Lerner CoplandsMusicWide 2001

Copland's Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood
Author(s): Neil Lerner

Source: The Musical Quarterly , Autumn, 2001, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 477-
515
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600994
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600994?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The Musical Quarterly
This content downloaded from

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Twentieth Century and Beyond
Copland's Music of Wide Open

Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral
Trope in Hollywood
Neil Lerner
A fifty-two-year-old record fell in 2001 when John Corigliano received a

Pulitzer Prize (for his Symphony no. 2 for String Orchestra) to go along
with his earlier Academy Award for a Best Score (for The Red Violin),
matching the feat first achieved by Aaron Copland in 1949. Copland's
Academy Award for The Heiress had made him the first composer to
claim both an Oscar and a Pulitzer, a sign of his remarkable ability to
negotiate a wide spectrum of musical tastes (and award committees).
When Copland first became interested in writing for Hollywood in the
mid- to late 1930s, fully synchronized sound films had been around for
less than a decade. Many of the more renowned concert-hall composers
of the time were enthusiastic about writing music for the most techno-
logically sophisticated types of mass media; even Arnold Schoenberg
and Igor Stravinsky were rumored to be negotiating for commercial film
contracts.1 Economics must have played a role in that phenomenon-
during the depression few writing opportunities could profitably be
spured-but financial gain seems to have been only a small part of it.
Reading the columns on film music in Modern Music from the 1930s,
one senses an almost giddy excitement about this new compositional
venue and its aesthetic possibilities.2 With the positive reception of his
score for The City in 1939, Copland had his ticket into the film industry,
and spent nearly ten years composing intermittently for Hollywood
films. While his actual output for the commercial film industry was small,
Copland's influence, stemming from both his cinema and his concert-
hall works, has been great: several elements of the Copland sound persist
in the widely understood musical vocabulary of today's Hollywood.
Although Copland once joked in an interview that his reason for
writing Hollywood film scores was that "I liked the winter climate better
in California,"3 it is surely no coincidence that he found himself in
southern California at just the same time as he was self-consciously re-
tooling his musical style for greater accessibility. He wrote for films while
The Musical Quarterly 85(3), Fall 2001, pp. 477-515

? 2001 Oxford University Press 477
128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
478 The Musical Quarterly
in the midst of his famous "tendency toward an imposed simplicity."4

Copland wrote this explanation for his stylistic shift:
During the mid-30s I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the

relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. The old
"special" public of the modem-music concerts had fallen away, and the
conventional concert public continued apathetic or indifferent to any-
thing but the established classics. It seemed to me that we composers were
in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for
music had grown up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense
to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that
it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the sim-
plest possible terms.5
Copland later regretted using the term "imposed simplicity" because it

presented an exaggerated division of his compositional output into the
"serious" and the "popular." I will argue that his "simple" music is in fact
remarkably nuanced, sophisticated, and even subversive in the way it
introduces formerly elitist modernist features into a more widely compre-
hended musical and cinematic vocabulary. Copland's reservations about
his musical bipolarity are further evidenced in an exchange with Groucho
Marx following the Los Angeles premiere of Copland's Piano Sonata.
Copland asked Marx not to tell Samuel Goldwyn of "the advanced stuff"
that he wrote, joking with Marx that "I have a split personality." Marx
shot right back: "Well, it's O.K., as long as you split it with Mr. Gold-
wyn."6 This anecdote gives us a sliver of insight into the significant con-
cerns plaguing Copland as he sought a "musical vernacular," a lifelong
project that he also spoke of in terms of "the connection between music
and the life about me."7
If one were to indulge in the reductions of "serious" and "popular,"
it would be tempting to separate Copland's "dissonant modernism" from
what I would term his "accessible modernism" (understanding that it is
a paradoxical term, since aesthetic modernism in music has been largely
constructed in terms of that music's very inaccessibility). It is likewise
tempting to distill it a step further and regard dissonant modernism as
urban and accessible modernism as pastoral, although the two need
not be held so far apart. Wilfrid Mellers has commented on the urban-
pastoral binary that at first glance may appear to underlie the stylistic
and aesthetic split between pieces such as the Piano Variations and
Appalachian Spring:
the folky vein of Copland's ballets is not an evasion of the steel girders-
within which he so miraculously discovers a human warmth-of the
Piano Variations: for he sees the prairie as symbol of the irremediable

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Copland's Music of Wide Open Spaces 479
loneliness of big cities, the hymn as symbol of the religious and domestic
security that urban man has lost.8
Mellers and others have argued that Copland's overall output can be re-
garded as highly cohesive, owing to certain features that surface across
his career, such as his propensity for generating long pieces out of a lim-
ited set of materials.9 While close analysis can reveal the organicism of
his works individually and as a group, it does not do much to clarify
which (and how) specific pieces and techniques have come to be de-
coded with such regularity in the mass media. And, to be sure, certain
recognizable strains of Copland's musical personality are regularly put
into the employ of visual narratives. The pastoral codes of Appalachian
Spring, the "Western" codes of Rodeo, and the U.S. patriotic codes of
the Fanfare for the Common Man resurface, respectively, in James
Homer's score for Apollo 13, in commercials promoting beef consump-
tion, and in recruitment campaigns for the U.S. Navy, to pick but one
example for each.
Because of his status as one of the most highly regarded concert-
hall composers in the United States in the 1940s and because of the
imprint his music left upon Hollywood's musical vocabulary, Copland's
involvement with cinema stands as a significant moment in the history
of film music.10 His work for Hollywood received considerable publicity
and met with largely favorable reviews, culminating in four Academy
Award nominations and one Oscar for Best Score (see Table 1). Media
journalists as well as Copland himself described his experiences in Holly-
wood for a general audience in the New York Times and for the more spe-
cialized readers of Modern Music.11 It is not terribly original or striking
to observe that Copland's sound (or, more correctly, sounds) permeated
Hollywood in the 1940s and that it has become even stronger since
the U.S. bicentennial,12 occurring in countless film scores, television
themes, and commercial advertisements. Several observers have already
earlier made this point:
The stylistic and idiomatic devices of Copland, Friedhofer, Antheil and

Rosza are as unmistakable as the directorial touches of Chaplin, Griffith,
Huston or Welles.13
Brief as [Copland's] tenure [in Hollywood] may have been, however, it left
its mark, although a whole generation was to pass before his influence be-
gan to be made manifest in Hollywood in any really noticeable way.14
It is difficult to understand why Copland's early American style of music,

as exemplified in Appalachian Spring, made a lasting impression on some
film composers which, unfortunately, many have never been able to cast
off.15

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Table 1. Film scores by Aaron Copland.
Date(s) of Later autono

Title composition Orchestrator(s) Academy Awards Agency/company Director(s
The City Sept. 1938 Henry Brant American Institute of Ralph Stein
Planners; Civic Films Willard Van
Nominated for Best

Of Mice and Men Oct.-Dec. 1939 George Bassman Hal Roach Studios; Lewis Milest
Music, Best Original United Artists
Score, and Best
Music, Scoring
Our Town Mar.-Apr. 1940 Jerome Moross Nominated for Best United Artists Sam Wood
Music, Best Original
Score, and Best
Music, Scoring
The North Star Feb.-Sept. 1943

Jerome Moross, Nominated for Best Goldwyn Pictures/RKO Lewis M
Gil Grau, Arthur Music and Best
Morton Scoring of a Dramatic
or Comedy Picture
The Cummington 21 June-24 Copland Office of War Helen Gray

Story July 1945 Information Larry Madi
The Heiress Nov.-Dec. 1948 Nathan Van Cleave Nominated for and Paramount Pictures William Wy
won for Best Music
and Best Scoring of
a Dramatic or Comedy
Picture
The Red Pony 29 Jan.-26 Copland, Republic Pictures Lewis Milest

Mar. 1948 Nathan Scott,
R. Dale Butts
Something Wild Apr. 10- David Walker Prometheus Enterprises; Jack Garf
Sept. 1961 distr. United Artists

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
A perfect example of scenic or pastoral descriptive music is the opening of

Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid.16
[Some Hollywood composers] adopted the styles of twentieth-century

composers: Copland for the image of America, past and present.17
Copland's influence on film music is immeasurable. His ballets Appala-

chian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo have left an ineradicable impression
on a whole generation of composers, and I doubt whether any film com-
poser faced with pictures of the Great American Outdoors, or any West-
ern story, has been able to withstand the lure of trying to imitate some
aspects of Copland's peculiar and personal harmony. Just as Elgar seems to
spell "England" to the minds of most listeners, Copland is the American
sound.18
Since Copland's music is characterized by stylistic contrasts and shifts in

mood, it is necessary to start discussing his film music, and the film music
inspired by him, with greater specificity regarding the various musical
codes he championed. Of these tropes, a powerfully nostalgic and pas-
toral mode can be studied through a variety of narrative and rhetorical
situations that reveal Copland's modernist reworking of some rather
ancient pastoral elements. Wilfrid Mellers identified in Copland an
"American idiom," connecting physical space with musical space, as
early as 1943; I plan to trace that trope through a survey of some of its
later uses in Hollywood.19 Given that this particular sound of Copland's
has been so pervasive, this essay will only touch on a select few of the
appearances of the sound and is not meant to represent an exhaustive
catalog of every instance of it. After proposing some possible influences
on the pastoral sound in commercial film, including early cinema ac-
companying traditions and modernist reworkings of older pastoral codes,
I want to investigate some of the ways this music has been utilized in
Hollywood's cinematic rhetoric and how those uses may have changed
and developed over time. While the early uses of this pastoral trope were
generally linked to more politically progressive and liberal rhetoric, since
the bicentennial the trope has begun to be associated with more conser-
vative arguments.
Virgil and Virgil Thomson: Copland's Pastoral Models
A simplified harmonic palette was being experimented with everywhere, of course; and a
music "of the people," clearly an ideal of the time, was one that seemed far nobler then
than the country-club-oriented so-called "jazz" that many had dallied with in the 1920s.
And thus it happened that my vocabulary was, in the main, the language Copland
adopted and refined.
-Virgil Thomson, American Music since 1910

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Despite their clear stylistic differences, Mellers reads the Piano Varia-
tions and Appalachian Spring as similar, since, to him, both evoke loneli-
ness, loss, and alienation. First of all, Copland's pastoral settings are per-
haps not as ironic as Mellers would have us believe; that is, Appalachian
Spring may not resonate with everyone as a work that suggests alienation.
What Arthur Berger calls "the declamatory style" in works such as Quiet
City also evinces those same qualities.20 Both reflect the literary genre of
the "pastoral," identified by critics as a work that contrasts and romanti-
cizes the simple life with the complicated through a comparison of the
rural with the urban.21 The complexities and stresses of urban life find
relief in a projected Arcadia. Such a broad definition would allow us to
reconsider much of Copland's "imposed simplicity" music as pastoral in
nature. A more specific musical definition of "pastoral" might begin with
Leonard G. Ratner's citations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1768) and
Heinrich Christoph Koch (1802), whose definitions of "musette" form
the basis for an understanding of this topic as it functioned in the eigh-
teenth century (and musical codes for the representation of nature date
back at least as far as the late sixteenth century).22 These musical topoi
carried considerable information of the kind sometimes dismissed as
extramusical. Koch's definition of "pastorale," in addition to discussing
specifically musical details, also describes it as a type of song that should
express an "idealistic" or "imaginary shepherd's world" (idealische
Hirtenwelt or eingebildete Schaiferwelt).23 The characteristic musical fea-
tures of the musette or the pastorale, as understood and reconstructed
in eighteenth-century instrumental music, involve a sustained pedal
tone or drone and a simple, naive melody, musical codes that were said
to conjure an idealized rural setting. These musical signifiers could sug-
gest or even affirm a connection with nature.
Copland's pastoral writing includes both of these features (held
pedal tones, sometimes at the fifth, and rustic melodies) and even high-
lights timbres reminiscent of the "oaten reed" of the classical literary
shepherd. Copland's pastoral mode tends to put the most interesting
melodic material into the winds or brass, deemphasizing the strings in
the modernist tradition of Stravinsky. Copland's famous "open" sound,
the disjunct melodies and widely spaced voicings, are also part of this
pastoral tradition (e.g., the open fifths in the musette's drones). The
most notable features of Copland's idiom-disjunct melodies, pedal
points, parallel diatonic harmonies, wind and brass timbres-are, then,
modernist reworkings of a venerated musical tradition, as well as exten-
sions of the pastoral tradition in Western literature stretching back to
Theocritus and Virgil. These characteristics were by no means invented
or discovered by Copland, although the prominence of his pastoral-

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
inflected works (especially Appalachian Spring) helped to establish certain

sounds as scenic, so much so that by 1976 textbooks seeking to train film
composers could list "scenic/pastoral" instruments among other timbre/
genre stereotypes (see Table 2, p. 70 in Skiles).24 Other elements of
Copland's pastoral mode are: homophonic textures; disjunct melodies
set against conjunct bass lines; slow to moderate tempi; a fondness for
fourths and fifths, both harmonically and melodically; a sense of static or
slow-moving diatonic harmony; and repetition of rhythmic and melodic
motives. How the music is applied within a visual context takes us back
to the literary roots of the pastoral as well: it is most often used as the
music of nostalgia, a longing for the place that is no more, perhaps the
music of utopian desire. This particular Coplandesque trope carries the
poignancy of nostalgic longing, the bittersweet or melancholic desire to
return home.25 And in its earliest appearances, it speaks to a collective,
inclusive longing.
Unlike many composers working in Hollywood, Copland had no
experience as a performer, arranger, or conductor for the pre-synchronized
sound cinema, as did composers such as Hugo Friedhofer, Dimitri Tiomkin,
and Carl Stalling, to name but a few. He approached his work in the film
industry with characteristic humility, remarking, "I was an outsider to
Hollywood, but I did not condescend to compose film music."26 He
watched with interest from the outside. Between 1936 and 1939, George
Antheil wrote a column in Modern Music titled "On the Hollywood
Front," which became "On the Film Front" when Paul Bowles wrote it
from 1939 to 1941.27 Even before 1936, Modern Music had featured
other essays reporting on music for film. Copland must have read these
accounts with growing excitement, none more so perhaps than Antheil's
piece from 1937 called "Breaking into the Movies."28 Antheil's main ad-
vice for making the break was to hire an agent, wait at least six months,
and be ready to write quickly. Bad-boy Antheil embodied an openly
modernist composer who, like Copland, sought in film music a way to
educate and attract a larger audience for new music. That Antheil man-
aged to adapt from his wilder days of the Ballet mecanique (composed
1923-25) into the Hollywood world with film scores such as The Plains-
man (1936) must also have attracted Copland's attention.
Copland also had an eye, and ear, on Virgil Thomson's work in
film. Thomson's two scores for Pare Lorentz's government-sponsored
films of persuasion, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River
(1937), appear to have been models for Copland when he turned to film
scoring in 1939.29 From an unpublished correspondence during 1942, we
know that Copland was familiar enough with Thomson's scores to dis-
cuss Thomson's pruning them into concert suites.30 More telling are

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Table 2. "Mood Categories and Associated Instruments."
Qualit) y Instruments
Drama Low strings

French horns or trombones
Low woodwinds
English horn (low register)
Bass flute (low register)
Contrabass clarinet (low register)
Piano
Mystery Low flute

Strings (tremolando)
Contrabassoon (low register)
French horns (stopped or muted)
Novachord or Hammond organ
Yamaha organ
Moog synthesizer
Romance Violins (middle and high register)
B-flat Clarinet (middle register)
Oboe (with caution)
Flute (middle register)
Bass flute (middle and low register)
French horn (middle and high register)
Bass clarinet (high register)
Violas, celli (middle and high register)
Vibraphone
Humor Bassoon (middle and low register)
Oboe (middle and high register)
Clarinet (all registers)
Xylophone
Bass clarinet (low)
Scenic (pastoral) Flute (middle and high register)
Horn (middle and high register)
Trumpet (middle register)
Clarinet (middle register)
English horn (middle register)
Oboe (middle and high register)
Violins (high register)
Harp (middle and high register)
Piano (middle and high register)
Science fiction Moog synthesizer
Yamaha organ
Female soprano voice
Vibraphone (haze effects)
Many percussion effects
Strings (harmonics)
Flute (high register)
Horror Contrabass clarinet
Contrabassoon
Tuba
Low trombones
Electronic instruments (effects)
Piano (low, bass clef)
French horns (low register, stopped)
Tympani
Bass drum
Narrative background Combined strings and woodwind (middle register)

Source: Marlin Skiles, Music Scoring for TV & Motion Pictures (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: Tab Books,
1976), 70.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Copland's remarks from a 1940 lecture on film music that he gave in

New York City.31 Copland explained that he only knew of two non-
Hollywood composers from the United States who had the chance to
write for films: Thomson (citing The Plow That Broke the Plains and The
River) and Louis Gruenberg (mentioning his current work with Lorentz
on The Fight for Life).32 He went on to discuss the opening reel of The
Plow That Broke the Plains, revealing his intimate understanding of
the issues and techniques:
Notice here that the music [in Plow] does not have a Hollywood quality.
It is fresher, more simple, and more personal than the usual product that
you get with the typical Hollywood film. There is only one point I would
like to make about that first reel. You immediately sense, I am sure, the
lack of the sort of fat, luscious music that accompanies most Hollywood
film. It is a much simpler solution for the problems. You get an earthy and
rather American quality by the fact that the music is rather thinly orches-
trated, depending mostly on a tune that Thomson either borrowed from
some native source or invented in the style of a native folk-tune, and, in
general, the music helps to emphasize the ominousness of the film. I can-
not possibly imagine Komgold writing it-not that he might not write a
score and possibly be even better synchronized with the action, but never-
theless would not have that frankness and openness of feeling which I
think distinctly lends color and imagination to the general picture you
are seeing. It seems to give it another dimension. (44-45)
Copland identified the essence of Thomson's innovations: the "thin" or-

chestration; the folk or folklike melody; and the general "openness of
feeling."
Thomson's nearly continuous score for The Plow That Broke the
Plains is a central part of the film's rhetorical strategy, offering musical
arguments and ironies for the visuals used by Lorentz. Music and image
come together to generate sympathy for the plight of Dust Bowl inhabi-
tants and to build support for the New Deal agencies, specifically the
Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration,
which had sponsored the film. The film's first large section is titled
"Grass" and presents a series of shots indicating the pastoral lushness of
the pre-Dust Bowl Midwest. Lorentz was often quite specific in his musi-
cal instructions to Thomson: he wanted a "Peer Gynt pastorale" for this
sequence.33 "Morgenstimmung" ("Morning Mood") from Edvard Grieg's
Peer Gynt was commonly used in film's so-called silent period, and it was
often requested in cue sheets and included in compilations as appropri-
ate music for idyllic opening sequences in the 1920s.34 For instance,
George W. Beynon wrote that " 'Morning' by Grieg is distinctly pastoral,
and paints the rising sun as clearly in tones of beauty as that seen from
the artist's brush."35 And Emo Rapee includes "Morgenstimmung" as

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
his first example of the "Pastorale" mood in his Motion Picture Moods
for Pianists and Organists: A Rapid-Reference Collection of Selected Pieces,
which, like other mood books from this period, included a list of poten-
tial mood types running down the side of each page of music (see Ex. 1,
p. 564 in Rapee).36
Although both the Grieg and the Thomson are in E major and
explore the mediant key of G-sharp, most of the similarities end there.
Grieg's chordal accompaniment supports a gently falling and rising
melody, while Thomson's polyphonic setting, with a strident melody,
sounds sparser. Thomson accompanies images of the lush, pre-Dust Bowl
grasslands with a triadic, disjunct melody set as a canon at the octave
(Ex. 2). The openness of the simple E-major arpeggio-based melody re-
flects the openness of the image's landscape. Later in the film, this music
returns but shifted into E minor to accompany shots of ecological devas-
tation, the mode shift underscoring the parallel visual transformation
from life to death. As Copland would do later in film scenes accompany-
ing literal open spaces, Thomson uses the open spaces in a disjunct, tri-
adic melody as a way of representing literal open spaces in the image; the
music works as a synchronous mediator, at once reflecting and enhanc-
ing the image on screen. Throughout this calculatedly persuasive film,
the music closely supports and amplifies the film's rhetoric.
Thomson's influence on Copland's film scoring has been noted
before-as early as 1948 by Frederick Sternfeld37 and later, more force-
fully, by Thomson himself, who takes credit for leading Copland to "the
most distinguished populist music style yet created in America."38 Is it a
coincidence that 1936, the year of The Plow That Broke the Plains, also
saw the first appearance of Copland's use of similarly open musical spaces
in association with thematic and visual open spaces? "Gyp's Song" from
The Second Hurricane (1936) opens with stark dyads of fifths and fourths,
as the stranded characters gaze over the flooded landscape and Gyp sings
of literal and figurative escape (see Ex. 3). It appears to be Copland's
earliest use of tightly blended musical and nonmusical (i.e., narrative)
openness. Howard Pollack has recently suggested that "Gyp's Song"
might have come directly out of Copland's own experiences growing up
homosexual and finds in this song a melancholic strain revealing sensi-
tivity to adolescent isolation.39 Other stylistic similarities between
Thomson and Copland from this time include the exploitation of folk
tunes, borrowed or synthesized; the use of canon and even occasionally
fugue as a rhetorical device (an especially striking connection since
Copland almost never wrote fugues anywhere else); an instrumental
palette favoring winds over strings; and a fondness for the perfect fourth,
both melodically and harmonically. Copland's U.S. pastoral sound is in
no small part indebted to Thomson's landmark film scores.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Aeroplane 2
Band 5 Morgenstimmung
Battle 10 Morning Mood
Birds 21 Edvard Grieg, Op. 46, No. 1
Calls 273 Allegrettopastorale Edited and fingered by Louis Oesterle
Allegretto pastorale (J = 60)
Chase 599
Chatter 28
5- ^ -a 3 oa < / I 5f14 \
Children 31
Chimes 259
Dances 39
Gavottes 39
Marches 102
Mazurkas 48
Minuets 54 p:#t#S+ i ( : ' j r 2 3
Polkas 61
Tangos 94
Valses lentes 78
5 ~ , ~ 4 4 _ 4^,(
Valses 65
Doll IL
Festival 140
Fire-Fighting 151
Funeral 160
Grotesque 165
Gruesome 169
Happiness 202 '%??~ ~ ~ ~ ~ '

Horror 173
Humorous 174 5 3 .-- 0
9 3 I
Hunting 186 A ct., Z :t- PL:t- - f
Impatience 194
Joyfulness 202
Love-themes 209
Lullabies 231
Misterioso 242
Monotony 250
Music-box 254
National 261
I h\ I -U 1 FL eL 23
Neutral 467
Orgies 487
Oriental 496
Parties 523
Passion 571
Pastorale 564
Pulsating 587
Purity 591
Quietude 591
s,9##"" i. i ("= (A L
Race 599
Railroad 608
Religioso 616
Sadness 621 17
Sea-Storm 651
Sinister 663
Wedding 671
Western 665
Copyright, 1899, by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.
Example 1. Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (Schirmer, 1924; rep.,
Arno Press, 1974), 564. Compiled and arranged by Emo Rapee. Copyright ? 1924 by
G. Schirmer, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
[This music accompanies several straight-on and panning shots of lush wheatfields]
%##Jr J J rr r J j J Jr J|r J
flute muted violins, violas
y -^"# rf 7 f f f - F f r" r r i
horns
flute, clarinet
r:p####CCf't - ?r trf rr-rr r' viola, cello
Narrator: "The grass lands..."
13 J^;i fi J f Jr L
????^ r'' f f r .
Example 2. Mm. 1-17 from "Grass," from The Plow That Broke the Plains. W
Thomson. Copyright ? 1942 (renewed) by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP). Inte
cured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Pollack has detailed how, in the summer of 1937, Co

secure a film contract in Hollywood, engaging Harold C
agent and meeting with, among others, George Antheil
James Cagney, and Harpo Marx.40 No contract material
seems to have been only through his score for the docum
The City (which premiered on 26 May 1939) that Holly
were convinced Copland's music would adapt well to fi
bluntly said that "[i]t gave me the credit I needed to ap
wood again."42 Adopting a three-part structure of past,
future, The City argues that the urban environment ha
pitable and sets up the Greenbelt town, the decentralize
nity in the mold of the New England town, as an achi
space. Copland's music works with the images to create
between the urban and the bucolic. The opening mome
are matched to exterior scenes of fields and buildings, a
ond Hurricane, perfect fourths and fifths are linked with

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
No. 4. Gyp's Song

LOWRIE: (spoken through music) Look at the river over there, how high it is
on the other side of the levee-Look at it rush, all brownish. Gee,
Slowly-simply #Il
it looks mean.
1fif
00
a 0
o08
000 0
0 0
0
, p: ### i p _ _ __
GWEN: You wouldn't think anybody could stand it, living here. Miles and mi
the brown river.
QUEENIE: I don't think that plane is ever coming back. I just f

everybody's so ugly.
23 iB (Gyp comes forward and sings.)
p
i## l - :1- , v ir: 1- r L I wish I had a car and
I
(repeat till ready,
if necessary)
I
26 Mf
justcould ve way, I sh weren'tso far and din't have

just could drive a - way, I wish I weren't so far and did - n't have to stay.
I
(p####vr 4.--- . 1 m
,: ;_: : r-r F F
*(Throughout this song, if these B's are too low, th
Example 3. Aaron Copland, "Gyp's Song" from Th

Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. Copyright re
Licensee. Reprinted by permission.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Moderato
8 trumpets and horn
bassoon, celli, basses
9): ' I
>
Example 4. Aaron Copland,

land Fund for Music, Inc., c
spaces (see Ex. 4). As

clangy stuff for the
cult for our compos
shrewdly."43 Indeed
scenesof industrial
Thomson's film scor
although Copland's p
son's.44 The two film
Van Dyke and Ralph
for The Plow That B
help him edit his ea
and pastoral duties:
while Steiner did "the
iron towns, and the
Copland, as the only
strating in his first f
and pastoral modes.
compassionate, alien
most overtly progre
moments in The City
conceived of here as
voice?

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Shaking Off the Aristocracy: Copland's Pastoral

Challenge to European Postromanticism
Most scores, as everybody knows, are written in the late nineteenth century symphonic
style, a style now so generally accepted as to be considered inevitable. But why need
movie music be symphonic? And why, oh why, the nineteenth century?
-Aaron Copland, "Second Thoughts on Hollywood," Modern Music
Caryl Flinn (following from the work of Barbara Zuck) has argued that
U.S. compositional activity in the 1930s and 1940s carried "an emerging
sense of utopia" that "could somehow be materialized through music."
This sense of utopia-in this case a collective identity realizable through
music-was achieved in the United States "by expelling foreign influ-
ences ... or by paring down the formal complexity of a work."48 Cop-
land's "imposed simplicity" provides a model of the latter. As he finally
struck out in the commercial film industry, he quickly found himself
composing for films containing tranquil scenes that directly imaged or
imagined utopic, pastoral spaces. In his first Hollywood film, Of Mice
and Men (directed by Lewis Milestone, 1939), Copland wrote a cue
titled "The Wood at Night" that accompanies George and Lennie's dis-
cussion of their rabbit farm, the dream that propels them through their
otherwise dreary lives as migrant workers. This music is heard first when
they are camping in the woods and then occurs later in a scene in the
bunkhouse (see Ex. 5).49 There are several pastoral elements in this cue:
the dronelike pedal created by the repetition in the bass; the simplicity
of the treble melodies; the flute and English horn timbres; and the
sparseness of the texture. Here Copland's music is applied to a politically
progressive cinematic narrative; we are encouraged to sympathize with
the plight of the workers. Copland's pastoral setting allows us to engage
in George and Lennie's utopian vision.
As a musical code signifying the characteristically pastoral longing
for a simpler life, this sound of Copland's made obvious sense in the
film version of Our Town (directed by Sam Wood, 1940). Based on the
Thornton Wilder play of the same name, Our Town romanticizes the rel-
ative simplicity of fin-de-siecle life in the New England town of Grover's
Corer. The cue titled "Story of Our Town," for instance, accompanies
the narrator, Mr. Morgan, as he introduces us to the geographic and his-
torical boundaries of Grover's Corer (see Ex. 6). It is rhythmically sim-
ple, although there are metrical shifts, and the polychords in the harmony
-the opening measures have a G-major arpeggio over a C-major triad,

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Slowly r J r f l at
,: . ~~U
tr....4~~ ~ flute
English horn solo
[George and Lennie prepare to sleep in the woods after discussing their dream of a rabbit farm.]
strings [ . L L . L
3^#c - r C - r r - r-
George: "Boy, it's gonna be nice sleepin' here, lookin' up.
i#F ..-f f f tt rffr F f

^.??^- uY - ^ J r r -r u ^
Boy, you sure feel free when you ain't got a job-if you ain't hungry."
Example 5. Aaron Copland, mm. 1-8 from "The Wood at Night," from Of Mic
by permission of The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., copyright owner.
and further measures have the tertial relations of G major

major over F, and A major over D-were once described by
as "the emancipation of consonance."50 Again we hear fam
musical elements underscoring an image of a wide horizon
direct mention, through dialogue, of a less complicated and
idyllic existence. Because the technique has been overused
1940s, we may not be able to imagine the freshness of tha
so it may be helpful to recall another film with a similar th
Sam Wood directed another cinematic adaptation of a
work about a small U.S. town at the end of the nineteenth
Kings Row (1942). Unlike Grover's Corer, this town has a
complete with an incestuous father, a corrupt banker, and
lante surgeon. It also differs from Our Town in its score by Er
gang Korngold, the former child prodigy who was forced in
Gilliam calls a "double exile" from both his native Austria and from the
highbrow world of opera.51 Korgold's score for Kings Row is an excep-
tional example of the so-called classical Hollywood score: stylistically
evolved from the chromatic, postromantic world of Strauss and Puccini,
it is an almost continuously running score with leitmotifs for all princi-

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Mr. Morgan:"All right, operator, let's start."

A flute
. rc . - - S . j -r, - J 3 - . r. - j - Ir -
iJ I II I Ii III! I I I I - II iii
<1(g j a S S rJ j i e S S
horns
[the opening shot is a long shot of Craven against the

mountains in the background] [a second shot occurs here: a medium close-up of Craven]
strings
i i ^ J S ^ iJ iiJ ; j ( 8J 2 J
[the original long shot of Craven and the mountains returns]
,v-
Lb-I IF'I iI F: E l1'# Fl 1 F
I f ' - I -t- I -
Example 6. Aaron Copland, mm. 1-10 fro

1940 by The Aaron Copland Fund for Mu
Publisher & Licensee. Reprinted by perm
pie characters; scored for full

establishes an epic feeling (alt
the regal-sounding title music
knowledge of the word "king"
found Korngold's sound notew
as "heroic,"53 an argument rein
composers' seeking Hollywood
sound era, most famously Joh
gold's style, along with others
inant paradigm for how Holly
uct that sold, producers were
became hegemonic.54
In terms of their musical st
Row looks back. Kings Row rai
may be lost with the passing o
States. One character (Drake
the ability to pass between the
visually by train tracks, but ot

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
hierarchy. And Drake pays a heavy price for his mobility: his legs, ampu-
tated by the wealthy father of a woman Drake had dated but chose not
to marry. Our Town addresses class division less directly, attempting to
erase any traces of class difference, just as the play and film attempt to
erase the boundaries between "characters" and "audience," through the
narrator's direct addressing of the audience at several points in the play
and film. Notably, the Sam Wood film that is more obsessed with the Eu-
ropean aristocracy has postromantic music in a distinctly European style
by Korngold.
The 1940s saw a number of Hollywood composers questioning the
"schmaltz" of the Steiner-Komgold model of film score. Irwin Bazelon
reflected on the schmaltz:
While the violins throbbed and the woodwinds and brasses sighed and
pulsated, the entire orchestra drenched itself in lachrymal sentimentality.
The music was luxuriant, the embodiment of an emotional overflow. It
didn't matter what the film was; even if the subject was a hard-boiled con-
temporary theme, the audience was still given its usual dosage of syrup
and honey. This mellifluousness dulled the senses and acted as an opiate
rather than a stimulant. And, it increased the viewer's susceptibility to
the film's projected illusions by appealing to maudlin emotions.55
Bazelon decried the specifically European and postromantic musical style

as an "opiate" that increased the viewer's susceptibility to the film, al-
though Claudia Gorbman writes that all music in sound film serves to
render less critical, "untroublesome viewing subjects" who will be more
likely to "buy" into the film, in all the possible ways that one "buys."56
Hugo Friedhofer, perhaps the first Hollywood composer to incorporate
Copland's musical vocabulary into his own, felt strongly on the matter:
"the ubiquitous Hollywood schmaltz tended to give me heartburn" and
"no cholesterol please!"57 Friedhofer saw Copland's importance and in-
fluence largely in the alternative he offered to the overly lush postro-
manticism:
I got to know Aaron quite well and was tremendously fond of him. I like
his forthrightness, his honesty, and his great musical integrity. He wrote
the way that he felt. Actually, the influence was largely in paring, in my
weeding out the run-of-the-mine Hollywood schmaltz, and trying to do a
very simple, straightforward, almost folklike scoring. I don't think I actu-
ally looked over Aaron's shoulder, but there was a certain use, perhaps a
certain harmonic similarity at times. But that was it.58
Friedhofer's most acclaimed score, The Best Years of Our Lives (di-
rected by William Wyler, 1946)-it brought Friedhofer his only Oscar

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
out of nine nominations and a distinguished career in Hollywood-has

been associated with Copland's sound since the film's release. The Best
Years of Our Lives, a story of three servicemen returning from duty in
World War II, swept the Oscars in 1946 with a total of seven: for actor,
supporting actor, director, editing, screenplay, score, and picture.59 A
timely article on the score by Frederick Sternfeld appeared in Musical
Quarterly in 1947 in which Copland and Hindemith were identified as
possible stylistic precursors to Friedhofer's "economy" of style.60 Fried-
hofer was studying the harmony of Copland's Piano Sonata while scoring
The Best Years,61 but while acknowledging Copland's influence, he also
suggested other sources of inspiration in published interviews: "David
Raksin and I underwent a period of total immersion in the music of
Copland, Hindemith, and Stravinsky in an effort to find our own way
out of the current late nineteenth-century morass; a striving for simplic-
ity of line, clarity of texture, and an avoidance of over-lush chromati-
cism."62 Furthermore, in presently unpublished interviews, Friedhofer
has credited a passage from the dirge in Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso
for String Orchestra with Piano Obbligato (1924-25) as another, per-
haps unexpected, source for a moment of the Best Years of Our Lives
score.63 Bloch's style, while less well known than Copland's, shared cer-
tain characteristics, such as a fondness for perfect fourths and fifths,
rhythmic ostinati, and pedal points (see Exx. 7 and 8). The E/D clashes
in the Bloch dirge may have inspired the C/D clashes in the "Arrival at
Homer's House" cue (Ex. 8), which accompanies the troubled Homer,
who had lost his hands during the war, as he returns home. George Burt
has read this part of Friedhofer's score as bichordal, arguing that it is
"suggestive of an ambivalence that is in agreement with Homer's reluc-
tance to face his family and his girlfriend."64
Although it would be reductive to attribute a single source of musi-
cal influence to Friedhofer, it seems important to assign some signifi-
cance to the fact that of the multiple composers who influenced his
musical identity, Copland was the only one writing music that was so
publicly connected with extramusical ideas through his heavily lauded
film scores. Friedhofer did not simply compose Coplandesque music in
the Best Years score because it was contemporary or collegial, however,
but because of its specific signifying capabilities, established in the early
Copland Hollywood film scores and the ballets, all of which received so
much critical and popular attention. This reason may explain why Cop-
land, rather than any of the numerous other composers who were creat-
ing "Americana" at this time (such as William Grant Still, Ferde Grofe,
and Roy Harris), has been singled out as such an important progenitor
of this idiom. And it is also important to note that Copland was by no

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
violins, violas
mf
:f#0 I r f r rre f r
celli
Example 7. Ernest Bloch, mm. 1-4 from dirge, Concerto Grosso for String Orchestra
no. 1. Copyright ? 1925, 1953 C. C. Birchard, 1981 Broude Brothers Limited. Reprin
by permission.
strings
9: _ -I 7 --
Example 8. Hugo Friedhofer, 10 mm. from "A

Lives. ? 1946 Samuel Goldwyn Productions.
by permission of Warner Bros. Publications,
means the first or only composer

lywood scoring;
would such a list
almost never adopts the Copland
Raksin, and Leonard Rosenman, a
According to Linda Danly, Frie
Wyler, consciously chose "a hom
Aaron Copland."65 In fact, Wyle
had first approached Copland to
Copland sound was important for
because the film had U.S. veteran
political positioning and tone. It

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
film about the American middle class,"67 but I would suggest that it goes
beyond merely highlighting the middle class. Instead, it promotes the il-
lusion of the potentially classless society of the so-called liberal consen-
sus that surfaced after World War II. While the three main male charac-
ters come from sharply delineated class backgrounds, encoded through
music, occupation, and their place of residence-Fred comes from the
working class and lives across the train tracks, Al lives in a swanky
apartment and works for a bank, while Homer lives in the suburbs, rep-
resenting the middle-the highs and lows are flattened out by the end of
the film, through the romantic reconciliation and suggested marriage of
Fred to Al's daughter at Homer and Wilma's wedding. Reflective of his
upper-class social status, Al's music has the greatest affinity to the Euro-
pean postromantic tradition. Much of his music derives from an ongoing
thematic transformation of the song "Among My Souvenirs," a song
connected to his marriage, often realized by a large nineteenth-century
orchestral sound.68 Fred's emblematic music has the mark of George
Gershwin, and jazz music in 1940s film was often positioned as a potent
symbol of class, in addition to its traditional power as an important
marker of race.69 The presence of at least traces of Copland in the film
score-and the music of Homer, in the middle, bears the most similarity
to Copland-reminds us of the early efficacy and naturalness of Cop-
land's music in leftist rhetoric.
Many have noted the particularly Coplandesque qualities of
Homer's music, called the "Neighbors Theme," although other parts of
the score bear Copland's fingerprints as well. For instance, part of the
"Main Title" music (Ex. 9) has some similarity with a moment from
Copland's Lincoln Portrait (Ex. 10) in the disjunct melodies and diatonic
harmonies, although the gaps in the vertical spacing in the Copland ex-
ample distinguish it from Friedhofer's more traditional voicing. The di-
rectness and simplicity of the Lincoln Portrait example is put to similar
use in this cinematic context, as Friedhofer's title music also needed to
capture something that could be quickly decoded as having a peculiarly
"American" sound. Stemfeld found the title music appropriate: "long
before it highlights any of the individual protagonists, the music should
characterize all three, as a collective hero."70 It would become difficult
to generate much sympathy for "collective heroes" in the United States
shortly after 1947. It is telling that the music first associated with Homer
is not called "Homer's Theme" but rather the "Neighbors Theme," again
drawing attention to the collective ideal most obviously manifested in
his character and his suburban setting. Homer will be the first of the
three men to disembark from the taxi and return home, and it is right
before this moment, as we see the three veterans in the back of a taxi,

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
ri
r r t r r
Example 9. Hugo Friedhofer, 3 mm. of the Best Years o
Samuel Goldwyn Productions. ? Renewed and assigne
by permission of Warer Bros. Publications, Miami, FL 3
A , . I I J I ,
y^~i ht-- ft
Example 10. Aaron Copland, mm. 38-41

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc
Sole Publisher & Licensee. Reprinted by
that the "Neighbors Theme" is fir

returns find comparisons to the s
encountered during the war.71 Th
with its often disjunct melody an
recognized as being Coplandesque
"suggest[ing] strongly the feeling
writing," and Prendergast later o
strongly suggestive of much of A
Its hymnlike, homophonic textur
direct passages, as in "Story of Ou
moderato section, marked "Like a
suite. Copland's music, already lin
utopian pastoral space, is here tig
and the suburbs. By 1946, the Co
as a widely understood musical m
wood's musical vocabulary.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
2 m 1. 77 : r7 I 1
2:.'"JT . ~ r
Example 11. Hugo Friedhofer, 5 mm. from

Our Lives. ? 1946 Samuel Goldwyn Produ
& Co. Reprinted by permission of Warner
rights reserved.
Hollywood Scores Flowing f
The music [Appalachian Spring] was endless
-Howard Pollack, Aa
The pastoral idiom does not feature

The North Star, The Heiress, The Re
it is an important part of The Cumm
idyllic New England town for Eur
film scores are each remarkable mo
Virgil Thomson referred to Copland
most elegant... yet composed and ex
-there were still only six fictional
mentaries, one of which (The Cumm
Office of War Information and dis
even shown in this country until la
can we account for the pastoral idi
in only a handful of early films? C
on Hollywood's musical vocabulary
his film scores but rather through
from Skiles and Previn at the start
Appalachian Spring as the paradigm
idiom. Recall also Friedhofer's comm
Kid. The ballets fostered a whole fa
erns, such as Jerome Moross's The B
Wyler, 1958) and Elmer Bernstein's
John Sturges, 1960).74 In rare cases

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
500 The Musical Quar
clarinet solo
65
A _ I - lf' I
I f CI fr f 1 i2 J |
strings f f
sf rinMf 2
c, rSfc Cir . . G-
N
mf f
f-
Example 12. Aaron Copland, Concerto for Clarinet, mm. 65-68. Copyright ? 1949,
1952 by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Boosey &
Hawkes, Inc., Sole Publisher & Licensee. Reprinted by permission.
eloquent
I IAI .
/
I . Slow
I/
andstately :: _ ^ f _
l _ I E h- I 6 I - 1" r h I r-
violins, flutes, clarinets, oboes
iw1, , I j -
violas, cellos, horns, trom
l I . . - I . I 1 I I I I
Y. blll Ikt Ic J j j4 i J I
bass clarinet, bassoons, ba
Example 13. Aaron Cop

permission of The Aar
have helped to s
ample, that less
for Clarinet (mm
composers. This
earlier Copland f
Valley," mm. 1-
composers and c
grumbled about
a modem Hollyw
Dreams score is

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Perhaps Hollywood's affinity for Appalachian Spring comes from the

work's "rootedness" in southern Californian soil, as the work was begun
while Copland was writing The North Star in Hollywood in 1943.
Howard Pollack speaks of Appalachian Spring as being "emblematic" and
"iconic,"76 and there are certainly few if any other U.S. concert-hall
works that can claim as much popularity with such a diversity of listen-
ers. In its unaltered form the work has been used across the political
spectrum, from the marketing of luxury sedans-part of the variations
on "Simple Gifts" were used in a 1996 commercial for the Oldsmobile
Aurora-to introductory music for Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's victory
speeches in Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 1996.77 Of course, Cop-
land's greatest fame among current television audiences may stem from
the use of the "Hoe-Down" from Rodeo in an ongoing (since 1992) series
of television and radio advertisements for the National Cattleman's Beef
Association's "Beef. It's What's For Dinner" campaign.78 The vigorous
rhythms of "Hoe-Down" seem to promise a similar power to the con-
sumers of bovine flesh, and anthropologists have noted that "meat has
long stood for [humanity's] proverbial 'muscle' over the natural world."79
According to the Beef Association's market research, the advertisements
with the Copland music have created a dramatic 50 percent increase in
positive attitudes about beef.80 From a strictly utilitarian and pragmatic
argument, to say nothing of the ethical considerations, eating cows is
not the most efficient way for humans to obtain protein, and so Cop-
land's music in the service of arguments supporting beef has to be viewed
within an economic and political context.
The ballets live on in film scores as well as the more clearly recog-
nizable "commercials." There are striking allusions to Appalachian Spring
in James Horer's score for Apollo 13 (directed by Ron Howard, 1995),
so much so, in fact, that one wonders if the piece was on the film's temp
track.81 Apollo 13 is a starkly patriotic and politically reactionary docu-
drama whose characters and visual iconography present a conservative
attitude toward gender roles in U.S. culture; the narrative, for example,
places an obsessive emphasis on the problems of how the men at NASA
will get their rocket up and keep it up, while the women appear to do
little more than wring their hands in front of the television. The film,
through both visual and musical means, attempts to create a mood of
nostalgia for a number of attitudes of the Nixon era, including a cooper-
ative spirit of hard work and self-sacrifice, the perceived simplicity of
the goal to win the space race, as well as perhaps the still relatively un-
questioned primacy of men over women. Horer borrows a familiar Ap-
palachian Spring motive twice: first at the beginning of the film, during
the recounting of the launch mishap that killed three astronauts, and

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Example 14. Aaron Copland, mm. 78-83 from Appalachian Spring Suite. Copyright ?
1948 by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Boosey &
Hawkes, Inc., Sole Publisher & Licensee. Reprinted by permission.
then at the close of the film, when the three astronauts of Apollo 13
have returned from their unlucky flight. This particular motif from
Appalachian Spring, two rising perfect fourths over a conjunct bass line
(see Ex. 14) appears virtually untransposed in Apollo 13 (against the
opening images of astronauts boarding the Apollo 1 mission, a nearly
identical melody of E-A-D-[E]-C-sharp-B is set against bassline
of C-sharp-D-E).82 The musical openness in the melody is suggestive
of the potential vastness of this newest frontier, outer space. The new
vista is first revealed to us not visually-we do not see images of outer
space-but instead through voice-over narration about and images of
the astronauts boarding and dying tragically on Apollo 1, positioning this
film's story within the context of the cold war-inspired space race and a
period of presumably national unity and patriotism, a description of the
early 1970s that cuts against the grain of the usual turbulence and cyni-
cism associated with that era. Apollo 13 points to this moment in U.S.
history as an important moment of consensus and community; it uses the
Copland trope to advance this patriotic, even jingoistic, argument.
Mellers had noted the importance of the fourth in the Copland
sound in 1943, pointing to "the prevalence of rising fourths in the line of
Copland, Harris, Schuman-indeed all the significant American com-
posers I know anything at all about."83 Consecutive rising fourths have
a rich history of suggesting open spaces that include their prominent
appearance in Alexander Courage's fanfare for the original Star Trek
television series (1966).84 The infinite space horizon seen during each
episode's opening credits is accompanied by other elements of the Cop-
landesque sound. Courage's musical gestures may be the result of several
influences. Kathryn Kalinak recounts a Fred Steiner anecdote in which
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, refers to Korngold's score
for Captain Blood as the archetype for the sound of his science-fiction
series.85 Another source reports that Roddenberry told Courage that he
"wanted something that had some balls and drive to it."86

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Perfect fourths signify at least two things in the history of twentieth-

century music. First, they provide a way of avoiding thirds and fifths,
something of keen interest to iconoclastically modernist composers dur-
ing the 1910s and 1920s who were seeking an alternative to common
practice functional tonality; thus Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith,
and Thomson are but three of the many who experiment with them.
Second, they have appeared in programmatic works intended to repre-
sent the vastness of nature. The opening of Gustav Mahler's First Sym-
phony (1888) begins, like Courage's title fanfare for Star Trek, with de-
scending perfect fourths against what Adoro called "[t]he tormenting
pedal point" and "an unpleasant whistling sound like that emitted by
old-fashioned steam engines."87 (Ex. 15 shows the opening measures of
Courage's theme.) Appalachian Spring's opening, which also employs an
A pedal, stands chronologically in between the Mahler and Courage ex-
amples; all three are connected to pastoral codes through their pedal
points and open fourths.88 The Mahler and Copland examples differ, of
course, in their stance toward nature. Whereas the Mahler pedal point is
frequently interpreted in negative terms-Adoro hears "a thin curtain,
threadbare but densely woven, [that] hangs from the sky like a pale gray
cloud layer, similarly painful to sensitive eyes"-the Copland pedal is
read as bright, warm, optimistic, a sign of the stability and potential of
the landscape, all qualities that Hollywood films frequently try to express.89
Just as landscape painting helped make visible an important part
of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural identity of "freedom" and privi-
lege,90 in which the U.S. frontier provides an escape from Europe, Holly-
wood film in the twentieth century has provided numerous images of
open spaces. Unlike the paintings, however, films are frequently accom-
panied by music. Copland's music has become closely associated with
these images of wide open spaces and, by extension, the limitless possi-
bilities of the so-called American Dream. And hence the appeal of that
music to advertisers of suburbs, luxury automobiles, beef, and patriarchy.
It should come as no surprise, then, to find that Copland's pastoral trope
has been often appropriated into narratives involving sports; one could
follow this use of the sound through either baseball movies (e.g., Randy
Newman's score for The Natural [directed by Barry Levinson, 1984] and
James Horer's score for Field of Dreams [directed by Phil Alden Robin-
son, 1989]) or basketball movies, as in Jerry Goldsmith's score for Hoosiers
(directed by David Anspaugh, 1986). Perhaps the most striking use of
preexistent Copland music-including Appalachian Spring-in a sports
film is Spike Lee's He Got Game (1998).
A dense film that raises issues of racial politics and economics
within the context of college basketball, He Got Game tells the story of a

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Fl./Picc. VI~~~~~~~~~~~ r
- d . ---- - r
Ob.
C1.
1(< ' " If
3 Hn.
"Space" pause
hff 'mf "the final frontie
C
Org. C l - ^o.- -0 ~.a_
VIi , - - - - -A -
Harp VI- as
Vibes
Example 15.
Television Se
? 1966, 1970
rights reserv
father, J
ball playe
powerful
Marx, Ste
seen as a
ball Assoc
is mostly
actually a
one that
self-sacri
irony ma
ages. Acc

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
When I was writing the script, I got the idea to use the great pieces of
Aaron Copland.... I wanted to use wall-to-wall Copland. Listening to
his music again and again, I began to visualize. I saw images. I could see
the basketball movie in my head: the drama and emotions one feels lis-
tening to his music would be just what the doctor ordered.... When I lis-
ten to [Copland's] music, I hear America, and basketball is America.91
The opening credits contain a montage of numerous types of people

practicing or playing basketball across the country, accompanied by
Copland's John Henry, an orchestral arrangement of a folk song that
refers specifically to the exploitation of African American physical labor.
The complex counterpoint between the music and image shows on the
one hand the unifying power of team sports-and the lingering, occa-
sionally slow-motion photography adds to the effect-while concur-
rently reminding us, if we are listening closely to the music, of the
United State's history of racial and class exploitation through reference
to John Henry. After this prologue, Lee introduces us to the central
characters, Jake and Jesus, underscored by the opening of Appalachian
Spring, which we hear while seeing images cross-cutting between Jesus's
housing projects and Jake's tightly confined basketball court at the At-
tica prison. We find out it is Attica through a rapid series of increasingly
close shots on the Attica sign, creating a sense of claustrophobia. It is
rare to find the Copland pastoral trope used this way:92 because Ap-
palachian Spring's screen appearances have normally stressed exterior,
liberating spaces, the effect here is unsettling when linked to the closed,
constricting world of the incarcerated Jake. Lee's cinematic juxtaposi-
tion, if not his explicit words to the contrary, quickly strips away the
romanticized Hollywood sheen normally associated with the Copland
pastoral trope, that simple glowing sound of the heartlands, with his
radical recontextualization of Appalachian Spring. Stanley Crouch
distinguishes between the music of the basketball courts (the Copland,
which Crouch does not read as problematic) and "the crabbed, hostile
yammering of the streets," which he identifies in the raps of Public En-
emy (two soundtracks were released along with the film: the "music" by
Copland and the "songs" by Public Enemy).93 While this film calls out
for much more extended analysis than that offered here, the rare and un-
settling appearance of Appalachian Spring is enough to demonstrate the
ongoing potency of this music in Hollywood's vocabulary.94
As with any reified musical code, constant and repetitive use of the
Copland pastoralism will, over time, both strip it of its original meaning
and open it up to signifying potential. The trope surfaces many times in
John Williams's output, from his eclectic scores for Superman: The Movie

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
(directed by Richard Donner, 1978), where it underscores images of the

wheat fields in the bucolic heartland of Smallville, to Amistad (directed
by Steven Spielberg, 1997), where it accompanies John Adams. Saving
Private Ryan (directed by Steven Spielberg, 1998) also makes frequent
use of the trope. In all of these examples, the pastoralism functions in
traditional ways: to evoke a utopic space, accompanying characters de-
fined by their self-sacrifice in the service of the common good. It is even
possible to find the Copland sound being applied, by Hollywood com-
posers, to non-U.S. characters, as Jerry Goldsmith does briefly in his
music for Rambo III (directed by Peter MacDonald, 1988). After Rambo
witnesses a brutal Soviet attack on Afghani citizens, he sits in contem-
plation as traces of the Copland pastoral trope enter into Goldsmith's
score, and from this point on in the film, Rambo determines not only to
save his kidnapped colonel but also to aid the Afghani freedom fighters
against the heavily armed soldiers from the USSR.95 There are earlier,
but few, precedents: for example, Copland's largely pastoral score for
The Cummington Story attaches the trope to European, perhaps Jewish,
refugees. The Copland trope surfaces in some films, then, as a way of
projecting certain U.S. values onto or in support of non-U.S. characters,
as perhaps a kind of musical colonialism.96
As a loose connotative signifier suggestive of grand possibilities, of
success through hard work, of the rewards of self-sacrifice, and of collec-
tive over individual goals, the Copland pastoral trope finds its way into
many narrative, generic, and documentary forms. The prominence of
these musical codes implies that they are widely understood by large
groups of the listening, and watching, population and that they are
durable enough to be put into service for a variety of conflicting ideolog-
ical positions, from the more left-wing utopian visions of films such as
The City, Our Town, and The Best Years of Our Lives to the more reac-
tionary arguments presented in the beef ad or Apollo 13. Copland had
an idea of what he had done: "It is a satisfaction to know that in the
composing of a ballet like Billy the Kid or in a film score like Our Town,
and perhaps in the Lincoln Portrait, I have touched off for myself and
others a kind of musical naturalness that we have badly needed along
with 'great' works."97 An active part of today's popularly understood mu-
sical vocabulary, the "naturalness" of Copland's U.S. pastoral idiom com-
municates specific values claimed across the political spectrum (although
probably more often reactionary than progressive today), mediates con-
temporary visual media, and manipulates consumers. Can any other U.S.
composer from the concert hall claim such a prosperous, influential, and
complicated life in the popular media?

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Notes
Earlier versions of this essay have been read, under different titles, for the American
Musicological Society, South-Central chapter, meeting (Murfreesboro, Tenn., Apr.
1997), the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (Phoenix, Ariz.,
Oct. 1997), and the Faculty Research Group of Davidson College (Oct. 1999), and as
part of the lecture series at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and the Uni-
versity of Virginia. I am grateful for all the intelligent feedback I received at these talks
and owe a special debt of thanks to Bryan Gilliam, Antony John, and Howard Pollack
for their insightful comments and questions on earlier drafts of this essay. Claudia Gorb-
man and William Rosar graciously shared information from parts of their unpublished
work. Some of the research for this article was funded by grants from the Davidson Col-
lege Faculty Study and Research Committee.
1. It is difficult, with the gaping divide between the concert hall and mass media, to
imagine contemporary composers stumbling over each other to write for the Intemet or
videogames, some of today's most technologically radical and creative mass media outlets
for instrumental music.
2. See, for instance, George Antheil's column, "On the Hollywood Front," in Modem
Music during the mid- to late 1930s, where he reported on the many rumors surrounding
possible Hollywood contracts for major concert-hall composers and predicted that the
best U.S. composers would soon be writing for film. Compare that with Lawrence Mor-
ton's estimation in 1945, which shows the ranking of the types of aesthetic modernism
that might be allowed in Hollywood: "The Sch6nberg rumor had been reduced to a
Krenek rumor which materialized in the engagement of Kurt Weill for a pair of films."
"On the Hollywood Front," Modem Music 22 (1945): 135.
3. Interview by Alfred Williams Cochran, "Style, Structure, and Tonal Organization in

the Early Film Scores of Aaron Copland" (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University, 1986), 117.
4. Aaron Copland, The New Music: 1900-1960, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1968), 160.
5. Copland, The New Music, 160.
6. Copland, The New Music, 163-64.
7. See Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1952), chapter 6, "The Composer in Industrial America," esp. p. 109.
8. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History
of American Music (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1965), 87.
9. Lawrence Starr considers the relatedness of Copland's stylistic personae in "Cop-

land's Style," Perspectives of New Music 19 (1980-81): 69-89. He reveals the actual com-
plexity of Copland's so-called simplicity (78) and notes that much remains to be studied
regarding the "extra-musical meanings and implications" of Copland's music (81).
10. Histories of Hollywood film music have tended not to focus on Copland, perhaps
because his chief Hollywood output was slight (only five films in ten years: Of Mice and
Men, Our Town, The North Star, The Heiress, and The Red Pony). Studies of the synchro-
nized sound film in Hollywood have focused mainly on the transplanted European com-
posers (such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korgold, Franz Waxman, and Miklos

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
Rosza) who established European postromanticism as the dominant musical paradigm for
Hollywood scores. Among these histories are the useful but largely anecdotal books by
Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies (New York: A. S. Bares, 1973; 2nd ed., 1997), and
Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson and Blake,
1975). Other important histories are Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of
Film Music (London: Hastings House, 1957), which was revised by Richard Amell and
Peter Day in 1975 (New York: Hastings House); Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes
on Film Music (New York: Arco, 1975); Roy M. Prendergast, A Neglected Art: A Critical
Study of Music in Films (New York: New York University Press, 1977), revised with the
title Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Christopher Palmer,
The Composer in Hollywood (New York: Marion Boyars, 1990); Kathryn Kalinak, Settling
the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1992); Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); George Burt, The Art of Film Mu-
sic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); Fred Karlin, Listening to Movies: The
Film Lover's Guide to Film Music (New York: Schirmer, 1994); Georg Maas and Achim
Schudack, Musik und Film-Filmmusik: Informationen und Modelle fiir die Unterrichtspraxis
(Mainz: Schott, 1997); and Laurence E. MacDonald, The Invisible Art of Film Music: A
Comprehensive History (New York: Ardsley House, 1998).
11. See esp. Copland, "Second Thoughts on Hollywood," Modern Music 17, no. 3
(Mar.-Apr. 1940): 141-47; "The Aim of Music for Films," New York Times, 10 Mar.
1940; and "Tips to Moviegoers: Take Off Those Ear-Muffs," New York Times, 6 Nov.
1949.
12. In a paper titled "A Part of Our World: Music for Network News," read at the joint
meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and
the Society for Music Theory in Oakland, Calif., Nov. 1990, Claudia Gorbman described
her interviews with composers working within the industry who said that after the bicen-
tennial, television music "went" Copland. By the mid-1970s, then, the Copland sound
was a recognized idiom within the industry, although, as I will point out below, it had
surfaced earlier in such scores as The Best Years of Our Lives.
13. Lawrence Morton, "Film Music Art or Industry," Film Music Notes 11, no. 1
(Sept.-Oct. 1951): 5.
14. Christopher Palmer, "Aaron Copland as Film Composer," Crescendo International
14 (May 1976): 24.
15. Marlin Skiles, Music Scoring for TV and Motion Pictures (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.:
Tab, 1976), 41.
16. Hugo Friedhofer, quoted in Skiles, 80. Judith Tick echoes this point, writing that
"[m]any later film composers turned to this section of the ballet ["Street in a Frontier
Town"] as a way to write a Western sound," in her essay "The Music of Aaron Copland,"
in Judith Tick and Gail Levin, Aaron Copland's America: A Cultural Perspective (New
York: Watson-Guptill, 2000), 154-56.
17. William Kraft, foreword to the first edition, in Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected
Art, xvi-xvii.
18. Andre Previn, in Karlin, 123-24.
19. W. H. Mellers, "American Music (an English Perspective)," Kenyon Review 5, no. 3
(Summer 1943): 357-75. He writes: "the American idiom I would like to refer to is

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
demonstrated most remarkably in the music of Copland, though there are hints of it in
Harris and Blitzstein too; I refer to a feeling of vastness, enormous airiness and emptiness
of space which probably derives from America's physical immensity and which is com-
municated through the music partly by the dominance of fourths and natural sevenths in
the line which produce an effect at once aspiring and curiously hollow; partly by the ex-
treme transparancy of the diaphanous linear texture, with very little harmonic filling-out
and that mainly of a diatonic or modally altered and non-chromatic order; and partly by
the lucidity of the articulation and organization of brief phrases that do not themselves
grow, but tend to the angular, the jerky and spasmodic" (370-71).
20. See the section "Declamatory Style" in Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1953), 52-56.
21. Two helpful studies are William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1950), and Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). A basic definition of
the term can be found in M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1988).
22. Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer,
1980), 21. Michael Beckerman writes that "consonant lines describing a narrow range
over an extended drone have been associated with the purity and perfection of nature
since the late sixteenth century"; "DvoIrk's 'New World' Largo and The Song of Hi-
awatha," Nineteenth-Century Music 16, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 40.
23. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon welches die theoretische und praktis-
che Tonkunst, encyclopddisch bearbeitet, alle alten und neuen Kunstworter erkliirt, und die
alten und neuen Instrumente beschrieben, enthilt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuch-
handlung, 1964), 1142.
24. Skiles, 70. He later adds that "it is expected that wide, lush landscapes will be
accompanied by the large orchestral sound, imitating the scope of the photography as
much as possible. The curious fact remains that many times the composer will not exam-
ine the possibility of remoteness and lonesomeness in such scenes and write the music
accordingly. It might be wiser to use solo instruments, properly written for such as the
clarinet or trumpet-to give this sense of remoteness and thus enhance the photography
to a greater extent" (80).
25. Caryl Flinn defines and discusses the term "nostalgia" in Strains of Utopia: Gender,
Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), not-
ing that it is "derived from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, a mournful or
painful condition" (93).
26. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1984), 300.
27. After Bowles, Leon Kochnitzky, John Latouche, and Lawrence Morton continued
the column through Modern Music's final year in 1946. William Lichtenwagner noted
that Modern Music "did not limit itself to what Charles Seeger calls 'high art music' "and
that "musical moderism was pursued not alone in concert but also on records, radio, in
the theater .. ., films, music and book publishing, even in folk music"; Lichtenwagner,
"Foreword to an Afterword," in Modem Music: An Analytic Index (New York: AMS Press,
1976), vi. See also Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case
Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 229-30, nn. 69, 70.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
28. Modem Music 14, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1937): 82-86.

29. For more on the score for The Plow That Broke the Plains, see Neil Lerner, "The
Classical Documentary Score in American Films of Persuasion: Contexts and Case Stud-
ies, 1936-45," chaps. 2 and 3 (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1997). For more on The
River, see my "Damming Virgil Thomson's Score for The River," in Collecting Visible Evi-
dence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), 103-15.
30. The note from Copland to Thomson, part of the Thomson collection at the Yale
University Music Library, is undated but makes mention of Thomson's suite for The
River, which Thomson was working on in 1942; additionally, Thomson wrote a response
that was dated 23 July 1942. Copland to Thomson: "I heard The River yesterday over the
air. It's awful nice music-and a lesson in how to treat Americana." Thomson back to
Copland: "I am delighted you liked The River music. I too found it long. Twenty-eight
minutes is too much for what it is, so I have cut out about ten of those minutes and now
it is all tighter and less diffuse." Shortly after this exchange, Thomson did Copland's mu-
sical portrait (16 Oct. 1942), titled "Persistently Pastoral: Aaron Copland." Thomson
began doing musical portraits in the summer of 1928, probably borrowing the idea from
Gertrude Stein's quickly generated literary portraits. Thomson composed his portrait in
the presence of his subjects. The Copland portrait might be read as an indicator of
Thomson's growing animosity toward his more successful colleague.
31. Part of the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress, it is titled "Talk on Film
Music by A. C.," with the further information: "Class Thirteen/Department of Fine Arts
-Columbia University/The History of the Motion Picture/By/The Museum of Modem
Art Film Library/Museum of Modem Art/January 10, 1940/New York City." The fifty-
seven page document is in box 211, folder 28.
32. By 1940 other non-Hollywood U.S. composers besides Thomson and Gruenberg
had written film music (e.g., Marc Blitzstein). For more on The Fight for Life, see Robert
F Nisbett, "Pare Lorentz, Louis Gruenberg, and The Fight for Life: The Making of a Film
Score," Musical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 231-55.
33. Lorentz's production sheets, scene outlines, and music descriptions are part of the
Virgil Thomson collection at the Yale University Music Library (MS 29, box 51, folder
542).
34. Rick Altman warns against privileging the accompanying practices of the 1920s as
normative for the entire era of pre-synchronized sound in "The Silence of the Silents,"
Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 648-718.
35. Musical Presentation of Motion Pictures (New York: G. Schirmer, 1921), 91.
36. New York: G. Schirmer, 1924; reprint, New York: Aro Press, 1974.
37. In a perceptive early analysis of Thomson's score for Louisiana Story, Stemfeld
asserts that "[The River] influenced profoundly Aaron Copland's music for The City," al-
though he does not explain how. "Louisiana Story: A Review of Virgil Thomson's Score,"
Film Music Notes 8, no. 1 (Sept.-Oct. 1948): 5.
38. Virgil Thomson, American Music since 1910 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Win-
ston, 1970), 55. "A simplified harmonic palette was being experimented with every-
where, of course; and a music 'of the people,' clearly an ideal of the time, was one that
seemed far nobler then than the country-club-oriented so-called 'jazz' that many had dal-

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
lied with in the 1920s. And thus it happened that my vocabulary was, in the main, the
language Copland adopted and refined for his ballet Billy the Kid and for his first film [sic]
Of Mice and Men. ... But his break-through into successful ballet composition, into ex-
pressive film-scoring, and into, for both, the most distinguished populist music style yet
created in America did follow in every case very shortly after my experiments in those
directions. We were closely associated at the time and discussed these matters at length."
39. Howard Pollack, "The Dean of Gay American Composers," American Music 18,
no. 1 (Spring 2000): 44.
40. Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New
York: Henry Holt, 1999), 336-37.
41. For further information on The City, see Cochran, "Style, Structure, and Tonal Or-
ganization in the Early Film Scores of Aaron Copland," and Claudia Joan Widgery, "The
Kinetic and Temporal Interaction of Music and Film: Three Documentaries of 1930s
America" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1990).
42. Copland and Perlis, 291.
43. Robert A. Simon, "Mr. Copland Here, There, and at the Fair," New Yorker, June
1939,57-59.
44. Copland's use of ostinati to accompany traffic and the patterns of consumption in
the city prefigures Philip Glass's application of such figures in Koyaanisqatsi (1983), a film
with a similar rhetorical strategy and message. All three films recall the experiments in
machine music made by the futurists and others in the first part of the twentieth century,
where repetitive structures imitated factory sounds.
45. Ralph Steiner, A Point of View (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1978), 12. Steiner told Copland that "a composer should know about unity and progres-
sion, and ... these had to be important to film editing." H20 had been screened on the
ninth Copland-Sessions concert, 15 Mar. 1931. See Carol J. Oja, "The Copland-Sessions
Concerts and Their Reception in the Contemporary Press," Musical Quarterly 65, no. 2
(Apr. 1979): 229.
46. Steiner, 14.
47. The "paradise" envisioned in The City still has the imperfections of racial segrega-
tion and the secondary status of women.
48. Flinn, 22. See also Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1980).
49. Sally Bick discusses Of Mice and Men in "Composers on the Cultural Front: Aaron
Copland and Hanns Eisler in Hollywood" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001).
50. Norman Kay, "Aspects of Copland's Development," Tempo (Winter 1970-71): 17.
Copland often experimented with bitonal effects, as in the C major/C minor clash in
Vitebsk: Study on a Jewish Theme and the A major/E major simultaneity at the opening of
Appalachian Spring.
51. Bryan Gilliam, "A Viennese Opera Composer in Hollywood: Komgold's Double
Exile in America," in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany
to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 223-42.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
52. George Korgold recounts this story in his liner notes for Kings Row (VCD 47203,
1979). Kalinak proposes a model for the classical Hollywood film score in chapter 4 of
Settling the Score.
53. For instance, Brown, 97, and Kalinak, 101.
54. Fred Karlin recounts Hugo Friedhofer's story of how Jack Warner once assembled
the music staff, ran a couple of films with Steiner scores, and had it announced that
everything should be "as close to what Max is doing" as possible. Karlin, 304.
55. Bazelon, 23. The use of music to render uncritical viewing subjects is not limited to
the synchronized sound film. See Gillian B. Anderson, "The Presentation of Silent
Films, or, Music as Anaesthesia," Journal of Musicology 5, no. 2 (Apr. 1987): 257-95.
56. Gorbman, 5.
57. From letters quoted in William Rosar's liner notes to Broken Arrow (FMA-HF105,
1999).
58. From a 1974 interview conducted by Irene Kahn Atkins, edited by Tony Thomas
and Linda Danly, included in Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life, ed. Linda Danly
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 84.
59. For a history of the film's production and a discussion of the ways it reflected con-
temporary political concerns, see Martin A. Jackson, "The Uncertain Peace: The Best
Years of Our Lives (1946)," in American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood
Image, ed. John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson (New York: Continuum, 1988),
147-63.
60. Frederick Sterfeld, "Music and the Feature Films," Musical Quarterly 33, no. 4
(Oct. 1947): 515-32. He would make a similar point four years later: "Friedhofer's music
is often frankly reminiscent of Hindemith and Copland and steers clear of the emotion-
alism and lushness that fills lesser scores." "Copland as a Film Composer," Musical Quar-
terly 37 (1951): 163.
61. Rosar, Broken Arrow liner notes. In an e-mail to the author (7 July 2001), Rosar
wrote that Friedhofer mentioned his study of the Piano Sonata in a phone conversation.
62. Quoted in Danly, 14.
63. I am grateful to William Rosar, who interviewed Friedhofer several times, for shar-
ing this unpublished point with me. E-mail to author, 13 July 2001.
64. Burt, 161.
65. Danly, 13. The Copland sound does not seem to appear in Friedhofer's output until
The Best Years of Our Lives, from which time it occurs with some regularity. In his liner
notes for Broken Arrow, Rosar identifies several scores as having an "Americana" style:
Wild Harvest (1947), Three Came Home (1950), Broken Arrow (1950), Two Flags West
(1950), Above and Beyond (1952), Island in the Sky (1953), In Love and War (1958), and
One-EyedJacks (1960).
66. Pollack, Aaron Copland, 428.
67. Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman, Flashback: A Brief History of Film (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 180.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
68. The presence of "Among My Souvenirs" is discussed in Stemfeld, "Music and the
Feature Films," 523-24.
69. Fred's music-which we do not hear during his initial return home-bears a slight
resemblance to the melody from Gershwin's Piano Prelude no. 2. Friedhofer met Gersh-
win in 1931 (Danly, 48), and Porgy and Bess may have had a particularly strong influence
on him (Rosar E-mail, 7 July 2001). Kalinak notes that "the classical score frequently en-
coded otherness through the common denominator of jazz" (167). Krin Gabbard devel-
ops this idea throughout Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
70. Stemfeld, "Music and the Feature Films," 519.
71. Gregg Toland's outstanding cinematography captures the three men in the rearview
mirror as the cab drives forward, an arresting visual metaphor for these individuals de-
fined by their past actions in the war and unsure of their future.
72. Louis Applebaum, "Hugo Friedhofer's Score to The Best Years of Our Lives," Film
Music Notes 9, no. 5 (1947): 11-15, and Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art, 75.
73. "Copland's Score for 'The Red Pony' Hollywood's Best, but Still Hollywood," New
York Herald Tribune, 10 Apr. 1949.
74. Irwin Bazelon puts it more bluntly (although surely not referring to Moross's and
Bemstein's famous scores) in Knowing the Score: "In the forties and fifties, for example,
Aaron Copland's Western style lyrically and rhythmically influenced an entire genera-
tion of film and concert composers, many of whom wrote Coplandesque music without
bothering to sign his name to their scores" (91).
75. Thomson, 57.
76. Pollack, Aaron Copland, 388.
77. Terry Teachout writes of Appalachian Spring's presence at the Democratic celebra-
tion in "Fanfare for Aaron Copland," Commentary 103, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 56. Consider
as well W. G. Snuffy Walden's theme music for the television series The West Wing,
which adopts the Copland pastoral features of disjunct melody, brass and wind timbres,
and parallel diatonicism.
78. Alan Salomon, "Copland Tunes Rev Up TV Spots for Olds, Beef," Advertising Age
66, no. 11 (13 Mar. 1995): 12.
79. Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991), 65.
80. Salomon, 12.
81. "Temp track" refers to the temporary soundtrack put together to accompany the
early rough cut of a film, usually before the new music is composed; it gives the editor
and filmmakers an often prejudicing idea of how music will fit with the images. Com-
posers rarely have kind things to say about them. For a fuller discussion of temp tracks,
see Fred Karlin and Raybur Wright, On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring
(New York: Schirmer, 1990), 33-44.
82. Homer returned to that same motif, this time transposed and with slightly different
rhythms, in his score for The Perfect Storm (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 2000). Stuart
Klawans wondered if Homer "was taught from Copland for Dummies" in his review of
The Perfect Storm ("The Flounder," Nation 271, no. 4 [July 24/31, 2000]: 43).

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
83. Mellers, "American Music," 370.
84. For further information on the numerous composers who worked on the series, see
Fred Steiner, "Keeping Score of the Scores: Music for Star Trek," Quarterly Journal of the
Library of Congress 40, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 5-15, and Jeff Bond, The Music of Star Trek
(Los Angeles: Lone Eagle, 1999). David Rose's theme for the television series Little
House on the Prairie (1974) is another example of the wide-open pastoral space being
accompanied by successive rising fourths. I am grateful to Nancy and Charles Youmans
for pointing me to that example.
85. Kalinak, 110, and 223 n. 58.
86. Jon Burlingame, TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes from "Dragnet" to
"Friends" (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 116. Discovering some of the intent behind the
music may explain something about the character of Captain Kirk.
87. Theodor W. Adoro, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15.
88. Copland admired Mahler's music, as evidenced by a letter in defense of Mahler in

the New York Times, 5 Apr. 1925. Pollack includes "at least portions of the First" Sym-
phony among the Mahler works recommended by Copland (63).
89. Adomo, 4.
90. See Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting,
1825-1875, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
91. Liner notes to He Got Game titled "Why Aaron Copland?" (Sony Classical, SK
60593, 1998). Victoria E. Johnson identifies Coplandesque qualities in parts of Bill Lee's
score for Do the Right Thing (1989), which she connects to "such value-laden symbols as
heritage, neighborhood, and community" (22), in "Polyphony and Cultural Expression:
Interpreting Musical Traditions in Do the Right Thing," Film Quarterly 47, no. 2 (Winter
1993-94): 18-29.
92. The Copland pastoral idiom almost always seems to underscore exterior images,
although Thomas Newman makes effective use of pedal tones and disjunct melodies in
several interior scenes in his score for The Shawshank Redemption (dir. Frank Darabont,
1994).
93. "Beatty, Lee, and Their Worlds of Blackness," Los Angeles Times, 13 June 1998.
Crouch's observation that rap has become an important musical code in cinematic repre-
sentations of the potentially dangerous urban space reminds us how those codes have
shifted since Copland scored The City, when repetitive dissonances were sufficient.
(Starting in the 1950s, jazz and rock performed this function, and it was taken over by
rap starting in the 1980s.)
94. Krin Gabbard addresses many of these same issues in much greater depth in "Race
and Reappropriation: Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland," American Music 18, no. 4 (Win-
ter 2000): 370-90. Gabbard does not find much irony in Lee's use of Copland (381). For
an extended discussion of how Lee's earlier film Do The Right Thing can illuminate our
understanding of reason, Allan Bloom's conservativism, racial politics, and music's role
on all of it, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in
Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), chap. 4.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00
95. I am grateful to Robert Walser for pointing out the Rambo III example. Richard
Dyer discusses the white muscle hero and Rambo's "American" qualities in White (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. pp. 145-83.
96. The 1945 Office of War Information film The Cummington Story shows the process
of teaching democracy and capitalism to eastern European refugees, underscored with
Copland's music; at the point they appear to have learned these lessons, they return to
Europe and, presumably, the countries that would soon become Soviet satellite countries.
See Lerner, "The Classical Documentary Score," chap. 5.
97. Copland, Music and Imagination, 109-10.

128.227.24.141 on Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:55:12 +00:00

Lerner CoplandsMusicWide 2001

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Lerner CoplandsMusicWide 2001

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Copland's Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood

Author(s): Neil Lerner

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600994

This content downloaded from

Copland's Music of Wide Open

A fifty-two-year-old record fell in 2001 when John Corigliano received a

The Musical Quarterly 85(3), Fall 2001, pp. 477-515

in the midst of his famous "tendency toward an imposed simplicity."4

During the mid-30s I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the

Copland later regretted using the term "imposed simplicity" because it

This content downloaded from

The stylistic and idiomatic devices of Copland, Friedhofer, Antheil and

It is difficult to understand why Copland's early American style of music,

This content downloaded from

Date(s) of Later autono

Nominated for Best

The North Star Feb.-Sept. 1943

The Cummington 21 June-24 Copland Office of War Helen Gray

The Red Pony 29 Jan.-26 Copland, Republic Pictures Lewis Milest

This content downloaded from

A perfect example of scenic or pastoral descriptive music is the opening of

[Some Hollywood composers] adopted the styles of twentieth-century

Copland's influence on film music is immeasurable. His ballets Appala-

Since Copland's music is characterized by stylistic contrasts and shifts in

Virgil and Virgil Thomson: Copland's Pastoral Models

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

inflected works (especially Appalachian Spring) helped to establish certain

This content downloaded from

Table 2. "Mood Categories and Associated Instruments."

Drama Low strings

Mystery Low flute

Narrative background Combined strings and woodwind (middle register)

This content downloaded from

Copland's remarks from a 1940 lecture on film music that he gave in

Copland identified the essence of Thomson's innovations: the "thin" or-

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Happiness 202 '%??~ ~ ~ ~ ~ '

Copyright, 1899, by G. Schirmer, Inc.

This content downloaded from

r:p####CCf't - ?r trf rr-rr r' viola, cello

Narrator: "The grass lands..."

Pollack has detailed how, in the summer of 1937, Co

This content downloaded from

No. 4. Gyp's Song

QUEENIE: I don't think that plane is ever coming back. I just f

i## l - :1- , v ir: 1- r L I wish I had a car and

justcould ve way, I sh weren'tso far and din't have

Example 3. Aaron Copland, "Gyp's Song" from Th

This content downloaded from

8 trumpets and horn

bassoon, celli, basses

Example 4. Aaron Copland,

spaces (see Ex. 4). As

This content downloaded from

Shaking Off the Aristocracy: Copland's Pastoral

-Aaron Copland, "Second Thoughts on Hollywood," Modern Music

This content downloaded from

i#F ..-f f f tt rffr F f

and further measures have the tertial relations of G major

This content downloaded from

Mr. Morgan:"All right, operator, let's start."