Vivian Perlis (1928–2019)

CDCOP | World Premiere 1954 New York City Opera | Derivative Works |

America of the 1950s was a very different place than that of the 1940s. Gone were the New Deal politics of Franklin Roosevelt and the shared patriotism of the World War II years. Instead, the United States grappled with its new role as a world superpower grounded in a mighty military-industrial complex. The Soviet Union, which stood as an ally in the fight against Nazi oppression, was now enemy number one, and communism became the maligned philosophy against which America must protect in a Cold War that would last for decades to come.

Even Aaron Copland’s music was changing. His Piano Quartet (1950), Orchestral Variations (1957) and Piano Fantasy (1957) are works demonstrating the composer’s experiments with serial and abstract musical techniques. Some scholars have argued this shift was the composer’s way of distancing himself from his association with folk-like themes and audience accessibility, which in elite circles was associated with the goals of communist Socialist Realism.

Yet Copland never really stopped composing in his Americana style. In 1952, he received a commission from the NBC Television Opera Workshop. Inspired by stories of Southern sharecroppers and photographs of rural Americans in their everyday settings, he conceived an opera that gazes upon one 1930s midwestern farm family and the two strangers who change their lives. During the course of the story, daughter Laurie falls in love with one of the outsiders on her graduation night. Together they dream of eloping. But in the end, the strangers go on their way, and Laurie leaves the farm, looking for a different life all on her own. Copland’s music is intimate, almost fragile in places, and in some ways, the production feels more like a theatrical drama with singing than a historical opera. NBC canceled the production. No explanation was given, but it may have had to do with the perception of Copland’s politics.

Since 1949, the composer had been included on intelligence lists of persons with communist connections or sympathies. In 1953, while composing The Tender Land, he was called before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations to explain his past political associations and to defend his loyalty to the United States. That same year, a planned performance of Lincoln Portrait at the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower was cancelled. Copland, even though he had solidly gained a reputation as the undisputed leader of American art music, surely was taken aback.

In this light, it seems as if Copland and his librettist Erik Johns (Copland’s one-time partner who wrote under the name Horace Everett) purposefully use The Tender Land’s simple story and graceful musical lines to highlight a distance between the ugliness of Washington politics and the potential quiet beauty, introspection, and struggle of everyday Americans going about their lives.

When The Tender Land finally received its premiere by the New York City Opera in 1954, the production was not a critical success. The built-in intimacy, intended for television cameras that would beam the show directly into America’s living rooms, did not translate well onto a vast stage, nor did it conform to the expectations of what an opera should be. While Appalachian Spring had ushered in a new kind of American ballet, it seems that New York audiences were not yet ready for a new kind of American opera. Some attendees, however, were profoundly affected. Several female composers in the audience connected with the character of Laurie and her effort to reject a pre-determined path.

Further, some scholars have noted a connection to those in the gay community, citing the need to leave home in order to find one’s own true self. (hence the focus on his art, Martha Graham, Halston and the entire Americana connection of the seventies leading up to Madonna as Madam X) Copland revised the opera in 1955 and later arranged an orchestral suite of music from the show, but it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the opera gained a new understanding and popularity on stage, suggesting that perhaps it was simply ahead of its time. In 1996, Murry Sidlin arranged the suite for soprano, tenor, and the same thirteen instruments that Copland used in his original Appalachian Spring, bringing an intimacy to the orchestration that matches the aesthetic of the opera and providing a nod back to Copland’s compositional heyday. --taken from Dr. K. Dawn Grapes program notes.

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Copyright © – Koch International Corp.
Phonographic Copyright ℗ – Koch International Corp.
Recorded At – Phoenix Symphony Hall
Conductor – James Sedares
Cover – Merrill Mahaffey
Design – Communication House, NYC
Engineer [Assistant] – Jeffrey Behr, Shari Christie
Engineer [Associate] – Andy R. Seagle
Orchestra – The Phoenix Symphony
Producer, Engineer – Michael Fine… (more)

The concluding volume of what is in effect Copland's autobiography, with commentary by Perlis, who teaches at the Yale School of Music, and many Copland friends and admirers, brings the life of America's oldest living composer up to date. Beginning in mid-WW II with the excitement over Appalachian Spring , shortly followed by the Third Symphony, we see Copland in the postwar years gradually becoming less productive, turning to conducting, and finally moving into a dignified retirement replete with honors and celebrations. This is more a tribute than a revealing portrait, though the details of the composer's meticulously recorded life, and his thoughts about his music, will be invaluable to scholars. Perhaps there is not much to disclose: Copland, like his music, seems highly intelligent, well organized, full of vitality with a dash of melancholy--very much the artist as businessman, teacher, rather than as the anguished, solitary soul of popular fiction. He was the foremost world ambassador for American serious music when it very much needed one, and at least two generations of composers owe him a tremendous debt.

Hailed as important, entertaining, and revealing, Copland: Since 1943 is composer Aaron Copland's irresistible account of the latter half of his career--a career that brought us such pioneering works as Appalachian Spring and Lincoln Portrait, the movie scores for Of Mice and Men and Our Town, and numerous other orchestral and chamber works. It tells the story of how a self-described "brash young man from Brooklyn" went on to become one of the founding fathers of "serious" American music. Featuring cameos by luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, Benny Goodman, and other peers of Aaron Copland during this explosively creative period, Copland: Since 1943 is an invaluable memoir that charts the crescendo of one of the most accomplished careers in the modern canon.… (more)

One of America's greatest composers, Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid) is famous for movie scores and numerous orchestral and chamber works. Copland: 1900-1942 takes the reader from his childhood through his early championship of American music to his arrival at Tanglewood.

"A valuable, readable, endearing record of his achievement." --The New York Times

"Scholars and lay readers alike will find this an indispensable source of Copland lore." -Library Journal

Aaron Copland is one of America's most beloved musical pioneers, famous for Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Lincoln Portrait, as well as the movie scores for "Our Town" and "Of Mice and Men," and numerous orchestral and chamber works. This candid, colorful memoir begins with Copland's Brooklyn childhood and takes us through his years in Paris, the creation of his early works, and his arrival at Tanglewood. Rich with remembrances from Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, and Nadia Boulanger, as well as a trove of letters, photographs, and scores from Copland's collection, this is one of our most vivid musical autobiographies, and an enduring record of an American maestro's explosively creative coming of age.… (more)