Day at Night: Aaron Copland, composer

James Day public television pioneer and chairman of the CUNY TV Advisory Board passed away in April 2008 his legacy includes the series day at night which aired for 130 episodes beginning in 1973 the program features interviews with many of the great thinkers and achievers of the 20th century these 30-year old programs have been restored the interviews remain fresh and relevant today exploring issues that are still important to society showing them again as CUNY TVs tribute to Jim and his contributions to public television when he was barely 15 years old and still a high school student in his native Brooklyn Aaron Copland declared his intention of becoming a composer the declaration stuck he not only became a composer he became one of the most distinguished composers this country has produced most will associate his name with a period when he drew heavily upon American folkloric themes for such familiar pieces as Billy the Kid rodeo and Appalachians spring the last of which incidentally won him a Pulitzer Prize but Aaron Copland's work is not stuck in a single moment of time it reflects the changes in the world and in the man over his more than 70 years though he has authored two books and has done some teaching his occupation has been and remains a creator of music mr. Kirkland in reading an autobiographical essay by you I was just trying to recall something you said about quotations you updated that autobiographical essay and pointed out that once something gets between quotation marks somehow it's forever the truth even though circumstances changed I'm going to use some quotations so if I go far back why I hope you'll bring them up today I'm thinking for example of something you wrote and I don't even recall when now in saying that the aims of a composer is not necessary to make beautiful sounds like Chopin and Mozart much as one would like to do that because one doesn't write the music of one's choice but of necessity what is the necessity what is that necessity the composer must serve well one starts after all with themes or rhythms or harmonies that occur to you that's that's the given part you can't just start writing music out of nowhere made up of nothing it has to take a musical form and it generally takes that form by ideas musical ideas which occur to you then after you begin working with them you begin to have a sense of what the emotional background of that particular theme or rhythm or harmony may be some seem rather grandiose and powerful others seem delicate and sensitive others seem lively and sprightly so that that's the given pod you can't take a sprightly theme and turn it into something else without falsifying it of course you can develop it and find other elements in it so that I would say pieces begin with that kind of material which is a purely musical material but which to the composer has an emotional significance what about the language in which you write it you I understand from this quotation that you would not write it then they Lang with a musical language of the 19th or the 18th or the 17th century you've got to write it in the language of your own time I would think so yes after all that's the language which is natural to you why should I confine myself to the musical vocabulary of the 18th century when vogner and many other composers have increased our vocabulary and nowadays we use a vocabulary which is influenced by Sharon Berg and Stravinsky and more recent composers than that don't most of us listen with sort of what I might think of as 19th century ears unfortunately they do many people the composer is not writing for that then they are not no that's part of the difficulty of the contemporary composer to get the audience's to sort of you know realize what century they're living in and the Lynne there is in a way that would be characteristic people who live today they can hope to have us write our music in the language of the past although a great deal of the serious music they hear was written in the past why can't you write in the language of the past it wouldn't be natural why should we limit ourselves we have rhythms that Chopin never thought of we have harmonies that it's a wider range it's a wider range we have a more complex language in one way a more dissonant language which can express harsh feelings in a more effective way I think the language of music is really no advanced with the times and our listeners have to lend there is in that way I want to ask you more about that later but I want to turn time back for a moment because I suppose you're not much thought of today as a rebel in music but you were when you were young in fact you were a rebel when you came off the streets of Brooklyn what you referred to as one of the driest streets in Brooklyn and as I recall you said something about the remarkable thing was that any music ever came out of that particular Street it's true didn't you came from a musical family though no I wouldn't say that I came from a musical family my sister played the piano and my brother played the violin that means they were sufficiently musical to do that but there are no composers or poets or dramatist that I know about in my family background and it was a very large fan so that I felt a little bit like a freak when I decided I wanted to devote my life to the writing of serious or music you know what prompted those thoughts oh no not at all it was just a natural inclination I have no idea why it should have happened to me but it did you took piano lessons from your elder sister did you in the beginning yeah and she said to me well I've taught you everything I know you've got to get a real piano teacher now where'd you go I went to a local man in who taught in Brooklyn he was a big shot because his studio really was in New York but he only came to Brooklyn one day a week that night he was an important guy uh-huh did he in fact teach you now looking back did he teach you well yes he did his name was Leopold Wilson and he had a studio on Avenue I remember and he was a good musician mm-hmm then what went beyond that well then I started to get interested in composition see I started composing short little piano pieces and then gradually to realize that I needed a harmony teacher who would tell me about the secrets of harmony and I found a teacher through mr. Wolfson who recommended man called Reuben Goldbach who was a teacher who lived in New York and whose uncle had been a famous composer in Austria and Hungary his name was called gold mark and he's written a famous opera which is occasionally still done called the Queen of Sheba and he was a good good man but very academic from my standpoint he knew about the rules of harmony but if I try to put anything over on him in the way of more modern harmonies that weren't in the books yet why he sort of reacted badly was that just the rebelliousness of youth that prompted you to break out of the conventional pattern no it wasn't rebellious this of you I got to know music which was in an advance did you see at that time the name would have been Debussy and Ravel and he didn't go that far he was dated from late 19th century and still had the habits of the late 19th century but was patient enough with you I suppose yes he but he insisted on my doing the exercises I was supposed to see I could do what I liked on the side but for him I had to obey the rules you didn't you after that went to Europe did you know yes I did and my interest in diversity in rival of course made me want to go to the country they came from that way you chose France that's partly why as a natural sympathy for French culture also you see the Germans were the villains toward the end of the teens that is 1918 otherwise that might have been a logical place to go as it was for the generation before mine everybody went to Leipzig in Berlin to to study music but my generation connected the more contemporary movement in music with France and Stravinsky was there and a lot of for some reason rather after the first world war a lot of people gathered into Paris so that it was an enormous ly lively a ten-year period as you know from the 20s to the 30s up to that point you hadn't had too much association with other people interested in composing I suppose I'd you know I didn't I had one or two friends of fellow students with mr. Gould mock but otherwise I was rather on my own in Brooklyn now one association named Aaron Copland so much with music that you're going to Paris the study seems not at all unusual but to a boy off the streets of Brooklyn so to speak without overdramatizing it it must have been quite an experience to go to to Paris alone to Europe well it was it was I I really got the courage to go partly because when I was thinking about it I read about the foundation of a summer music school for Americans which was being founded in the palace of Fontainebleau and I thought gee that's a good way of you know finding my way around by going to a place that's going to be full of American students and yet in so characteristic a place is the palace of fauna blow just imagine what it was like to go from Brooklyn straight to the palaces that's cultural shock that sure was a culture shock you studied there for a brief time but it was another teacher there that I guess really was the important influence in those days was it not yes it was on Jay definitely yes and you know it took a certain amount of courage when I first heard about other students enthusing about Miss Boulanger I thought well you know a lady nothing she teaches harmony and counterpoint but she wouldn't of course know about composition so it took a certain amount of cogitating and hesitation about the idea of studying composition with a woman now all the women's live people are going to be shocked by that but actually fifty years ago and that's what we're talking about there had not been any really outstanding women composers no women Beethoven's and boss for some very extraordinary reason which nobody seems to understand and which I feel pretty sure is going to change or if it hasn't already changed and so she really had to be very what was she well she had an extraordinary combination of talents really she was a very warm and human personality there's nothing particularly teachers about her and she was she was living in the midst of French culture not just musical culture but culture and she knew in the musical field all the bright young men including Ravel and Roussel and a dozen other French composers at that time who all seem to be doing the new thing in music so she was a kind of a conduit to what was going on as the latest thing in music and she I remember she used to have Wednesday afternoon teas when you might find anybody there with their latest score and I remember meeting Ravel there was I even met Sam songs there now Sam songs was born in 1834 have you ever shaken hands with a man who was bored of 1834 I did he I'm sorry to say he died two months later but kind of plugged into a whole history then into a culture you were in touch with the liveliest movement in music of the period now that's a terrific thing for a young composer of 21 to get in touch with because it just live-ins your whole spirit was that carried on when you came back to New York after three years it was in a different way when I came back after having been in in Paris for three years I felt it was a lot to do in relation to the introducing of this newer music to the American musical Public Stravinsky in the early 20s was considered to be quite a wild man the Sacre du Printemps all of rhythms that scared everybody so that it was a question of introducing that newer kind of music making it feel normal to listen to and also another very preoccupying thing in my mind was where were my fellow American composers with sympathies over the same as mine with whom I could get together so we could sort of push our way into the conventional musical life you didn't get get that you did get together with some of them to the league of composers didn't you and yes the league ultimately were they with the Copeland sessions performances yes that's true we found the league had been established in 1920 two or three I guess 23 while I was still in Paris so by the time I got back that was a big help of course but gradually we just wanted to have our own society and with Roger sessions I started these series called the Copeland sessions concerts it only lasted three years but we did a certain amount of work that I think was valuable what did you switch from that to the use of the Jazz 80 and then well it was the example of France and part I think we were very aware of the fact that the music in France being written at that time not only new but it was French in character very different from Brahms and rhaegar of a different quality a different sensitivity a different feel to it and it was French because it reflected French characteristics a certain refinement a certain sensitivity and we thought in order to write our own kind of serious American music we had to reflect American characteristics so what's more American than jazz it was a it was a feeling that through American rhythms of popular music we could immediately have the advantage of using an idiom it would seem natural to us and perhaps sympathetic to our means of reaching this audience for American composers then in a sense yes exactly and creating our music of our own recognizably our own you see but you didn't stay with that very long you but to do to compensation I would say that I stayed with it in the sense that any music I might have written in the years after might reflect jazz elements and not so obviously as I used them in my piano concerto of 1927 or in my music for the theater of 1925 the influence is still there the influence of wits in the blood yes I couldn't think rhythms without thinking in terms of what jazz has added to our musical language at some point you became concerned about the relationship between the composer and the audience and I understand that to mean that the audiences were not anxious to hear contemporary composers weren't anxious to hear the music and I suspect it must be terribly frustrating for a composer not to be published not to be performed not to hear his own music performed and much less to have audiences clamoring to hear it's not only frustrating it's an impossible situation to find yourself in so that I felt it was very natural that one would want to sort of do what one could to make contact with an audience obviously if you're invited to write a score for a ballet with an American subject you'd start thinking about American folk tunes of one kind or another who were a cowboy subject you'd look up some cowboy tunes hence Billy the Kid and Rodale I think that would explain those pieces yes and in a similar way the working with such theatrical media as ballet would make me want to occasionally write a piece based on American materials which by definition would have a broader audience I mean a composer when he writes in music has a pretty good sense of who this is going to appeal to if you write a very severe dissonant piece for piano that lasts a half an hour you know that by definition you're limiting the size of your audience on the other hand if you have it in you to write such a piece you wouldn't dream of preventing yourself from doing so just because the audience is smaller so that the composer generally knows the approximate kind of audience his music might might appeal to he's not fully himself and to deny yourself the pleasure either of writing for a very broader audience or for a limited audience seems to me to be foolish you have to be realistic about it I suppose in some cases your writing not for today's audience but for tomorrow's audience and the sense well in every case you hope you're writing for tomorrow yes of course of course that's right but when so many stories are told of the poor reception pieces had in their own time and pieces that we not only accept but of course love now it's almost as though one has to write for the future is is what is contemporary music reflective of today's environment or is it kind of predictive of tomorrow's it that would be a hard question to answer both I would say and it's difficult for us to decide now what 25 or 50 years from now is going to remain and be there just as strongly in the minds of those listeners at that time is it maybe in our own minds there's a certain gamble to being a creative artist nobody can guarantee you that in a hundred years you're going to be remembered I don't care how enthusiastic your present-day criticisms must be so that in the end the creator must have a sense inside himself that what he is doing is of real importance and therefore will have lasting value but no one can guarantee it it's a gamble but it's important it's rare the creator is very important I think of this this question about to the future or the present when I hear contemporary music performed and I am told that if you hear it enough you come to accept and theory of it is the theory of course now and I wonder well since it seems not to be in tune with my own perceptions at the moment it's going to be in tune with someone else's perceptions twenty-five years from now or 50 years from now therefore we must be moving in a direction where that kind of thing is going to have to be a natural part of our lives in our environment and since it's staccato since it's dissonant in many cases angular in some cases it seems almost immediate almost to me to be it's you put it rather ungrateful I guess and I I do I'm doing this obviously with the intention of provoking a thought yes because I am curious to know what it will take to to bring about a heightened appreciation of contemporary music new music well one thing it will take is familiarity you must be able to hear these things more than once and more than ten times would even be better if you lend yourself what seems like a rhythm now ten years from now would seem like an exciting one perhaps I'm it might remain of course but things tend to when they become familiar to change their character in our minds the proof of it is course the rhythms of Stravinsky which seems so unconventional at the time that he first wrote them in the 1918 period and which seemed almost impossible for musicians professor professional musicians to play nowadays you can hear a high school orchestra almost not every high school but the best of the high school orchestras are able to handle rhythms that the New York Philharmonic couldn't handle in 1918 with any ease that means the skills of the musicians are improving constantly I mean the rhythm of five eighths or seven eighths used to be a drama they were released it's like two quarters and three quarters and fork was but no one had really seen a combination of quick moving music which changed the rhythms in every measure that was really going too far they said at the time now everybody can do it because they've become familiar they've done it enough time so that it's the same as 2/4 in 3/4 this new music does offer a real challenge that the performer it doesn't they look strained frequently as they perform it it must take a intense concentration - it does but that was true of every period I'm sure the first performers of Ogden's operas thought it looked very straight and that's a satisfaction of the performer I suppose they had that kind of challenge thrown at him isn't it if he's a if he's a smart cookie yes if he's an old-fashioned stick in the mud you'll just resent it but the brighter boys and girls they they like to be challenged and it's a triumphed in their own minds when they succeed in mastering a new idiom with the specific new musical problems it's interesting that while we're developing this new highly challenging idiom which does require attention concentration and a real depth of interest we've also developed electronic mechanisms to feed music into our ears 24 hours a day and we're primitive man / had to listen to stay alive modern man almost has to non listen stop listen unless you don't know what but the word is this must affect the performance of music if we are being conditioned not to give our full attention it wouldn't yes I regret that very much I wish that when people are not in a mood to listen to music that they would turn the Don thing off because that kind of casual bathing in musical sounds without listening to it that's not at all the composer's idea if you want to really listen to what he has to say listen otherwise forget it don't just let it on there is a like wallpaper on a wall that just is around you because it makes a kind of pleasant sound when of the you did at one point in your life right functional music what am i right functional music you're still right function right what what is functional music is distinguished when the sort of thing we've been talking about well if you are a movie producer and director and you make a movie you have to have music in certain parts of the film in order to help your film that's just a convention though I suppose it is a convention but sometimes it really is necessary and it can heighten the emotional feeling of a particular film scene that would be functional music in the sense that the music is is serving a specific function to help the effectiveness of a different art in the same way I suppose a ballet score is functional music or any dramatic score that accompanies a spoken play at that time is that music is not a default on this concert hall and now for for college so it serves that function in each case and here I suppose the challenge of the composer is somewhat different in that he has to serve the function in addition to serving his own creative impulses that's true but it's a special satisfaction actually you see I've written the music for five or six films and I've had the experience of seeing a film a film scene played without any musical accompaniment and then imagining what kind of news heighten the effectiveness of that film make it seem more tender more touching more more exciting more frightening and I've written such music and then heard it put to the film for the first time and that's really quite an experience because it does do things to a film scene sometimes it might be over obvious if my getting away by being either too loud or or in some way a jaw with the scene you're looking at but you can make a sick boy seem much sicker and you can mote with them much more tenderly if there's music going on you might not be consciously aware of the fact that the music is going on but it might play on your emotions so much better if you're not aware I said so much the better if your musical you'll hear it I mean if you tend to listen to music you will you always whether they want to incite mr. Koopman I said earlier that every composer wants to be remembered a hundred years from now and I suppose any composer like yourself would wish to be remembered for everything he has done what would you most like to be remembered for among the works that you have done well I've been asked that question before I see you much like I have the answer already it's like asking a mother which is her favorite child you know you like one for one reason perhaps because nobody else seems to like it you like another because everybody seems to like it why shouldn't you join in you know you you like one piece because it took so much labor you worked so hard on it over such a long time and it took seems such a difficult birth you might say on the other hand some things came so easily that you feel happy about the fact that they came that easily so you have different reasons for liking different pieces thank you very much

Channel: CUNY TV

Views: 50,259

Keywords: day at night, cuny tv, aaron copland

Id: JnWNjd00_ek

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2011