When Aaron Copland sat down to write the ballet \u201cAppalachian Spring\u201d in 1944, he was already well on his way to creating music that most of us would recognize as iconic examples of an \u201cAmerican Sound.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had started his career as a composer with pieces that traded in jagged musical lines. He admired Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Milhaud, but he also borrowed from that wellspring of uniquely American music, jazz. Those pieces earned the admiration of academics, but they didn\u2019t pay the bills during the Depression-era 1930s.<\/p>\n
Looking for something that would resonate with audiences, he found ways to anchor his music that reached out instead of pushing people away. After a visit south of the border, he wrote El Salon Mexico in 1935, a fantasy that quoted liberally from Mexican dancehall tunes. Soon came the ballets \u201cBilly the Kid\u201d and \u201cRodeo,\u201d which riffed on familiar cowboy songs, tweaking the tunes to modernize them, and framed them in open harmonies and snappy rhythms.<\/p>\n
But \u201cAppalachian Spring\u201d would be different. Playing with the intervals and harmonies of the Shaker hymn \u201cSimple Gifts,\u201d Copland opened the work by creating a unique chord, two simple triads superimposed. Building up from the bottom, it\u2019s A, C-sharp, E (which anyone who\u2019s played guitar will recognize as an A-major chord), over which he suspends a B, then an E, and finally a G-sharp.<\/p>\n
Because of how that chord builds so slowly, each additional note rings against what we already have heard. It\u2019s dissonant, but our ears welcome it, like jazz, because it\u2019s unfolding so logically. What we hear is vastly more complex than how it looks on paper. This is why the \u201cAmerican sound,\u201d more than just cowboy songs and Shaker tunes, uses simple musical ideas and opens them up to create a spaciousness that lets us absorb it as something at once familiar and exciting.<\/p>\n
Here in Aspen we have heard the music of contemporaries who shared Copland\u2019s American sensibilities as the music festival celebrates the theme \u201cBeing American.\u201d<\/a> Among them were Gershwin\u2019s Concerto in F, Samuel Barber\u2019s concertos for violin, cello and piano, and Leonard Bernstein\u2019s \u201cWest Side Story.\u201d<\/a> They all feel inherently American.<\/p>\n You can also hear echoes of Copland\u2019s open, brash style in classic film scores for westerns including \u201cRed River\u201d (Dmitri Tiompkin), \u201cThe Magnificent Seven\u201d (Elmer Bernstein) and a long list of Italian made \u201cSpaghetti westerns\u201d scored by Ennio Morricone, who showed that this \u201cAmerican sound\u201d could travel. It\u2019s easy to hear Copland\u2019s influence in John Williams\u2019 music, as in scores for the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise, \u201cJaws,\u201d \u201cRaiders of the Lost Ark\u201d and \u201cSuperman.\u201d<\/p>\n But it would be a mistake to limit the \u201cAmerican sound\u201d to this.<\/p>\n For one thing, minimalism. Its gradually expanding forms and reliance (at least at first) on consonance rather than harsh dissonances fit right into the same origins. This form of music from American composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams in the 1970s and 1980s could join jazz and Copland\u2019s style as distinctly American. (Of those three, Adams, who once called himself \u201can American vernacular composer,\u201d has strayed the furthest beyond those original confines.)<\/p>\n Even more significantly, music from new composers over the past several decades has come from those who, unlike the Eastern Jewish immigrants Copland and Gershwin, openly embrace their cultural origins. Vijay Ayer\u2019s jazz and Indian backgrounds fused in \u201cRadhe, Radhe: Rites of Holi,\u201d heard July 27, and you could hear Vivian Fung\u2019s Chinese and Southeast Asian history in a new quartet played by the American String Quartet on July 24<\/a>. Bassist and composer Edgar Meyer\u2019s \u201cNew Piece for Orchestra\u201d christened the music tent for the summer June 28 with jazz and bluegrass roots showing through his classical style.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to pinpoint just what it is about this music that feels American. Maybe it\u2019s the freedom and swing of jazz. Maybe it\u2019s an American directness, or a reflection of how un-self-conscious we can be about our origins when we are at our best. But we can hear it, clearly.<\/p>\n For further examples, tune your ears for the Aspen Philharmonic\u2019s Aug. 7 concert when Nicola Benedetti plays jazz great Wynton Marsalis\u2019 violin concerto on a program that includes Copland\u2019s majestic Symphony No. 3. In \u201cOf Love and Longing,\u201d to be heard Aug. 10 on guitarist Sharon Isbin\u2019s recital with soprano Jessica Rivera, composer Richard Danielpour channels his Persian heritage in setting the words of the poet Rumi to music of erotic exoticism.<\/p>\n Bringing things full circle on Aug. 13, violinist Robert McDuffie, a longtime champion of American music, plays John Corigliano\u2019s Violin Sonata. This early work by the son of a New York Philharmonic concertmaster has overtones of Copland \u2014 whose original version of \u201cAppalachian Spring\u201d is on the same program. The links continue.<\/p>\n Harvey Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival for 24 years.<\/p>\n