A concert hall full of students gazed up at the maestro with movie-star charm who addressed them from the stage on a February day in 1964. The New York Philharmonic players on stage put away their music for Gunther Schuller's Journey into Jazz (1962) as Leonard Bernstein began to introduce the next piece. He had said earlier that Schuller's mission was to combine the two, usually separate traditions of jazz and symphonic music.
Schuller's compositional experiments may be the newest, Bernstein now told his audience, but they were by no means the first. "Way back in the prehistoric days of 1926," he began with a twinkle in his voice, Aaron Copland, now a familiar figure in American music, was "a young pioneer" who experimented with jazz in the concert hall and "turned out some pretty marvelous pieces" like the Piano Concerto they were about to hear—played by Copland himself.
But Bernstein had a word of caution. "I want you to realize that the kind of jazz you'll be hearing is from another time," he said. "It's jazz of the Twenties, full of Charleston rhythms and boop-boop-ba-doops, and a certain Gershwin-like sentimentality. And the wonderful thing is, that old as it is, it still sounds as fresh and charming and full of zip as it did in 1927!"
Then the Piano Concerto's lanky 63-year old composer, Aaron Copland himself, strode onto the stage, sat at the piano, and played the work with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bernstein. It was the second piece of the Young People's Concert titled "Jazz in the Concert Hall," which was televised on March 11, 1964.
The Piano Concerto Structure
The Piano Concerto has two movements, played without pause. The first movement, slow and atmospheric, is connected to the fast, raucous second movement by a cadenza passage for solo piano.
Certain style traits associated with jazz are audible throughout the work. Syncopated melodies abound, often presented against a metrically regular bass. "Blue notes" (bent or flatted third and seventh scale degrees) permeate many of the motives and phrases. The Piano Concerto's instrumentation allows Copland to reference jazz timbres, including soprano and alto saxophones and a percussion section that can easily allude to a drum set. The solo piano is ideal for riffs and gestures, whether flashy or subtle, that evoke Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton.
"Full of Charleston rhythms and boop-boop-ba-doops"
As a complex, ever-changing musical art with at least a century of history, jazz has always eluded simple definitions. Bernstein was right to characterize Copland's jazz idioms as relics of a bygone age.
But even by 1920s standards, Copland's definition of jazz was rather loose. Gayle Murchison writes that around 1920, Copland "came to jazz as did many other white New Yorkers, from an outsider’s perspective," a perspective that tended to conflate jazz with popular music. As biographer Howard Pollack writes, "For the young Coplands, 'jazz' formed a sort of continuum from the Stephen Foster melodies sung at school to the ragtime played at home to the improvisational jazz heard in clubs." By listening to phonograph records, playing through sheet music from Tin Pan Alley, and hearing (or playing with) live dance bands, Copland heard sweet jazz, syncopated dance music, and popular song that referenced one or both.
Jazz in 1921, when Copland left the U.S. to study for three years in Europe, was not what it would soon become. Louis Armstrong was unknown outside his native New Orleans; Duke Ellington had just started his first dance band in DC and was still painting signs as a day job. A crucial forerunner to Ellington, pianist Fletcher Henderson had just arrived in New York to study chemistry at Columbia University; he ended up touring with blues singer Ethel Waters and working as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, as George Gershwin recently had done. But Copland knew little of the jazz music being created in African American spaces in the 1920s, which has proven to be an important part of the lineage of jazz as we understand it today.
Modernist and American
However limited his knowledge of jazz, when Copland arrived in France in June 1921, he discovered that what Europeans called "American jazz" was all the rage, not only with cabaret audiences, but also among many symphonic composers who sought viable alternatives to what they perceived as the stuffy, self-important German mainstream. Modernism was also in style: the edgy, anti-Romantic aesthetic that gave rise to Picasso's cubist paintings (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) and Nijinsky's angular choreography (The Rite of Spring). In modernist music, such as works by Igor Stravinsky, rhythms were irregular, chunky, even jarring; forms were overly repetitive or completely unpredictable; conventional melodies were often absent, and harmonies were dissonant and abrasive.
Copland had embraced modernism while still a student in New York. In Paris, his teacher supported his development as a modernist composer but also encouraged him to express his national identity by "sounding American." Jazz elements, Copland knew, were popular among European modernists including Stravinsky, Debussy, Darius Milhaud, and some American composers, like John Alden Carpenter. Additionally, Americans like Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and others had achieved tremendous popularity with something called symphonic jazz. Copland found that jazz references were a good way to sound both modernist and American.
"a young pioneer in American music"
Shortly after his return to the U.S. in 1924, Copland embarked upon what he soon called his jazz phase with the 1925 Music for the Theatre Music for the Theatre. His American composer friends objected. Roy Harris called Music for the Theatre—especially the Burlesque movement—"whorehouse music" and tried to talk him out of putting jazz into the then-in-progress Piano Concerto. Virgil Thomson would later call Copland's flirtation with jazz idioms in the mid-twenties his "one wild oat."
Despite the recent popularity of Gershwin's recent Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Concerto in F (1925) and a high-profile premiere with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony, Copland's Piano Concerto had a troubled initial reception. Copland was the piano soloist for the premiere. Audiences in Boston were scandalized by its modernist idioms ("cacophonous!") and its strong references to popular entertainment ("lowbrow!"), neither of which, many believed, belonged in a traditional concert hall. And some jazz fans were offended because they found Copland’s treatment parodistic or superficial.
Jazz or no jazz, conservative concert-goers disliked the Concerto's modernist dissonances and were jolted by the frequent interruptions to the rhythmic flow. But Copland took it in stride, almost as if provocation was his goal. Decades later, he recalled, "I realized I was using a contemporary musical language that most audiences were not accustomed to hearing. And actually, there was a lot of fun in bucking the tide and feeling part of the avant-garde out there fighting new battles. That feeling was very much part of the excitement of the times." (Copland/Perlis 55)
Copland's evolving views of jazz
In the late 1920s, Copland seemed to view jazz as a passing fad. In Modern Music Magazine, he quipped that jazz consisted of two moods: "blues and the snappy number," and therefore it had limited value to "serious" composers. By 1939 he announced that he had left jazz behind, writing “The jazz element in Music for the Theatre, [which] was further developed in a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. ... proved to be the last of my 'experiments' with symphonic jazz. With the Concerto I felt I had done all I could with the idiom..." These statements are unfortunately over-quoted and frankly inaccurate outside the narrow window of what he would refer to as “The Jazz Interlude" of 20th century composition.
Copland's understanding of jazz during his self-labeled "jazzy" period in the mid 1920s was, it seemed, quite skewed. But once back in the U.S., he soon learned more, and this led him to stop calling his own music "jazz." His subsequent music shows that he did not reject the jazz-inspired elements found in his Piano Concerto, but rather he internalized them. Rhythms, attitudes, and certain dissonances derived from jazz became an integral part of his individual voice.
Many post-1920s Copland compositions clearly reveal aspects of jazz influence. The rhythms in parts of the Piano Variations (1930) and much of the Short Symphony (1931-33); the idioms, rhythms, and melodies of the Clarinet Concerto (1942) are three of many examples. Copland never said as much, but his growing knowledge and understanding of jazz over the decades—including its social, racial, and other cultural components—reinforced for him that the term itself did not apply to his own music.
After the Piano Concerto, Copland may have stopped calling his music "jazz" or jazzy. But he internalized a looseness, a rhythmic freedom that listeners around the world still identify as distinctly American today, and that forms an immediately recognizable component of Copland's individual voice. Copland acknowledged this. By the 1950s, as when he gave the endowed Norton lectures at Harvard, Copland credited African American music traditions with forming the rhythmic character of his musical style.
Copland's Piano Concerto cannot be considered jazz. But it does reference elements of jazz as Copland and mainstream symphonic audiences knew it in the 1920s. His purpose in writing a modernist symphonic composition that alluded to jazz was to give his music a deliberately American tinge—and like a good modernist, to provoke listeners.
"fresh and charming and full of zip"
About the same time as Bernstein's 1964 description of the work as "fresh and charming and full of zip," the Piano Concerto did experience a modest revival, but it has yet to achieve the wide popularity of Copland's best-known works. In part, this may be logistical: the performance materials are in poor shape, making new performances logistically difficult; a new edition will soon be released to rectify that situation. Or the work may simply have been ahead of its time. It seems likely that the passage of time has blunted the shocking impact the work had a hundred years ago, and that twenty-first century conductors and listeners alike may find in the work even more "zip" than Bernstein's listeners did in 1964.
Next month, we will explore the inner workings of the Piano Concerto, while bringing its performance history and reception into the twenty-first century. How does this big modernist work hang together? How does the drama unfold over roughly 17 minutes? Which performances bring out its character? All of this and more as we consider what a live hearing of the Piano Concerto can offer the modern listener.
Sources & Further Reading
- Copland, Aaron. "The Jazz Interlude" in Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941): 62-71.
- Copland, Aaron. "Jazz Structure and Influence," Modern Music 4.2 (1927).
- Copland, Aaron. "Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch," in Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941): 212-230. Reprinted from The Magazine of Art 32 (September 1939): 522-523.
- Copland, Aaron and Vivian Perlis. The Complete Copland. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013.
- Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. Edited by David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Ira Goldmark. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
- "Jazz in the Concert Hall" concert program. New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert, February 8, 1964. New York Philharmonic Digital Archives: https://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/3bb6f386-cb8a-4723-b2f5-4dcc93348b3c-0.1/fullview#page/1/mode/2up
- "Jazz in the Concert Hall" New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert, February 8, 1964. Leonard Bernstein, host and conductor. Audio-visual recording. https://youtu.be/nTETCRtx1pM.
- Kleppinger, Stanley V. "On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron Copland." American Music, Spring 2003, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003) 74-111.
- Levin, Gail. "The Influence of Jazz" and "Getting Established in New York" in Aaron Copland's America: A Cultural Perspective (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2000): 22-39.
- Levy, Beth. “Aaron Copland: From Orient to Occident: the Saga of the Prairies” in Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
- Murchison, Gayle. The American Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetics of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921–1938. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
- Oja, Carol J. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). See "The Usable Past," esp. 113-119; and "The Piano Concerto," 134-136.
