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On the Media

The Sound of America

On the Media

WNYC Studios

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4.68.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Composer Aaron Copland and the search for an American national identity.

Transcript

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0:00.0

There are many Americas. Nowadays, they barely speak to one another. But during the most perilous years of the last century, one young composer went in search of a sound that melded many of the nation's strains into something singular and new. He was a man of the left, though, of no political party.

0:23.9

Gay, but neither closeted nor out.

0:28.3

Jewish, but agnostic, unless you count music as a religion.

0:36.6

For this 4th of July podcast Extra, we revisit the story of Aaron Copeland with WNYC's Sarah Fischko, who reported this piece back in 2017 for the United States of

0:41.4

Anxiety podcast.

0:46.8

The Aaron Copeland story is filled with ironies.

0:51.0

For one thing, Copeland reached the height of his artistry and fame during the most desperate times in 20th century America, the era of the Great Depression and the years of World War II.

1:02.9

And for another, he first thought about creating music that sounded uniquely American only after he had left America, Brooklyn, to be exact, for Europe in

1:12.9

1921. He recalled later he had read about an American music school being formed that very year,

1:19.2

post-World War I, outside Paris.

1:21.4

The instant I read about it, I thought, oh gee, I don't know, a soul in France, this would

1:25.8

be a way of going and at least having some friends around and getting a start.

1:31.3

So off he went. Once there, Copeland began to search for a compositional style. In his own way, says Judith Tick, who co-wrote Aaron Copeland's America.

1:42.0

He graduated high school and did not go to college.

1:44.7

Instead, he became an apprentice.

1:46.9

His mentor in Paris was the fame Nadia Boulanger, who would go on to train everyone,

1:52.4

from Quincy Jones to Philip Glass.

1:54.9

He absolutely adored the milieu that Nadia Boulanger created around her, which was premised on the notion that a composer had to find his own voice.

2:05.6

And for a while, looking for his own voice, he lived the Paris life,

2:09.6

that lost generation life we know a little bit about from Hemingway, Fitzgerald,

2:14.6

Gertrude Stein, artists and thinkers looking for new forms, new ideas.

2:20.4

Copeland used to wander over to Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Rue de Lodion.

...

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