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Statements and Connotations: Copland the Symphonist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Extract

Two fanfares, one from the Third Symphony and the other from Connotations, the latter not obviously for the Common Man, encapsulate the paradoxes – if not contradictions – of Aaron Copland's symphonism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

1 (At least, I suppose that's what the music represents here: but it was irreversibly skewed for me but its use as title-musi c for a mid–1960s TV nature series about the Galapagos Islands, so I'm unable to hear those opening fanfares without revisiting a splendid image of iguanas and sea-lions disporting themselves on sea-wet rocks above surging breakers.)

2 The movement, as muc h as the Fanfare, has suffered many subsequent imitations, especially in the cinema. Not all of these (not, for example, the opening sequence of John Newton Howard's music for Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp) need be ashamed of exploiting the paternity.

3 On Crohg, its conception,.quarryings and vicissitudes, see Knussen, Oliver, ‘In Search of Grohg’, in Tempo 189, pp.23 Google Scholar.

4 Quoted in Berger, Arthur, Aaron Copland (New York: OUP, 1953), p.9 Google Scholar.

5 The New Music, 1900–1960 (London: Macdonald, 1968), p.40 Google Scholar.

6 With somewhat less obvious symmetry, Samuel Barber's First Symphony (another example of American Sibelianism), clearly has Copland's Ode as model.

7 The way Copland told it afterwards: ‘She said, “Mr. Copland…’ Pause. “Mr. Copland…” Another pause. And that was it’

8 According to his editor, ‘… quasi-mystical illumination, a sudden perception of that deeper pattern, order and unity, which gives meaning to external forms’ – Gardner, W. H., The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p.xxi Google Scholar.