The Dixie Chicks should take heart. Although they have had their songs dropped from radio stations and been booed at awards shows because of their statements against President Bush, a fellow Texan, they are not alone in the annals of American music for being shunned because of their politics. In his day, the great American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) also faced the difficulties of being a politically engaged artist.
In January 1953, Copland’s orchestral work “Lincoln Portrait” was pulled from a Washington concert celebrating the Eisenhower inauguration. Later that year, he was compelled by subpoena to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy, all because of his alleged ties to communist organizations.
Last month, a lengthy FBI file on Copland was released in response to a 1997 request under the Freedom of Information Act by the Associated Press. The documents traced Copland’s travels, associations and allegiances for 25 years, and reveal that he was deeply involved in socialist causes, primarily during the 1930s and 1940s. This is in sharp contrast to the image fostered by Copland and others that he was a musician who lived apart from the currents of international politics.
But Copland’s progressive politics always have been clear in his music, which spotlights and ennobles the common man – “the great masses of the proletariat,” as he himself once put it. The full extent of Copland’s political activism, as idealistic and perhaps naive as it may have been, only adds to his remarkable legacy.
There’s always been a certain irony in the fact that the signature sound of America was created by a left-leaning Jewish homosexual who was born in Brooklyn of Russian immigrant parents. But Copland’s music has not only entered the mainstream concert repertoire. his “Fanfare for the Common Man” has become the soundtrack for presidential inaugurations and Olympic competitions.
Copland found his popular voice as a composer through a canny use of American folk melodies. His hat trick of ballet scores “Billy the Kid” (1938), “Rodeo” (1942) and “Appalachian Spring” (1943-44) were the result of great skill and thoughtful collaboration, not simple inspiration from the heartland.
The search for a distinctly American sound was an effort Copland shared with many other composers of his era, including Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris and Douglas Moore. Their emphasis on folk song was a means already employed by nationalistic composers from Europe for generations. But for Copland it also was of a piece with his politics.
The communist movement in America during the mid-1930s allied itself with nationalistic themes and promoted the integration of folk material into serious art. According to Howard Pollack’s biography “Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man,” from which many of the biographical details in this story were taken, Copland was no stranger to such discussions but, rather, was a supporter of the larger socialist ideals.
In 1934, the left-wing journal “New Masses” announced a competition for music for a new workers song with lyrics from a poem titled “Into the Streets May First.” Copland’s setting won. Late in life he downplayed the piece, calling it the “silliest thing I did.” But in a 1935 letter to the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez he referred to it as “my communist song” and boasted that it had been published in Soviet Russia. “I should very much like to make a trip there,” he added.
Copland got caught up with a band of communist-leaning farmers during the summer of 1934, which he spent in rural Minnesota with his companion Victor Kraft. He even made a couple of speeches, and wrote in a letter that farmers would come up to him in town “as one red to another.”
The last hurrah for Copland and other prominent leftist artist was the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City in 1949. Other participants were playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller and Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich. It must have been obvious that the tide began to turn when Life magazine’s coverage of the gathering began, “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus.”
Copland’s reputation first was attacked on the floor of the U.S. House on Jan. 3, 1953, by Illinois Rep. Fred Busbey, who, in light of the composer’s suspected political affiliations, questioned the presence of Copland’s music on the upcoming inaugural concert. The congressman subsequently placed into the Congressional Record a list of some 20 communist organizations, or “fronts,” with which the composer allegedly had ties.
Five months later, McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, hammered away at Copland during two hours of closed-door testimony on the extent of his involvement with these same organizations. Copland kept his cool and often pleaded memory lapses and lack of preparation (he was given three days’ notice of the hearing). He gave away little and often cited his involvements as purely artistically related.
The ammunition for Busbey and McCarthy’s fusillades is contained in the recently released FBI file, which log Copland’s associations, often in great detail. If some citations seem trivial (“According to the Daily Worker … Aaron Copland was one of the sponsors of the American Youth Orchestra”), the bulk of them is convincing, if not damning.
While Copland was never called back by McCarthy for public testimony, the FBI documents show that the government continued to monitor his activities and considered indicting him for committing perjury and fraud in his Senate testimony.
“We all hung out with the left-wing intellectuals,” says composer Ned Rorem, 79, who was a student of Copland’s in the 1940s at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Mass., and remembers seeing him in Paris in 1953 shortly after the congressional testimony. Says Rorem, on the phone from his home in New York City, “Aaron was not a card-carrying communist, but he was a fellow traveler.”
Another composer colleague, David Del Tredici, 65, recalls Copland describing the encounter with McCarthy, and that it included a distinct taste of homophobia.
“Aaron told me that one of the people on the panel was this gorgeous young man who said not a word,” says Del Tredici, during a phone interview from New York. “He always thought that he was there to rattle him.”
Perhaps because Copland did not otherwise discuss his youthful political activities, Del Tredici, like others, downplays the extent of his involvement.
“He might have gone to some kind of meeting,” says Del Tredici. “A friend probably said `Come on, it will be fun.’” One pictures the young Christopher Isherwood in the “Berlin Stories” discovering himself amid radicals.
But Del Tredici also allows for the sincerity and idealism that may have driven Copland. “There was the romance of socialism that interested him and others,” he says. “It’s so different now that we wouldn’t have any idea of how it was once appealing.”
“Today, there isn’t anything you can call left wing,” declares Rorem.
Perhaps that’s all the more reason that Copland’s courage of conviction can be almost as inspiring as his music. A line from his speech to the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference is especially apt today when slogans on T-shirts can raise the risk of arrest.
“I am here this morning,” Copland said, “because I wish to protest an attitude that has turned the very word peace into a dirty word.”
Originally appeared in the Times Union, June 1, 2003.
Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.
