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Biography of Copland
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Listen to El Salon Mexico
NPR, Aaron Copland Interviews
Host Fred Caland - 1980 interview with Aaron Copland
Host Marin Alsop - Copland the quintessential American composer
Symphony #3 Fanfare for the Common Man - uses a playful simplicity
A truly identifiable American Style
Copland was a Jewish immigrant to the United States. He took it onto himself to find tutoring in music composition and piano. He was a pianist first and then a composer. He was not a young protege but worked hard at his craft. He went to France to study in the early 1920’s. Not Germany like many of the earlier eras composers. He wanted to be an American composer and found out what it was to be an American composer once looking back from France.
Copland's music falls into three large periods. In the first two, he concerns himself with, among other things, trying to find a serious style which sounds American, rather than European. His main teacher, Nadia Boulanger, encouraged him in this, usually pointing out (to her) odd rhythms in his work. Copland had not noticed them before, because they were part of him. As Leonard Bernstein noted, they were the rhythms of someone who had grown up with jazz and American pop, although not necessarily jazz rhythms. As a young man in his 20s, he composes a ballet Grohg (later reworked as the Dance Symphony) to an Expressionist libretto by the theater critic Harold Clurman. The rhythms in the faster sections gave some very well-known European conductors fits. Again, they weren't precisely the jazz of the time, but they would have fit right into be-bop. In his first period during the 1920s, he tries out his own brand of symphonic jazz in such works as Music for the Theater and the massive Piano Concerto. However, he soon gives it up because he feels it emotionally "limited" to either blues or "snappy numbers." Never mind that his own example disproves this. He then starts casting about for something else, and the works of this time betray to some extent a lack of artistic direction, even as they show an increase in technical skill. This culminates in the highly Stravinskian Short Symphony and the craggy Piano Variations, two masterpieces in which I can find not a single wasted note.
In the same period Copland wrote El Salon Mexico, he also composed a clarinet concerto for Benny Goodman the jazz band leader, the full-length opera The Tender Land, Fanfare for the Common Man (the Olympic theme), Lincoln Portrait for speaker and orchestra, the Old American Songs, Symphony No. 3, and his mega-hit Appalachian Spring.
Program Notes on El Salon Mexico
Aaron Copland
El Salón México
The music of Aaron Copland is so entrenched in American consciousness that fellow composer Ned Rorem once called him "a fact of sonic geology, like a throbbing, song-filled rock of Gibraltar." Listeners familiar with his best-known works such as Rodeo or Fanfare for the Common Man (both 1942, and recorded by Redwood Symphony on its 1998 CD) may not realize, however, that Copland's long career took him through several distinct periods: a first jazzy phase, from 1925 to 1929; an avante-garde period from 1930 to 1936; a populist phase from 1936 to 1949; and a final return to modern, serial territory. Through all these phases his personal hallmarks are evident: transparent orchestrations (he described it as "keeping instruments out of each other's way"), a supreme mastery of rhythm, and the ability to assign thematic or emotional expressiveness to particular parts of the orchestra, letting each carry an individual idea to build the larger whole.
El Salón México marks Copland's entrance into his populist phase, when he wanted to find a broader audience for contemporary music by using simpler harmonic melodies, often based on folk tunes, in a more accessible but still sophisticated manner. The work's genesis was a visit to Mexico in 1932, when composer Carlos Chávez brought Copland to a popular dance club called El Salón México. Copland described the scene, and its inspiration to him, in his autobiography:
Perhaps my piece might never have been written if it hadn't been for the existence of the Salón México. I remember reading about it for the first time in a tourist guide book: "Harlem-type nightclub for the peepul [sic], grand Cuban orchestra. Three halls: one for people dressed in your way, one for people dressed in overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot." When I got there, I also found a sign on the wall which said: "Please don't throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies don't burn their feet."
…In some inexplicable way, while milling about in those crowded halls, one really felt a live contact with the Mexican people — the electric sense one sometimes gets in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people — their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.
Copland determined he would write a "musical potpourri" that would convey his impression of the Mexican people. He realized that as an outsider he might miss the mark: "I felt nervous about what the Mexicans might think of a 'gringo' meddling with their native melodies." But he discovered he needn't worry when, "at the first of the final rehearsals that I attended … as I entered the hall the orchestral players, who were in the thick of a Beethoven symphony, suddenly stopped what they were doing and began to applaud vigorously." The work was premiered by Chávez conducting the Mexico Symphony Orchestra on August 27, 1937, and was a critical and popular success.
In creating his potpourri, Copland borrowed at least nine Mexican folk tunes from two collections he received during his trip, El Folklore y la Musica Mexicana edited by Ruben Campos and Cancionero Mexicano by Frances Toor. Most of the tunes use meters of 6/8 or 3/4 time, sometimes in alternation. Copland applied standard folk music practices throughout the work, such as harmonizations in parallel thirds and sixths, slides in pitch, clarinet cadenzas, string glissandos, and some call-and-response constructions.
The work consists of an introduction and four major segments, alternating slow-fast-slow-fast. A trumpet solo following the introduction is the longest quoted melody from Compos' collection, a tune called El Mosco. A slow "Mexican hat dance" segues into a lyrical, broad melody that ends with a repeated trumpet call, announcing the second, faster segment. This builds to a crashing close, followed by the so-called "siesta" section, introduced by a solo clarinet and violin. Lyrical, "sleepy" melodies alternate, followed by an insistent, rocking melody that gradually increases in tempo. The finale builds in rhythmic intensity and melodic complexity, when, as Copland writes, "I present the folk tunes simultaneously in their original keys and rhythms. The result is a kind of polytonality that achieves the frenetic whirl I had in mind before the end, when all is resolved with a plain unadorned triad."
Original Notes http://www.barbwired.com/barbweb/programs/copland_salonmexico.html
April 1, 2001
More Notes from ~ James Reel, All Music Guide
http://www.answers.com/topic/el-sal-n-m-xico-for-orchestra
Copland's period as a full-time populist didn't begin until 1936, when he completed El Salón México. On a trip to Mexico in 1932, Copland resolved to write a piece using popular Mexican themes, and when he finally began its slow assembly the following year, he borrowed tunes from collections recently published by Ruben Campos and Frances Toor. The result is a gaudy souvenir, as Copland intended; he felt unqualified, as a foreigner, to write something more serious drawing from Mexico's history or its revolutionary present. He connected the piece with a dancehall he'd visited, El Salón México, a "hot spot," Copland wrote, where "one felt, in a very natural and unaffected way, a close contact with the Mexican people. It wasn't the music I heard, but the spirit that I felt there, which attracted me."
For this work, Copland favored the Mexican huapango rhythm, essentially a measure in 6/8 answered exuberantly by a measure in 3/4. The piece begins with rhythmic brass chords and a rising string figure, but almost immediately the music, having toyed with fragments of "El Palo Verde" and "La Jesusita," loses its energy and collapses with a thud. The trumpet lazily introduces the folk tune "El Mosco" over a wheezing, inebriated-sounding accompaniment. The lower winds bring on a slow, quiet, sexy, rhythmic theme of their own, which the strings take up more grandly. Next, the higher woodwinds announce a faster, jaunty tune, which is picked up in turn by other sections of the orchestra, although the strings and percussion quickly reduce it to little more than rhythm. The brass and percussion take the lead in developing this into a dynamic, strongly accented motif. This soon plays itself out, whereupon a softer, broader, dreamier section arises. This grows organically into a faster, more vigorous section whose most arresting feature is a raucous little tune for clarinet. Now Copland builds the excitement more patiently and gradually than before, layering on and then stripping away various sections of the orchestra. A tiny bit of "El Mosco" comes to dominate the proceedings, building to an exuberant finale that Copland intentionally sabotages with a percussive whack on the offbeat. ~ James Reel, All Music Guide](El_Salon_Mexico_-_Copland_files/shapeimage_3.png)
