls.
To be sure, Mr. Copland's predecessors in the field have done yeoman
work; several symphonies have shown true concert stature, and a few will
linger long in the American repertory. But the Third seems to crystallize
the maturity, the firm control of idiom, the seasoned style slowly evolving
in American composition.47
Robert Hague made a similar pronouncement, describing the work as "a

glowing landmark in American music, and in the field of modem music
as a whole."48
As had only been hinted at after the premieres, the fourth move-
ment was said to define the tone of the entire symphony in this next set
of reviews. Kastendieck, who had previously ignored the finale, now
pointed to the quotation of the Fanfare as "an index to the import of his
music." The symphony, he felt, "has folk spirit" that "comes out strik-
ingly in the last movement, which appears to sum up all that has gone
before."49 The finale did not elude all criticism, however; the reviewer
for Musical America noted that it was the "weakest" part of the sym-
phony and that the climax "escapes banality by a thread."50
The January performance elicited, for the first time, comments
from Olin Downes.51 He wrote about the piece a second time when, in
December 1947, Georg Szell and the New York Philharmonic performed
it at Carnegie Hall. Written a year apart, Downes's two articles encapsu-
late the progression of critical inquiry seen in the reviews from 1946 and
1947. That is, his first review emphasizes workmanship and style while
the second raises the question of the Third Symphony's expressive tone.
In his report on the BSO concert in January 1947, Downes focused
on the success of the symphony in meeting his technical standards for
the genre.52 Though Copland had "written earlier formative pieces and
given them the symphonic title," Downes wrote, the Third Symphony is
"the first time that he has emerged as an authentic symphonist.... As
the matter stands we prefer to call this score not Mr. Copland's third but
his first symphony."53 Nearly a year later, in response to the performance
by Szell and the New York Philharmonic, Downes reassessed the sym-
phony's workmanship, concluding that "on growing acquaintance, [it]
shows its weaknesses more clearly than ever."54 New to this second re-
view is a consideration of the Third's intent and significance; like many
of his colleagues, Downes placed more importance on the finale and its
quotation as a meaningful emblem of the whole.
The use of the Fanfare for the Common Man, which Mr. Copland has
transferred from a former score into the finale of this symphony, is more

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than a quotation. It is as though he had looked anew upon an idea only

partially clear to him when he first conceived it, and realized the signifi-
cance of that idea, from a new point of consciousness which enabled him
to drive it home with its full power. The repeated proclamation of this
fanfare, with the drum rolls and the archaic open intervals for the brasses,
comes out almost like a chorale of the faith.
Downes hesitated, however, to pursue further his line of thought

about the Fanfare's significance and reverted to a formalist evaluation.
"Let us not try to read meanings into the movement or into the sym-
phony," he advised. "Let us say only that the fanfares have a finely up-
lifting and dramatic effect; that they are also germane to the structure
of the finale and of the work as a whole."55 Despite his brief flirtation
with an interpretation of the fourth movement as "a chorale of the
faith," Downes highlighted the organic development of the Fanfare and
its relationship to the symphonic structure. In keeping with his personal
critical priorities, he ultimately privileged workmanship over tone or
meaning.
The increasing priority assigned to interpreting the symphony by
critics in their second reviews may have resulted in part from the 1947
awards the work received from the New York Music Critics' Circle and
the Boston Symphony Orchestra.56 These accolades legitimized the sym-
phony's position in the American repertory. Copland was the acknowl-
edged leader of "the modem group of American composers today, regard-
less of any individual critical opinion, such as our own, of his product,"
according to Downes, who was a member of the Critics' Circle.57 Re-
lieved of the burden of demonstrating that the symphony was a techni-
cally sound composition, reviewers were free to interpret the work and
write about a performance's expression and execution, issues perhaps
more typical of newspaper criticism.
The Symphony and Cold War Aesthetics
Dramatic changes in the American cultural context beginning around

1947 in turn affected the context of the symphony's interpretation. The
optimism and grandeur of the Third Symphony-so well suited to a na-
tion at war-became increasingly unfashionable as the cultural national-
ism of the 1940s faded and was replaced by sociopolitical tensions of the
early cold war period. Copland himself came under suspicion in the ensu-
ing anticommunist fervor of the McCarthy era, and in January 1953 his
Lincoln Portrait was pulled from President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower's
inaugural program because its composer had "questionable affiliations"

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with Communist-front organizations. The following May Copland was

called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.58
The stimulating and fruitful alliance of musical creativity, political
engagement, and progressive ideology that characterized the 1930s and
1940s for Copland was destroyed by a redefinition of liberalism in terms
of fierce individualism. The artistic elitism of the postwar avant-garde
prized academic segregation, not cultural connection,59 and the attitude
of cold war liberalism, as codified in The Vital Center (1949) by Arthur J.
Schlesinger Jr., reasserted the ultimate integrity of the individual in
abandoning the ideal of American collectivity.60 As the anti-Stalinist
left of the late 1930s merged with a centrist anticommunist movement, a
new liberal intellectual establishment was created-one entirely dismis-
sive of the progressive values that had encouraged musical accessibility
and symphonic grandeur in the era of depression and war.
The postwar intellectual climate was defined by anticommunist lib-
eralism as articulated by the New York intellectuals gathered around the
Partisan Review. This group included a Jewish "family" consisting of,
among others, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Clement
Greenberg, Philip Rahv, Meyer Shapiro, and Diana and Lionel
Trilling.61 Copland did not belong to this clan, whose general attitude
toward art was defensive: the high culture of art, literature, and music
had to be protected from the contaminating force of middlebrow public
tastes. As early as 1939 Greenberg had articulated the stance of this
emergent avant-garde, so far removed from Copland's progressive sensi-
bility, as "art for art's sake" that avoided subject matter and content "like
the plague."62 As this mode of artistic modernism took hold in the post-
war years, the aesthetic of accessibility was replaced by a cultivation of
the intentionally difficult. And the common man, so lauded during the
Depression and war years, was regarded with suspicion and disgust.
American artists grew less interested in exploring their own na-
tional identity and rejected the passionate populism of Copland's gener-
ation in favor of an internationalist, individualist perspective.63 If at first
it had been difficult for critics to accept the accessible tone and populist
aesthetic in the symphonic genre, in the late 1940s and early 1950s the
Third was even less likely to be appreciated in light of cold war cultural
politics. Copland himself described the cold war atmosphere as full of
"suspicion, ill-will, and dread."64 The very language of the Third
Symphony-tonal, tuneful, and grandly rhetorical-was considered sus-
picious, as was its connection to progressive ideology and Shostakovich's
collectivist musical rhetoric.65
The influence of these cultural and political forces on the reception
of the Third Symphony can be read in Virgil Thomson's June 1947

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article "More about Copland's Third," written in response to the Critics'

Circle award.66 Though Thomson agreed it was "the most impressive
piece of new symphonic composition that we have heard this year," he
nonetheless concluded that the symphony was "not quite ... satisfying":
"There is something false about its expressive content. Not wholly false
but not convincing either. The present writer has referred to this
troublesome quality as an 'editorial tone.' He means by that he is not
convinced that the feelings expressed in the work are entirely sponta-
neous and personal."67 In earlier reviews he had written that "there is
nothing insincere" in the symphony and that it "is obviously sincere,"
but now he doubted Copland's honesty of expression.68 These contradic-
tions are not necessarily as revealing of Thomson's interpretation of the
Third Symphony as they are of his particular politics and general reac-
tion against the musical aesthetic of the Depression era. For example,
Thomson argued that
to hold a place in the repertory it [a symphony] must be a true account,

because that is what all great music of the past is. This is why political
propaganda and moral education have no place in it and why the editorial
attitude is unbecoming to it. Shocking as the proposition may appear to
an epoch that is corrupted all through by advertising and propaganda,
quality in music is not determined by the nature or social utility of its ex-
pressive content but by the absolute sincerity of the same.... In writing
symphonies and similar untitled instrumental works it is sheer suicide for
a composer to get involved with feelings, sentiments or emotions other
than the ones he really has.69
Again contradicting his previous reviews of the Third, Thomson now

distrusted Copland's meaning as conveyed in the bold tone of the sym-
phony. Thomson's critical stance in this 1947 review stands in stark con-
trast to the statement in "Copland as Great Man" that "Copland has
said what he meant to say" and was "emotionally sincere."70 Thus, al-
though the tone of Copland's symphony had not changed, its critical in-
terpretation had been transformed in response to the new distrust of ide-
ological agendas perceived in such grand, accessible music.
The aesthetic behind the Third, more than the music itself, was
troubling to Thomson. He made a connection between the symphony,
politics, and the prevalent anticommunism of the later 1940s in compar-
ing Copland's music to
the speeches of Henry Wallace, striking in phraseology but all too remi-
niscent of Moscow. And not of Moscow as a source of vigorous political
ideas, either, but of Moscow as the very spirit of international pietism....

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I am disappointed at feelings that show so little variation, save in the

manner of their expression, from the patriotic-versus-pastoral formula
that the Russians evolved for war-time radio usage. Aaron Copland's real
personality is more interesting than that, fuller of depths and surprises.71
This review is consistent with sentiments expressed in his other articles

after 1947 on Americanism, musical sincerity, and the Russian com-
posers, in which he voiced suspicions about the grandiose and optimistic
tone of wartime pieces.72 In referencing Wallace and Moscow in the
same breath, Thomson seems to ally himself with anticommunist liberal-
ism, which portrayed Wallace and his progressive politics at this time as
hopelessly bound to communist ideologies.73
After Koussevitzky's January 1947 performance in Boston, other
conductors and orchestras were free to perform the Third Symphony,
and within the next year seven conductors did so with ten different or-
chestras.74 Georg Szell and the New York Philharmonic brought the
Third Symphony to New York City again at the end of 1947, and many
of the same critics who had reviewed Koussevitzky's premieres with the
BSO also attended Szell's performance. Robert Hague maintained that
"the work stood up very well when differently interpreted, showing per-
haps that it has the quality of greatness which makes music conductor-
proof."75 Irving Kolodin, however, concluded that neither conductor
gave the work a satisfactory reading: "unity of workmanship the score
undoubtedly has; we still wait the interpreter who will also give it unity
of meaning."76
The symphony was heard for the first time on the West Coast in
November 1948, when Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philhar-
monic programmed Copland's Third with William Grant Still's In
Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy on a special pro-
gram commemorating Armistice Day (11 November). Expressing a cold
war suspicion of cultural nationalism, Albert Goldberg questioned the
American bias of the program in his review for the Los Angeles Times: "It
might even be condescending to call attention to the fact that these
were works by American composers, for the day has passed when the na-
tive writer or performer must be patronized by an extra little shove, a
faint cheer, and a wave of the American flag."77 Owen Callin also took
issue with the Americanist program and style of the symphony. He be-
lieved that "America is still in its infancy in developing a national mu-
sic," and though he credited Copland (along with Gould and Gershwin)
with advancing the musical refinement of this country, he asked with
respect to the Third Symphony: "Must American music depend upon
a blatancy inspired by all the noises of a carnival? Does an American

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symphony need a percussion section that would supply a radio sound ef-
fects man with almost everything he needed for a hundred programs?"78
These comments evince the cold war impatience with wartime rhetoric,
the optimism of which seemed in the new atomic age to have been
sorely mistaken.
Meanwhile, as the symphony's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, pro-
moted the Third in the United States and Europe, Boosey's house jour-
nal, Tempo, published an article on the new work by Copland's friend
and fellow composer Arthur Berger.79 The purpose of the article as ad-
vertising explains its descriptive tone, but Berger was no mere propagan-
dist. He sharply criticized the finale's quotation of the Fanfare for the
Common Man. Elsewhere in the movement he heard a recollection of
Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, which he interpreted as a kitschy "allu-
sion to the 'common man's' interests" and considered "hackneyed not
only because of its overwhelming familiarity but because even originally,
its pomp and overstatement were calculated to stir the most inattentive
listener."80 As part of a younger generation that was less inclined to pro-
gressive politics, Berger had little interest in or sympathy for a musically
unsophisticated audience.81
Berger was also concerned with the nature of the musical materials,
which he took pains to distinguish from folk quotation. According to his
view, the general qualities of hymnody had found their way into Cop-
land's style seemingly while the composer was unaware:
Having dealt for several years with specific examples of New England and
Quaker hymnody, and having sung, more generally, the eulogies of his
country and its founders, it is inevitable that some characteristics of the
hymn and anthem should have incorporated themselves into his style,
where they are now quite inseparable from other facets of his personality-
a personality that is both powerfully transmitted by his musical style and
one of the most absorbing ever to be expressed in tones.82
Berger was eager to distance the symphony from Copland's folk-influenced,

functional music of the Depression era and its associated progressive
agenda, because he had found the composer's interests in that period
"limiting."83 To emphasize Copland's new freedom from functionality, he
began the article for Tempo by asserting that the symphony "has not,
either in seriousness or dimension, been obliged to compromise in the
slightest with an impresario or any other demands of an occasion or dra-
matic situation."84 This was simply not true. Of course Copland did not
"compromise" himself or his musical aesthetic, but he did respond to the
personal and cultural circumstances of the commission and composition.
As commissioner of the piece, Koussevitzky influenced the symphony's

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tone, and Copland explicitly related his music to its cultural context, to
the very dramatic situation of world war, with a triumphant narrative
and quotation of the Fanfare.
In his 1952 book on Copland's music, Berger expanded his thoughts
on the Third. Again he described the symphony's general character as "a
glorified and expansive hymn."85 He made additional comparisons to
other European and American composers, placing Copland within a sym-
phonic tradition perhaps less tainted by obvious political associations.
His Third Symphony falls into the broadly rhetorical pattern established
for the form from Beethoven and Schumann through Mahler and adorned
in our time by Shostakovich with a special fillip to mass appeal. The slow,
broad, Mahleresque first-movement form of Shostakovich had already
been adopted by Roy Harris in his highly inspired, if uneven, symphonies,
but this had been converted into thoroughly American terms by recourse
to American hymnody.86
Berger heard the hymn in many slow passages of Copland's music in the
Americanist style, considering it the basis of the composer's melodic
writing.87 As in 1948, however, he was quick to distinguish between the
unconscious influence of folk music and its literal quotation. He felt it
necessary to correct "the impression that Copland has abandoned his
more serious musical thinking for folk potpourris," recalling the 1948
review in Time.88 Berger simply distrusted Copland's musical populism
and was eager to find the Third Symphony free from "extra-musical
ideologies."89 His analysis tried to disassociate Copland from folk song
and, by extension, from progressive liberal values untenable in the cold
war era.
Though Downes, Thomson, and Berger had their doubts a

symphony's rhetoric and tone, another of Copland's close frie
the work all possible praise. Harold Clurman was perhaps less
trained than the other three, but he knew Copland just as wel
better; their friendship had been formed while they were stud
Paris during the 1920s, and in his autobiography Copland des
Clurman as one of "the major and continuing influences in my
The two shared progressive political and aesthetic ideals born
commitment to Depression-era liberalism. As compared to Th
and Berger, Clurman's political sympathies were more in keep
Copland's own.91 A progressive outlook informed Clurman's re
which he explicitly related Copland's style to American cultu
With the depression of the early thirties, Copland's music becom

and bare, as if descriptive of a new Stone Age in which the depo

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world has either to produce new life or become an eternally condemned

planet. Beginning at this point, Copland's music alternates between ex-
pressions of hope in the future-sometimes in an annunciatory style-and
uncertain returns to a cryptic mood hovering between disturbed resigna-
tion and confidence. As the depression receded to a point which permit-
ted some relaxation, Copland turned to dreams of peace and quiet, poetic
calm and idyllic gaiety, tender solitude and naive exhilaration in terms of
the halcyon days of the past, the relatively untroubled times of a pre-
industrial America.92
Clurman went on to ruefully suggest that the Third Symphony, as an op-

timistic statement of moral resolve, was out of step with the cultural
tenor of the postwar times.
Unlike Thomson and Berger, who were dubious of Copland's grand
symphonic conception and its motivating populist aesthetic, Clurman
found in the symphony a very sincere expression of the composer's inner
strength. The Third was
the synthesis of everything Copland has had to say; it is his richest, most
mature and varied work. Its importance beyond this lies in the fact that,
in this time of increasing and almost fashionable pessimism, it is a work of
positive affirmation. It is one thing to write a symphony of vigorous popu-
lar sentiment when one is encouraged by the whole aspiration of a people
and the planned support of a self-conscious community, but to declare
oneself ready to face the future with simple manfulness in a society where
the sincerest speech betrays fear, trembling, and confusion is to achieve
genuine heroism.93
Clurman's essay captured the progressive reaction to the cold war as a

time when "the willingness and capacity to withstand organized pressure
became a measure of one's moral strength and personal integrity."94 Such
comments anticipated Copland's own discussion of the cold war atmos-
phere, delivered in the presence of Henry Wallace and Dmitri
Shostakovich at the 1949 Peace Conference, a "last hurrah" of progres-
sive liberalism.95 Somewhat wistfully, Clurman concluded that the sym-
phony was "the music of a glad resolve, despite the tragedy of our con-
vulsive environment. It is the music of the inner triumph of a man who
accepts his world even as he witnesses its apparent madness."96
To committed liberals like Clurman and Copland, the postwar po-
litical environment was indeed tragic. The 1946 congressional elections
gave Republicans their first majority in the House and Senate since
1930, and Harry Truman proved a disappointment in both domestic and
foreign policy, provoking liberal outrage when he announced the Tru-
man Doctrine in March 1947.97 A new fear of the common man and of

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the masses characterized postwar intellectual criticism and led many lib-
erals to abandon the progressive, collectivist agenda forged during the
Popular Front era.98 The "end of ideology," in Daniel Bell's famous
phrase, effectively ended artists' commitment to a communitarian vi-
sion.99 This deep distrust of the populace informed the perceived conflict
between audience acceptance and artistic quality expressed in the Time
review and implied in commentary by Thomson and Berger.100
The grand, optimistic tone of the symphony remained a locus for
criticism into the next decade and even in British reviews. For example,
Jascha Horenstein's 1957 performance of the Third Symphony with the
B.B.C. Symphony received unfavorable press. "There is nothing either
subtle or profound" in the Third, wrote a reviewer from the London
Times, who offered only a backhanded compliment that actually in-
dicted the American character in general.
[The symphony] contains in its finale a "Fanfare for the Common Man."
Its construction is simple, containing no sonata movement and only at-
tempting any elaboration of design in the last movement, where various
ideas have to be loosely connected.... Its positive qualities are a certain
spaciousness and a crude vitality, both of them the musical expression of
American life, which is after long dependence on Europe thus finding its
own idiom.10'
The Musical Times critic concisely described the fourth movement as but
"an example of grandiloquence hiding sheer emptiness."102
Again under attack was Copland's stylistic connection to the Russian
symphonists. The critic for the Glasgow Herald dismissed the Third Sym-
phony as Copland's attempt "to get aboard the Soviet Symphony Success
Train and appeal to the attention of the American Common Man."103 An-
other reviewer opined that if "Copland set out to capture the public that
had been attracted by the Soviet Symphonists, Prokofiev and Shostako-
vich," he had not succeeded, because "Copland's Third had certainly not
the zest of the former's Fifth nor the latter's Ninth and Tenth."104
Through the next two decades critical focus remained on the sym-
phony's grand scale and Americanist tone, both of which began to sound
increasingly dated. In 1966 Alan Rich found the work "not overlong for
its content" but considered it "a trifle dated, [in a style] left behind by
Mr. Copland himself and by most of his fellows."105 It seemed old-fashioned
even to Copland's staunch supporter Wilfrid Mellers, who recognized
that the predominant manner of the age no longer permitted such ora-
tory. To him, the symphony was "suspect when it first appeared, and
more so now, even making allowance for the swing of fashion's pendu-
lum away from the grandly symphonic."106 Mellers's interpretation of

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Copland's tone as affect rather than feeling recalls Virgil Thomson's

comments from two decades previous. The optimism of Copland's sym-
phonic finale sounded somehow counterfeit in the cynical postwar era.
Like so many others since the second Boston performance in 1946,
Mellers leveled his harshest criticism at the finale:
The coda to the finale gets almost risible, as the kitchen department takes
over. I don't think this is just a musical matter. One can accept such as-
sault and battery at the end of the 90-minute Mahler or Shostakovich
symphony because it is in a profound sense an epic and a public state-
ment. Copland isn't naturally a public composer in this way, and perhaps
no democratic American could be. Certainly the only American sym-
phony that sounds convincing in epic terms (Roy Harris's Third) has a
terse brevity far removed from the rodomontade Copland affects in this
particular too-big work.107
In the 1930s and 1940s Copland had been a very "public composer," but
at this time, in the midst of worldwide anticommunist fervor, such alle-
giances were best denied, if not completely forgotten.
Surveying the range of criticism since the premiere and through
the cold war era, one begins to think that Copland's Third Symphony
may have simply arrived too late. A few critics found fault with the
piece's workmanship, but almost all believed its style to be sufficiently
distinctive. But the symphony's tone, the tenor of its emotional rhetoric,
went unappreciated by those already propelled through the Depression
and war and into a new cold war era of blighted hope. The changed po-
litical and artistic context that so distrusted any populist sentiment at-
tuned critical ears to hear the Third Symphony as at best irrelevant, at
worst dangerously naive.
From Journalism to Historiography
In a circumstance emblematic of the Third Symphony's cultural decline

in the later twentieth century, the work was ignored by the very orches-
tra that had been its champion. In 1973 the Third was performed by the
BSO in Symphony Hall, now under the baton of Michael Tilson
Thomas, for the first time since Koussevitzky's last performance there in
1946.108 Michael Steinberg's review for the Boston Globe freely summa-
rized the evolution of the American symphonic aesthetic away from the
grand manner in pronouncing that
this 1946 war surplus symphony of his really is an awful thing.... What
is most distressing ... is its rhetorical stance, its anxious insistence we

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understand just how important a statement it is making. There was a lot

of that in the forties. Shostakovich, the archbang-banger of the war years,
disfigured much of his orchestral music with such bombast, while Schu-
man and Harris were doing a lot of such tub-thumping over here. It is not
a characteristic Copland fault, but having somehow committed himself to
writing such a piece-much of which is based on the 1942 "Fanfare for
the Common Man," the nutshell version of that ghastly manner-he did
it with enormous vigor.109
Such antipathy may represent an extreme view, however, as other critics

in the 1970s were more tolerant of Copland's rhetorical tone. Raymond
Ericson of the New York Times conceded that in the Symphony "there
are times when its grandiose manner almost smothers its substance," but
he still felt that "the substance is there ... [and] its grandiloquent ex-
pression takes on a power hard to resist."110 In New Orleans, Frank
Gagnard admired the finale's fanfares, which "suggest majesty, but...
our kind of accessible majesty."11 These last two reviews date from 1976,
a year in which Copland's Third Symphony was performed frequently to
honor the national bicentennial and a time inevitably more receptive to
populist cultural Americanism.
More recent reviews have shown a developing historiographic per-
spective in considering Copland's symphony not merely as an autono-
mous work to be judged but as a cultural artifact from the World War II
era to be interpreted. This new critical stance appears in K. Robert
Schwarz's 1987 review of recordings by the Dallas Symphony and New
York Philharmonic:
Every so often in a nation's history, a composition is created that captures

the mood of a people, that speaks a shared language of hope, conviction,
and affirmation. Such a work is Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3
(1944-46). On the one hand, it sums up Mr. Copland's work of the 1930s
and 1940s, the frankly populist Americana now transformed into a subtle
but pervasive folk influence. On the other hand, it speaks for its era, a
time when America was experiencing the political and spiritual elation of
the end of World War II.112
Donal Henahan heard in the Third's grandeur "a senator's exhortation at

a war-bond rally" but appreciated Copland's "desire to make contact
with the listener" and the work's "sense of conviction."113 And in 1991
Peter Davis described the symphony as "bursting with end-of-the-war
optimism, vibrant big statements, and self-confident proclamations that
the Great American Symphony has been written at last."114
The most overtly retrospective stance toward the Third Symphony
was adopted by the New York Philharmonic during its 1996-97 concert

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season. Performances of nine American symphonies marked the begin-

ning of a four-year series titled "American Classics."l5 The works were
presented as a cohesive group of Depression- and war-era symphonies by
composers who shared an Americanist, accessible symphonic aesthetic.
Previewing the concert season, David Wright focused on the composi-
tional ideology of the 1940s and, echoing the title of Harold Clurman's
autobiography, concluded that Copland's symphony "marks the end of
the fervent era":116
That end came suddenly. Once the war was won, narrow nationalism be-
came unfashionable. In the arts, it was supplanted by a cosmopolitan urge
to speak the same language as colleagues in Vienna, Tokyo and Buenos
Aires. In music, that language was, by and large, the Serialism of Schoen-
berg and his successors. And God forbid that anyone should try to do
"something Godlike." That had just been tried with results including the
world war, genocide and nuclear nightmare. Composers, like Voltaire's
(and Bernstein's) Candide, withdrew to tend their gardens.117
Again, cultural forces at work outside the concert hall influenced atti-
tudes toward the symphony and its era. The New York Philharmonic's
"American Classics" program and Wright's account of it coincided with
the commemoration of World War II, the fiftieth anniversary of which
spawned historically minded television and concert series further colored
by a growing millennial nostalgia.
In addition to placing the work in its wartime context, the histori-
ographic perspective emergent in later reviews also suggests the Third
Symphony as a synthesis or summation of Copland's compositional work
up to 1946. For example, in 1967 Peter Dickinson described the sym-
phony as "a powerful synthesis of the elements in Copland's musical per-
sonality,"'18 and a decade later Leighton Kerner proposed that it offered
"the most complete single view available of his career in composing."119
Copland himself felt that the Third Symphony achieved integration be-
tween his abstract style of the 1920s and the Americanism of the 1930s.
Among his manuscripts are fragmentary notes for various lectures given
throughout his career; on one such undated page he briefly outlined his
stylistic periods, from his modernist interest in jazz abstractions to his
new simplicity responding to the "challenge of [the] new audience" in
the 1930s.120 The Third Symphony, he noted, was "a synthesis."121
Although this view of the symphony as a compositional landmark
appears with increasing frequency in journalistic criticism and finds sup-
port in Copland's own thought, more influential scholarly accounts over-
look the significance of the Third Symphony in American symphonic
history and in Copland's compositional career. The various book-length

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academic surveys of American music dating from 1946 to the present all
discuss Copland, yet barely mention the Third Symphony. A canvass of
texts by the respected scholars Wilfrid Mellers, Charles Hamm, H. Wiley
Hitchcock, and Gilbert Chase reveals surprising neglect, despite the
symphony's continued presence in the concert hall and the richly con-
textual, historiographic interpretations offered by music critics in the
popular press.122 In his essay on the scholarship of American music,
Richard Crawford may conclude that "as a group, [these] four books are
most remarkable for having so little to do with each other, either in ap-
proach or territory covered," but all share the omission of the Third
Symphony from serious consideration.
Mellers's Music in a New-Found Land is dedicated in part to Cop-
land, but it makes no mention of the Third Symphony at all, nor does
Charles Hamm's Music in the New World.123 In Music in the United States,
H. Wiley Hitchcock gives only the work's title.124 Gilbert Chase writes
that the symphony "has many fine qualities, including a distinctively
personal style and an impressive mastery of the orchestral devices at his
command," and considers the work to be representative of an "American
Grand Tradition."125 In relying heavily on Berger's 1953 interpretation,
however, Chase transmits Berger's suspicions about rhetorical grandeur.
More recently, Neil Butterworth's uneven survey The American Sym-
phony (1998) naturally includes the Third, but his discussion amounts to
little more than a guided tour through the score based on Copland's own
program notes from 1946.126
There is, then, a clear discrepancy between the importance af-
forded the symphony by audiences and critics-and even by Copland
himself-and the consideration given to the work by scholars of Ameri-
can music. Until the Third is viewed in its proper cultural context and
evaluated with sympathy toward Copland's aesthetic program, the sym-
phony might continue to sound excessively grand, embarrassingly frank,
or overly accommodating. Aesthetic tendencies in American art since
1945 have pulled very far away from the sensibilities of depression and
war, but the achievements of the 1940s and of the era's artists cannot be
dismissed as so much surplus goods.
The tide may in fact be turning. Since the 1970s some American
conductors (notably Michael Tilson Thomas and Leonard Slatkin) have
chosen to champion native symphonic music, thus prompting commen-
tators to explore for their readers in program notes, reviews, and articles
the contributions of American composers to the genre. There are even
young American composers who have expressed a renewed interest in
the grand symphony and in reaching out to their audiences with a style
more accessible to the average listener; for example, Stephen Albert's

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1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning symphony RiverRun is unabashedly melodic.

Aaron Jay Keris's Symphony no. 2 (1995) contains, in the words of the
composer, a "call for a common humanity" written in open fifths with a
dramatic and rhetorical climax.127 These developments have not gone
unnoticed by journalists. Surveying such works, Anthony Tommasini
concluded that "younger Americans are finding their way, pulling in au-
diences and major record companies, and creating deserving works that
may linger, as well as reviving a languishing heritage."128
Such interest on the part of conductors, composers, and critics may
indicate a revival of Copland's aesthetic of accessibility and even a new-
found relevance of the Third Symphony to the present cultural context.
The symphony will likely find its way onto more programs, inspiring fur-
ther criticism and commentary, in the wake of Copland's centennial cel-
ebration in 2000. As the reception history of the Third Symphony con-
tinues to be written in journalism and scholarship, we may then read not
only of the work's evolving significance but also of our own shifting cul-
tural values in the new millenium.
Appendix: Aaron Copland's Program Notes from the

Premiere (18 October 1946)
"Inevitably the writing of a symphony," says Mr. Copland, "brings with it

the question of what it is meant to express. I suppose if I forced myself, I
could invent an ideological basis for my symphony. But if I did, I'd be
bluffing-or at any rate, adding something ex post facto, something that
might or might not be true, but which played no role at the moment of
creation. Harold Clurman put my meaning well when he wrote recently
that music is a 'reflection of and response to specific worlds of men: it is
play, it is speech, it is unconscious result and conscious statement at the
same time.' Anything more specific than that in relation to so-called ab-
solute music is suspect. In other words-to use a well-worn phrase-I
prefer to let the music 'speak for itself.'
"One aspect of the Symphony ought to be pointed out: it contains
no folk or popular material. During the late twenties it was customary to
pigeon-hole me as [a] composer of symphonic jazz, with emphasis on the
jazz. More recently I have been catalogued as a folk-lorist and purveyor
of Americana. Any reference to jazz or folk material in this work was
purely unconscious.
"For the sake of those who would like a purely musical guide
through unfamiliar terrain I add a breakdown by movements of the tech-
nical outlines of the work:

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I. Molto moderato: The opening movement, which is broad and expres-

sive in character, opens and closes in the key of E major. (Formally it
bears no relation to the sonata-allegro with which symphonies usu-
ally begin.) The themes-three in number-are plainly stated: the
first is in the strings, at the very start without introduction; the sec-
ond in related mood in violas and oboes; the third, of a bolder na-
ture, in the trombones and horns. The general form is that of an
arch, in which the central portion is more animated, and the final
section an extended coda, presenting a broadened version of the
opening material. Both first and third themes are referred to again in
later movements of the Symphony.
II. Allegro molto: The form of this movement stays closer to normal sym-
phonic procedure. It is the usual scherzo, with first part, trio, and re-
turn. A brass introduction leads to the main theme, which is stated
three times in part I: at first in horns and violas with continuation in
clarinets, then in unison strings, and finally in augmentation in the
lower brass. The three statements of the theme are separated by the
usual episodes. After the climax is reached, the trio follows without
pause. Solo wood-winds sing the new trio melody in lyrical and canon-
ical style. The strings take it up, and add a new section of their own.
The recapitulation of part I is not literal. The principal theme of the
scherzo returns in a somewhat disguised form in the solo piano, leading
through previous episodic material to a full restatement in the tutti or-
chestra. This is climaxed by a return to the lyrical trio theme, this time
sung in canon and in fortissimo by the entire orchestra.
III. Andantino quasi allegretto: The third movement is freest of all in for-
mal structure. Although it is built up sectionally, the various sec-
tions are intended to emerge one from the other in continuous flow,
somewhat in the manner of a closely knit series of variations. The
opening section, however, plays no role other than that of introduc-
ing the main body of the movement.
High up in the unaccompanied first violins is heard a rhythmi-
cally transformed version of the third (trombone) theme of the first
movement of the Symphony. It is briefly developed in contrapuntal
style, and comes to a full close, once again in the key of E major. A
new and more tonal theme is introduced in the solo flute. This is the
melody that supplied the thematic substance for the sectional meta-
morphoses that follow: at first with quiet singing nostalgia; then faster
and heavier-almost dance-like; then more child-like and naive, and
finally vigorous and forthright. Imperceptibly the whole movement
drifts off into the higher regions of the strings, out of which floats
the single line of the beginning, sung by a solo violin and piccolo,

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accompanied this time by harps and celesta. The third movement

calls for no brass, with the exception of a single horn and trumpet.
IV. Molto deliberato (Fanfare)-Allegro resoluto: The final movement fol-
lows without pause. It is the longest movement of the Symphony,
and closest in structure to the customary sonata-allegro form. The
opening fanfare is based on Fanfare for the Common Man, which I
composed in 1942 at the invitation of Eugene Goossens for a series
of wartime fanfares introduced under his direction by the Cincin-
nati Symphony. In the present version it is first played pianissimo by
flutes and clarinets, and then suddenly given out by brass and per-
cussion. The fanfare serves as preparation for the main body of the
movement which follows. The components of the usual form are
there: a first theme in animated sixteenth-note motion; a second
theme-broader and more song-like in character; a full-blown de-
velopment and a refashioned return to the earlier material of the
movement, leading to a peroration. One curious feature of the
movement consists in the fact that the second theme is to be found
embedded in the development section instead of being in its cus-
tomary place. The development, as such, concerns itself with the
fanfare and first theme fragments. A shrill tutti chord, with flutter-
tongued brass and piccolos, brings the development to a close.
What follows is not a recapitulation in the ordinary sense. Instead, a
delicate interweaving of the first theme in the higher solo wood-
winds is combined with a quiet version of the fanfare in the two bas-
soons. Combined with this, the opening theme of the first move-
ment of the Symphony is quoted, first in the violins, and later in the
solo trombone. Near the end a full-voiced chanting of the second
song-like theme is heard in horns and trombones. The Symphony
concludes on a massive restatement of the opening phrase with
which the entire work began."
Notes
1. The piano sketch of the symphony's fourth movement is dated 29 Sept. 1946. Aaron
Copland Collection, Music Division (hereafter cited as Copland Collection), Library of
Congress (hereafter cited as LC).
2. This date is taken from the end of the complete autograph score, ARCO 58, in the
Serge Koussevitzky Collection, Music Division, LC. On the scheduling of the premiere,
see correspondence between Hans W. Heinsheimer (artist representative at Boosey &
Hawkes) and Copland, 27 Aug. 1946 and 9 Sept. 1946. Copland Collection, LC.
3. Aaron Copland, program notes, Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Bulletin, 66th
Season (1947), 138. The entire note is given in the appendix.

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4. On the cultural context of Copland's Third, see Elizabeth Bergman Crist, "Aaron
Copland's Third Symphony (1946): Context, Composition, and Consequence" (Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 2000).
5. The motivations of the critics during this period, the sentiment toward the Ameri-
can symphony in general, and the personal histories of prominent reviewers are discussed
comprehensively in Julie Schnepel, "The Critical Pursuit of the Great American Sym-
phony, 1893-1950" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1995). As she has demonstrated,
many critics had these three musical elements in mind as a priori standards used to judge
any new symphonic composition. Thus, the issues of workmanship, style, and tone were
not unique to commentary on Copland's work but were general criteria for symphonic
success (63-115). While Schnepel's analysis is based upon her close reading of five critics
active in New York City, her conclusions seem widely applicable.
6. By 1940 Shostakovich "had earned the proportion of about one per cent of the
American repertoire-a percentage of not inconsiderable magnitude for a contemporary
composer." John H. Mueller, The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musi-
cal Taste (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951), 226. Between 1940 and 1945,
Shostakovich's music was performed more than that of any other contemporary com-
poser. See Kate Hevner Mueller, Twenty-Seven Major American Symphony Orchestras: A
History and Analysis of their Repertoires, Seasons 1842-43 through 1969-70 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1973), xxx.
7. Schnepel, 80-106.
8. See Crist, 1-6, on the symphony as a prominent genre during the depression and
war years. Even a cursory survey of the "core repertoire" presented by Schnepel reveals
the significance of the years 1929-50 in the history of American symphonic composi-
tion. Schnepel, 345-47. In discussing the generations of American composers bor be-
tween 1900 and 1920, Copland himself noted that one "curious fact" tied together their
compositional efforts: "all have written symphonies." Aaron Copland, "Notes on Con-
temporary Music in the United States," manuscript, n.d. (c. 1951), Copland Collection,
LC.
9. Cyrus Durgin, "Symphony Hall: Boston Symphony Orchestra," review of Boston

Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Koussevitzky), Boston Daily Globe, 19 Oct. 1946.
Hereafter, Boston Symphony Orchestra is abbreviated as BSO.
10. Durgin, review of BSO (Koussevitzky), Boston Daily Globe, 14 Dec. 1946.
11. Claudia Cassidy, "On the Aisle: Koussevitzky Introduces Copland's Brilliant Third
Symphony in Memorable Concert," review of BSO (Koussevitzky), Chicago Tribune, 7
Dec. 1946.
12. Robert A. Hague, "Musical Roundup: New Copland Symphony," review of BSO
(Koussevitzky), PM, 18 Nov. 1946.
13. Irving Kolodin, "Koussevitzky Does New Copland Opus," review of BSO (Kousse-
vitzky), New York Sun, 18 Nov. 1946.
14. Louis Biancolli, "Boston Symphony Plays Copland's Third," review of BSO (Kous-
sevitzky), New York World-Telegram, 18 Nov. 1946.
15. N[oel] S[traus], "Boston Symphony Plays at Carnegie," review of BSO (Kousse-
vitzky), New York Times, 17 Nov. 1946.

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16. Ralph Lewando, "Koussevitzky, Boston Symphony Give Rousing Concert at

Mosque," review of BSO (Koussevitzky), Pittsburgh Press, 4 Dec. 1946.
17. L. A. Sloper, "Copland Music Heard in Premiere," review of BSO (Koussevitzky),

Christian Science Monitor, 19 Oct. 1946.
18. Kolodin, 18 Nov. 1946.
19. Cassidy, 7 Dec. 1946.
20. Copland's earlier symphonic works had generally languished unperformed. After its
premiere in 1925, Copland's first symphony, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, was
not heard again in Boston until 1935. The Short Symphony was similarly neglected, hav-
ing received only a broadcast performance with the NBC Symphony under Leopold
Stokowski in Jan. 1944.
21. Alexander Williams, "Music: Symphony Concert," review of BSO (Koussevtizky),

Boston Herald, 19 Oct. 1946.
22. Howard Taubman, "Music: Aaron Copland," review of New York Philharmonic
(Copland), New York Times, 31 Jan. 1958. Hereafter, New York Philharmonic is abbrevi-
ated as N.Y. Phil.
23. Miles Kastendieck, "Copland Music at Carnegie," review of BSO (Koussevitzky),

New York Journal-American, 18 Nov. 1946.
24. Kastendieck, 18 Nov. 1946.
25. Biancolli, 18 Nov. 1946.
26. "Not Banned, Not Played," interview with Shostakovich, Time, 9 June 1947, 82.
27. Warren Storey Smith, "Symphony Concert," review of BSO (Koussevitzky), Boston
Post, 19 Oct. 1946. Smith was less flippant in his review after the second Boston perfor-
mance in December but still felt that "the Symphony as a whole leans heavily on Mr.
Copland's previous music and there are suggestions of other composers." Smith, review of
BSO (Koussevitsky), Boston Post, 14 Dec. 1946.
28. "Copland's Third," Time, 28 Oct. 1946, 55.
29. "Copland's Third," 55.
30. Felix Borowski, "Boston Symphony Excelled by None," review of BSO (Kousse-
vitzky), Chicago Sun, 8 Dec. 1946.
31. Robert A. Hague, "Musical Roundup: New Copland Symphony," review of BSO
(Koussevitzky), PM, 18 Nov. 1946. Not coincidentally, PM was known for its liberal
slant.
32. On the critical perception and conception of musical works, see Edward T. Cone,
"The Authority of Music Criticism," Journal of the American Musicological Society 34
(1981): 1-18.
33. Donald Steinfirst, "Koussevitzky Pleases with Varied Repertoire," review of BSO
(Koussevitzky), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 Dec. 1946.
34. Winthrop P. Tryon, "Symphony on Second Hearing," review of BSO (Kousse-

vitzky), Christian Science Monitor, 14 Dec. 1946.
35. Durgin, 19 Oct. 1946.

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36. Alexander Williams, "Music: Symphony Concert," review of BSO (Koussevitzky),

Boston Herald, 14 Dec. 1946.
37. Irving Kolodin, "Koussevitsky Does New Copland Opus," review of BSO (Kousse-
vitzky), New York Sun, 18 Nov. 1946.
38. Thomson, "Boston's Recovery," review of BSO (Koussevitzky), New York Herald-
Tribune, 17 Nov. 1946.
39. Schnepel, 507. Regarding Thomson's attitude toward Shostakovich, see, e.g.,
Thomson's 1940 article on the Sixth Symphony, which he dismissed as an "atmospheric
marketplace-and-landscape painting" that was "pleasant and at moments not without a
certain concentration." As reprinted in Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 202.
40. Virgil Thomson, "Copland as Great Man," New York Herald-Tribune, 24 Nov. 1946.
41. Thomson, "Copland as Great Man," 6.
42. Schnepel, 130-43.

45. On progressivism, Copland's accessible style, and the title of the Fanfare for the
Common Man (1942), see Crist, 79-130.
46. On the popularity of Shostakovich's music during the depression and World War II,
see J. Mueller, 226-28. Massive press campaigns accompanied premieres and perfor-
mances of works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, particularly their symphonies, which
were performed in Boston and New York with regularity. As described by Donald Fuller,
the symphonies of Shostakovich were "mercilessly re-performed by all," while Arthur
Berger publicly grumbled about the "unheard-of fee" of $10,000 for the Eighth Sym-
phony's performance rights. Donald Fuller, "New York Mid-Season, 1942-43," Moder
Music 20 (1943): 113; Arthur Berger, "Music in Wartime," New Republic, 7 Feb. 1944,
177.
47. Louis Biancolli, "Two Symphonies are Bracketed at Carnegie," review of BSO
(Koussevitzky), New York World Telegram, 9 Jan. 1947.
48. Robert A. Hague, "Musical Roundup: Copland and Prokofiev," review of BSO
(Koussevitzky), PM, 12 Jan. 1947, 18.
49. Miles Kastendieck, "Bostonians at Caregie," review of N.Y. Phil. (Szell), New York
Joural-American, 19 Dec. 1947.
50. Review of N.Y. Phil. (Szell), Musical America, 1 Jan. 1948, 31.
51. Noel Straus reviewed the New York premiere. See n. 15.
52. Olin Downes, "Boston Symphony Plays Copland 3D," review of BSO (Kousse-
vitzky), New York Times, 9 Jan. 1947. On Downes's critical understanding of the sym-
phonic genre, see Schnepel, 143-55.
53. Downes, 9 Jan. 1947.
54. Olin Downes, "Szell Conductor at Philharmonic," review of N.Y. Phil. (Szell), New
York Times, 19 Dec. 1947.

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55. Downes, 19 Dec. 1947.
56. Recipients of the Critics' Circle Award were chosen by a committee of New York
music critics. On the Boston Symphony Orchestra Merit Award, see the letter from
Henry B. Cabot, president of the BSO trustees, to Copland, 7 Jan. 1947. Copland Col-
lection, LC. This committee consisted of Koussevitzky, Cabot, and A. Tillman Merritt,
head of the music department of Harvard University at the time.
57. Olin Downes, "Critics' Laurels," New York Times, 8 June 1947.
58. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland since 1943 (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1989), 181-203; and Jennifer L. DeLapp, "Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideol-
ogy in the McCarthy Era" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997), 134-51.
59. On the intellectual climate of the 1950s, see Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a
Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper &
Row, 1985).
60. Arthur J. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1949), ix: "Mid-twentieth-century liberalism, I believe, has
thus been fundamentally reshaped by the hope of the New Deal, by the exposure
of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The conse-
quence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of to-
talitarianism and a reassertion of the ultimate integrity of the individual. This
awakening constitutes the unique experience and fundamental faith of contempo-
rary liberalism."
61. On these New York intellectuals, see John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the
American Left (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 210-17.
62. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), in Mass Culture: The Popu-
lar Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.:
Free Press, 1957), 99. On Greenberg's aesthetic, see Erika Doss, Benton, Pollack, and the
Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 363-416.
63. Charles Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-
Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 255-60.
64. Aaron Copland, "Effect of the Cold War on the Artist in the United States,"
speech delivered at the Fine Arts Panel of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for
World Peace, 27 Mar. 1949. Copland Collection, LC. On this conference, see DeLapp,
93-100.
65. The respective political associations of communism with musical accessibility and
of democracy with serialist techniques emerge in the public exchange between Copland
and Arnold Schoenberg in 1949. See DeLapp, 100-106.
66. Virgil Thomson, "More about Copland's Third," New York Herald-Tribune, 22 June
1947.
67. In "Copland as Great Man," however, Thomson complimented Copland's expres-

sion as straightforward and sincere: "the nature of the work's expressivity is as plain as a
newspaper editorial" (6).
68. Thomson, "Boston's Recovery," 17 Nov. 1946, and "Copland as Great Man," 6.

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69. Thomson, "More about Copland's Third," 6.
71. Thomson, "More about Copland's Third," 6.
72. See Virgil Thomson, "On Being American," 25 Jan. 1948; "The Problem of Sincer-
ity," 8 February 1948; and "Composers in Trouble," 22 Feb. 1948; in Thomson, A Virgil
Thomson Reader, 304-8, 309-12.
73. Pells, 110-12.
74. The first conductor after Koussevitzky to present the symphony was Leonard Bern-
stein, who gave the first performance outside the United States in May 1947 with the Czech
Philharmonic in Prague. Soon after, Copland himself led a performance in Mexico by the
Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico (OSM) on 20 and 22 June 1947 at the invitation of Carlos
Chavez, conductor of the OSM. The Third Symphony became a favorite work for Copland
to conduct overseas with foreign orchestras, particularly at the beginning of his conducting
career, when he may have been glad to gain the experience without the pressure of Ameri-
can critical reviews. Between 1947 and 1957, he performed the piece with orchestras in
Cologne, Trieste, Paris (with the Orchestre de la Radio Diffusion Francais), and Munich. He
conducted the symphony with an American orchestra for the first time in 1957, leading the
Chicago Symphony in a performance at Ravinia, Ill., during its summer music festival.
75. Robert A. Hague, "Musical Roundup: Copland and Prokofiev," review of N.Y. Phil.
(Szell), PM, 23 Dec. 1947.
76. Irving Kolodin, "The Music Makers: George Conducts Copland and Brahms," re-
view of N.Y. Phil. (Szell), New York Sun, 19 Dec. 1947.
77. Albert Goldberg, "Philharmonic Season Opened," review of Los Angeles Philhar-
monic (Wallenstein), Los Angeles Times, 12 Nov. 1948.
78. Owen Callin, "Wallenstein Superb as L.A. Symphony Season Opens," review of
Los Angeles Philharmonic (Wallenstein), Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 12
Nov. 1948.
79. Arthur Berger, "The Third Symphony of Aaron Copland," Tempo 9 (1948): 20-27.
80. Berger, "The Third Symphony," 26.
81. On generational conflicts in liberal ideologies, see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology:
On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).
82. Bell, 23.
83. Berger, "The Music of Aaron Copland," Musical Quarterly 31 (1945): 439. Despite
praising Copland's ingenious adaptations of folk material, Berger concluded that "his
preoccupations of the last ten years have been limiting, and we should be thankful that
he has retured to something more substantial in the symphony he is now writing for
Koussevitzky."
84. Berger, "The Third Symphony," 20.
85. Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 73-74.
86. Berger, Aaron Copland, 75-76.
87. Berger, Aaron Copland, 59-60.

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88. Berger, Aaron Copland, 73.
89. Berger, Aaron Copland, 72.
90. Aaron Copland and Vivian Peris, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St.
Martin's/Marek, 1984), 56.
91. On Clurman's political thought, see Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story
of the Group Theater and the Thirties (New York: Knopf, 1945).
92. Harold Clurman, "Nightlife and Daylight," Tomorrow 6 (1947): 51.
93. Clurman, "Nightlife and Daylight," 51.

94. Pells, 262.
95. Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New
York: Henry Holt, 1999), 283. Aaron Copland, "Effect of the Cold War on the Artist in
the United States," speech. Copland Collection, LC.
96. Clurman, "Nightlife and Daylight," 51.
97. Pells, 56-63.
98. William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s
(Boston: Twayne, 1991), 137-43.
99. On the end of ideology, progressive commitment, and the liberal social vision, see
C. Wright Mills, "Letter to the New Left" (1960), in The End of Ideology Debate, ed.
Chaim I. Waxman (New York: Clarion/Simon & Schuster, 1968), 126-40. As Mills
noted, "the end-of-ideology is based upon a disillusionment with any real commitment
to socialism in any recognizable form" (128). In the same collection, see also Stephen
W. Rousseas and James Farganis, "American Politics and the End of Ideology," 206-28.
100. It bears mention that Time was published by the Republican Henry A. Luce, a bit-
ter opponent of the New Deal. On Henry A. Luce, see David Brinkley, "World War II
and American Liberalism," in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness
during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 323-24.
101. "Copland's Third Symphony," review of B.B.C. Symphony (Horenstein), Times

(London), 14 Nov. 1957.
102. "Copland's Third Symphony," review of B.B.C. Symphony (Horenstein), Musical

Times (Jan. 1958): 29.
103. Review of B.B.C. Symphony (Horenstein), Glasgow Herald, 18 Nov. 1957.
104. "Copland's Third Symphony," Musical Times, 29.
105. Alan Rich, "Bernstein Tries, Fails to Scratch His Back," review of N.Y. Phil.
(Bernstein), New York Herald Tribune, 11 Feb. 1966.
106. Wilfrid Mellers, review of N.Y. Phil. (Bernstein) recording of Aaron Copland's
Third Symphony (CBS BRG 72559 SBRG 72559), Musical Times (Aug. 1967): 715-16.
107. Mellers, review, 714-16.
108. Koussevitzky and the BSO performed the work in Boston for the last time on 13
and 14 Dec. 1946; in the summer of 1947, they presented the Third Symphony at the
Berkshire Festival (Tanglewood). Bernstein led the BSO in 1952 at a second Tanglewood
performance of the Third.

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109. Michael Steinberg, "Wild Contrasts in Evidence at BSO Concert," review of BSO
(Tilson Thomas), Boston Globe, 6 Jan. 1973.
110. Raymond Ericson, "Music: Philharmonic," review of N.Y. Phil. (Bernstein), New
York Times, 3 Apr. 1976.
111. Frank Gagnard, "Still a Year for Copland," review of New Orleans Philharmonic-
Symphony (Copland), New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2 Dec. 1976.
112. K. Robert Schwarz, "Copland's Third: Language of Hope," New York Times, 19
Apr. 1987.
113. Donal Henahan, "Muti Leads Philadelphians in Copland and Brahms," review of
Philadelphia Orchestra (Muti), New York Times, 5 Feb. 1988.
114. Peter G. Davis, "Sonic Boomers," New York, 25 Nov. 1991.
115. David Wright, "Symphonists, Native and Fervent," New York Times, 22 Sept.
1996.
116. Wright, "Symphonists." See also Clurman, The Fervent Years.
117. Wright, "Symphonists."
118. Peter Dickinson, review of New York Philharmonic (Bernstein) recording of Cop-
land's Third Symphony (CBS BRG 72559), Music and Musicians (Nov. 1967): 50.
119. Leighton Kemer, review of N.Y. Phil. (Bernstein), "Bernstein Socks Copland
Home," Village Voice, 12 Apr. 1976, 93.
120. Aaron Copland, "Introduction to My Music," manuscript lecture notes, c. 1952.

Copland Collection, LC.
121. Copland, "Introduction to My Music." The phrase reads: "The Third Symphony
as a synthesis."
122. These are the same four texts that Richard Crawford discusses in "Cosmopolitan
and Provincial: American Musical Historiography," in The American Musical Landscape
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3-37.
123. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964;
reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Charles Hamm, Music in the New
World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).
124. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1988), 231.
125. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, rev. 3d ed. (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 568. In the first edition (1955), Chase had
noted that the Third Symphony "appears to mark the return to a phase of abstract or
nonprogrammatic composition," 501.
126. Neil Butterworth, The American Symphony (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998),
53-60.
127. Anthony Tommasini, "Again, a Quest for the Great American Symphony," New
York Times, 10 Aug. 1997.
128. Tommasini, "Again, a Quest."

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Critical Politics: The Reception History of Aaron Copland's Third Symphony

Author(s): Elizabeth Bergman Crist

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600912

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Critical Politics: The Reception History

Elizabeth Bergman Crist

In the summer of 1946, Aaron Copland rushed to complete his long-

The Musical Quarterly 85(2), Summer 2001, pp. 232-263

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First Performances: Koussevitzky and the BSO in 1946

Table 1. Performances of the Third Symphony by the BSO in 1946

Boston, Symphony Hall 18 Oct.

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By contract, no other orchestra was allowed to perform the Third Symphony

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The temptation ... is to whisper "Shostakovich!" to a neighbor. The

Actually, Shostakovich offered no compliments when in 1947 he heard

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appeared in a review of the symphony's world premiere by Warren

you might title the Symphony "Shostakovich in the Appalachians." Into

The derisive comparison of Copland to Shostakovich here becomes a

If the 45-year-old Copland could be considered the top U.S. composer,

This reviewer considered Copland's borrowings of preexistent music a

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I think Copland has said what he meant to say, minor inefficiencies of

Thomson found technical flaws but nonetheless appreciated in the sym-

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Thomson was the only reviewer to suggest a connection between musi-

New York and Boston, 1947

In response to subsequent performances, writers focused increasingly on

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Robert Hague made a similar pronouncement, describing the work as "a

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than a quotation. It is as though he had looked anew upon an idea only

Downes hesitated, however, to pursue further his line of thought

The Symphony and Cold War Aesthetics

Dramatic changes in the American cultural context beginning around

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with Communist-front organizations. The following May Copland was

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article "More about Copland's Third," written in response to the Critics'

to hold a place in the repertory it [a symphony] must be a true account,

Again contradicting his previous reviews of the Third, Thomson now

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I am disappointed at feelings that show so little variation, save in the

This review is consistent with sentiments expressed in his other articles

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Berger was eager to distance the symphony from Copland's folk-influenced,

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Though Downes, Thomson, and Berger had their doubts a

With the depression of the early thirties, Copland's music becom

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world has either to produce new life or become an eternally condemned

Clurman went on to ruefully suggest that the Third Symphony, as an op-

Clurman's essay captured the progressive reaction to the cold war as a

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Copland's tone as affect rather than feeling recalls Virgil Thomson's

From Journalism to Historiography

In a circumstance emblematic of the Third Symphony's cultural decline

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understand just how important a statement it is making. There was a lot