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About thirty people showed up to bid Prokofiev farewell. The Beethoven Quartet

was instructed to play Tchaikovsky, although Prokofiev never liked Tchaikovsky;

the quartet then disappeared into the mob to play the same music for Stalin.

The hearse was not allowed near Prokofiev’s house, so the coffin had to be

moved by hand, through and around streets that were blocked by crowds and

tanks. As the masses moved toward the Hall of Columns along one avenue,

Prokofiev’s body was carried in the opposite direction down an empty street.

Shostakovich was among the mourners. He and Prokofiev had grown closer in

the preceding years, especially since 1948. Prokofiev’s final scores, more

tentative in construction but still pulsing with lyric power, fascinated

Shostakovich as he set about finding new paths for his own music. In October

1952, after the premiere of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, a gentle, wistful

withdrawal from the world, Shostakovich sent along a touching and unusually

direct letter of congratulation: “I wish you at least another hundred years to live

and create. Listening to such works as your Seventh Symphony makes it much

easier and more joyful to live.” Five months later, he was photographed

standing over Prokofiev’s body, his face inscrutable and blank.

MUSIC FOR ALL

In 1934, Arnold Schoenberg moved to California, bought a Ford sedan, and

declared, “I was driven into Paradise.” By the beginning of the forties, when the

Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and their respective satellites controlled Europe

from Madrid to Warsaw, crowds of cultural luminaries sought refuge in the

United States, and they were greseted by a significant irony. Europeans had

long depicted America as a wilderness of vulgarity; the cult of the dollar had

driven Gustav Mahler to an early grave, or so his widow claimed. Now, with

xEurope in the grip of totalitarianism, America had unexpectedly become the

last hope of civilization. The impresario and Zionist activist Meyer Weisgal, in a

telegram to the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, put it this way: “IF HITLER

DOESN’T WANT YOU I’LL TAKE YOU.” Many leading composers of the early

twentieth century—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Weill,

Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, and Eisler, among others—settled in the United

States. Entire artistic communities of Paris, Berlin, and the former St.

Petersburg reconstituted themselves in neighborhoods of New York and Los

Angeles. Alma Mahler was herself among the refugees; she escaped the

German invasion of France by hiking across the Pyrenees with her latest

Music in FDR’s America

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husband, Franz Werfel, and by the end of 1940 she was living on Los Tilos

Road in the Hollywood Hills.

That such disparate personalities as the White Russian Stravinsky and the

hard-core Communist Eisler could feel temporarily at home in America was a

tribute to the inclusive spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as

president from 1933 until his death in 1945. A patrician with a populist flair,

Roosevelt embodied what came to be known as the “middlebrow” vision of

American culture—the idea that democratic capitalism operating at full tilt could

still accommodate high culture of the European variety.

Back in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was

caught in a false dichotomy between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” between

“academic pedantry and pavement slang.” He called for a middle-ground culture

that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power. In the thirties,

the middlebrow became something like a national pastime: symphonic music

was broadcast on the radio, literary properties furnished plots for Hollywood A

pictures, novels by Thomas Mann and other émigrés were disseminated

through the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The influx of European genius coincided with an upsurge of native composition.

Pay no heed to the muses of Europe, Ralph Waldo Emerson had told American

artists and intellectuals in 1837; by the 1940s the muses were studying for U.S.

citizenship exams, and young American composers had found their voice.

Aaron Copland wrote music in praise of the Wild West, Abraham Lincoln,

rodeos, and Mexican saloons. Alongside Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, Marc

Blitzstein, and other more or less like-minded colleagues, Copland reached out

to a new mass public with the aid of radio, recording, and film, and, surprisingly,

the U.S. government itself. The Works Progress Administration, inaugurated in

1935, launched an ambitious scheme of federal arts projects, and some ninety-

five million people were said to have attended presentations by the Federal

Music Project over a two-and-a-half-year period. The democratic masses were

evidently taking hold of an art that had long been the property of the elite.

Hence the exhilaration that Blitzstein felt in 1936, when he wrote an article titled

“Coming—the Mass Audience!” for the magazine Modern Music:

The mass audience came, but it did not remain. No sooner had classical music

entered the mainstream arena than it began to face insurmountable obstacles.

One problem was political. Populists of Blitzstein’s type subscribed not just to

the vaguely social-democratic rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal but also to the

semi-Communistic doctrines of the Popular Front. When the New Deal came

under political attack in 1938, Roosevelt promptly retreated, letting the federal

arts projects collapse, and suddenly the picture was a lot less pretty.

“The great

mass of people enter at last the field of serious music. Radio is responsible, the

talkies, the summer concerts, a growing appetite, a hundred things; really the

fact of an art and a world in progress. You can no more stop it than you can

stop an avalanche.”

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There was the deeper problem of classical music’s true place in American

culture. At some level Americans did not seem to believe that a Europe-based

art form could speak for their condition; to most, Duke Ellington or Benny

Goodman was a more convincing musical answer to Emerson’s demand for an

American Scholar. Yet Copland and others of his generation succeeded in

forging sounds so charged with patriotic feeling that they endure in movies and

the media today. During the Depression and the Second World War, classical

music, whether in the form of Beethoven symphonies or Copland ballets,

encapsulated America’s we’re-all-in-this-together spirit; it showed how individual

efforts could be pooled together in a “common discipline,” as Roosevelt said in

his inaugural speech of 1933. That music has not lost its binding power.

Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio

for Strings plays on the radio.

Three major technological advances altered the musical landscape from the

twenties onward. First, electrical recording allowed for sound quality of

unprecedented richness and dynamic range. Second, radio transmission

allowed for the live broadcast of music coast to coast. Third, sound was added

to motion pictures. Common to all these breakthroughs was the innovation of

the microphone, which had the effect of freeing classical music from the elite

concert halls in which it had long been confined, and, consequently, from the

domain of city dwellers and the wealthy. The millions whom Beethoven longed

to embrace in his “Ode to Joy” showed up in the Hooper ratings—up to ten

million for Arturo Toscanini’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, and millions

more for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

Radio Music

Electrical recording set off a rush to rerecord the classics of the orchestral

repertory. Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra led the way with a

disc of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre in July 1925. Toscanini was not far

behind, and with the publicity machine of the radio-recording conglomerate of

NBC and RCA behind him he would go on to sell some twenty million records.

NBC’s first nationwide radio broadcast took place in November 1926; it carried

a concert by the New York Symphony under the direction of Walter Damrosch,

a genial conductor and lecturer who was to become a radio star in his own right.

A rival network, CBS, inaugurated its existence in 1927 with Deems Taylor’s

opera The King’s Henchman. Sound film created new careers for a host of

composers, who fleshed out on-screen action with orchestral brouhaha.

Contrary to legend, Al Jolson’s cry of “Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’

yet!” was not America’s first experience of the power of sound film; in 1926,

Warner Brothers created a nationwide sensation by releasing a film of Don Juan

To some extent, the radio vogue for classical music was imposed on the

American public from above. One reason for the trend was utilitarian: the

networks feared a government takeover of the radio industry, and by

broadcasting classical music they could make a gesture toward “public service”

with rousing synchronized accompaniment by the New York Philharmonic.

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and thus stave off the threat. Another reason was cultural: radio and record-

company executives were naturally inclined to support classical programming,

whether or not audience surveys demanded it. Many were émigrés or the first-

generation offspring of immigrant families, and they considered Beethoven and

Tchaikovsky a birthright. The radio pioneer David Sarnoff, who grew up in the

same New York Russian-Jewish communities that produced George Gershwin,

had declared back in 1915 that one of the advantages of the “radio music box”

was that rural listeners would be able to enjoy symphonies by the fireplace. By

1921 Sarnoff had become general manager of the Radio Corporation of

America, and five years later he created NBC. All along, he insisted that radio

should aspire to class and culture. “I regard radio as a sort of cleansing

instrument for the mind,” he once said, “just as the bathtub is for the body.”

Yet, even without the prompting of the radio executives, Americans of the

period avidly sought the cultural improvement that classical music was

presumed to provide. The middlebrow ideal was to be sophisticated without

being pretentious, worldly but not effete, and classical music with an American

accent fit the bill. NBC’s “Blue” network might carry Ohio State versus Indiana

one afternoon and a Lotte Lehmann recital the next. Benny Goodman recorded

both Mozart and swing. The classically trained composer Morton Gould

appeared on radio as the star of the Cresta Blanca Carnival,

There was no bigger star of radio than Toscanini himself, whom Sarnoff

introduced to the national NBC audience on Christmas Day 1937. At the close

of the first season, the

and Harold

Shapero switched between swing arrangements and neoclassical composition.

Alan Shulman, a cellist in the NBC Symphony, composed “serious” works,

joined an NBC jazz ensemble called New Friends of Rhythm (“Toscanini’s Hep

Cats,” they were called), and mentored the master pop arranger Nelson Riddle.

New York Times

The trouble was that Toscanini could not make classical music American. As

the

editorialized ponderously that “Wagner,

Beethoven, Bach, Sibelius, Brahms are made manifest in many a remote

farmhouse and in many a plain home.” Sarnoff’s radio idyll was complete.

Times’s list of names suggested, the Maestro’s canon was focused on

European composers and stopped short of the present, Sibelius having fallen

silent. During his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, from 1926 to 1936,

Toscanini had ignored American music week after week, conducting only six

native works in ten years. He evinced little interest in living composers of any

nationality, apart from a few Italians whom he knew personally. At NBC, his

taste broadened slightly, and a smattering of American pieces—Roy Harris’s

Third Symphony, Copland’s El Salón México, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and

Gershwin’s An American in Paris,

Two other celebrity conductors—Leopold Stokowski, who served briefly as co-

conductor of the NBC Symphony, and Serge Koussevitzky, who led the Boston

Symphony—treated new and American works far more respectfully. “Dee next

Beethoven vill from Colorado come,” Koussevitzky declared. By the end of his

twenty-five-year reign in Boston, the Russian émigré had hosted an astounding

85 premieres of American scores and 195 American works altogether. He also

among others—appeared on his programs.

On a typical night, though, Beethoven and Brahms prevailed.

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commissioned such international masterpieces as Stravinsky’s Symphony of

Psalms, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and

Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony.

Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson, the same dyspeptic duo who tried to

stamp out Sibelius, mocked the cult of Toscanini, Walter Damrosch’s music-

appreciation lectures for children, and other instances of classical hype in the

thirties. If their diatribes were egregiously snooty in tone—“It is highly doubtful,”

Adorno sniffed, “if the boy in the subway whistling the main theme of the finale

of Brahms’s First Symphony actually has been gripped by that music”— the

critique of the middlebrow mentality sometimes hit home. The classical

conglomerates, Thomson noted, confined themselves to a repertory of fifty

masterpieces, because they were the easiest to sell. Yet the failure to support

the new led inexorably to the decline of classical music as a popular pastime,

for nothing bound it to contemporary life. A venerable art form was set to

become one more passing fad in a ravenous consumer culture.

Stokowski, who had promoted

Edgard Varèse and other ultra-moderns back in the twenties, introduced two big

new Schoenberg works, the Violin Concerto and the Piano Concerto. Between

them, Stokowski and Koussevitzky created much of the core repertory of the

mid-twentieth century. Yet they failed to stimulate the radio executives and the

corporate heads who bought advertising. Stokowski’s advocacy of new music

reportedly alarmed the higher-ups at General Motors, which had begun

sponsoring the NBC Symphony. A few months after the premiere of

Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, it was announced that Stokowski’s contract

would not be renewed, and composers lost their most forceful supporter.

Aaron Copland hardly looked the part of the Great American Composer. He was

a tall, wiry man with an angular, bespectacled face, resembling an awkward

office clerk in a Hollywood genre picture. He was the son of Russian-Jewish

immigrants; he was an ardent leftist; he was gay. Yet he had a plausible claim

to the evanescent mythology of the frontier and the Wild West. In the late

nineteenth century, his maternal grandfather, Aaron Mittenthal, operated an

emporium in Dallas, near such outfits as W. R. Hinckley’s tin shop and Ott &

Pfaffle’s gun store. According to family legend, Mittenthal once hired the outlaw

Frank James, brother of the famous Jesse James.

Young Copland

Copland heard stories of the West, but he spent his childhood in Brooklyn. His

father ran a department store at the corner of Dean Street and Washington

Avenue, and the family lived above it. Copland later described the

neighborhood as “simply drab” and claimed that he had received no musical

stimulus from it, although he could hardly have been unaffected by the diverse

clamor of popular and classical airs that enlivened any Brooklyn or Manhattan

block at the turn of the century.

Copland’s background was, as it happens, very similar to George Gershwin’s.

Both were Brooklyn-born, a little over two years apart. Both were Russian-

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Jewish in origin. Both studied composition with a man named Rubin Goldmark.

And they haunted the same locales in their youth; Gershwin attended recitals at

Wanamaker’s department store, while Copland made his debut there in 1917.

Copland noted some of the similarities in his memoirs, but said that no personal

bond formed between them: “When we were finally face to face at some party,

with the opportunity for conversation, we found nothing to say to each other!”

Each may have envied the other’s advantages—Copland’s intellectual acclaim,

Gershwin’s fame and wealth.

While Gershwin developed his craft in the back rooms of Tin Pan Alley, Copland

followed more conventional avenues of European study. In 1921, at the age of

twenty, he attended the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, outside Paris,

and plunged into the carnival of twenties styles. Walking through the city on his

first day, he saw a poster for the Swedish Ballet and found himself sitting

through Cocteau’s absurdist ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with music by

five of Les Six. Over the next three years he showed impeccable taste in

concertgoing, attending the first nights of Milhaud’s Creation of the World and

Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Koussevitzky’s performances of Stravinsky’s Octet and

Honegger’s Pacific 231, and the Paris premiere of Pierrot lunaire. At the

Shakespeare and Company bookstore he timidly approached James Joyce to

ask about a musical passage in Ulysses.

Copland’s teacher was the organist, composer, and pedagogue Nadia

Boulanger, who honed the compositional skills of half the major American

composers of the rising generation—Copland, Thomson, Harris, and Blitzstein,

among others. Through Boulanger, Copland absorbed the aesthetics of the

twenties—the revolt against Germanic grandiosity, the yen for lucidity and

grace, the cultivation of Baroque and Classical forms. She preached, in other

words, the gospel according to Igor Stravinsky. If you were to take a Stravinsky

score such as the Octet or the

All told, he was very much in the

middle of the action, although he observed more than he participated; it was his

fellow student Virgil Thomson who danced all night at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments, loosen up the

tightly controlled structure, and insert a few melodies of the New England

hymnal or urban-jazzy type, you would have the beginnings of a Copland work

such as Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring. The entire style is implicit in the

“Pastorale” of

In 1923 Boulanger did Copland the gigantic favor of introducing him to

Koussevitzky, who, she had heard, would be taking over the Boston Symphony

the following season. After hearing Copland bang out his

Histoire du soldat.

Cortège macabre on

the piano (Prokofiev happened to be in the room as well), Koussevitzky

proposed that Copland write a work for organ and orchestra, with Boulanger as

soloist. Walter Damrosch also promised the young composer a place on his

New York Symphony concerts. Thus, Copland’s Organ Symphony was booked

for performances in both New York and Boston—a sensational send-off for a

composer aged twenty-four. The symphony begins in an atmosphere of

spacious mystery, with a sweet, ambiguous flute melody unfolding over

sustained notes on the viola. The ending is all action and gesture and dancing

motion; the solo instrument begins to sound less like the voice of God and more

like an organ at a fairground. The journey from nocturnal meditation to

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communal celebration brings to mind Ives’s American idylls, but Copland

executes his design with a clarity and an economy that do credit to his French

training.

Copland showed an uncommon flair for the lowlier arts of organization and

publicity. He recognized that composers would make little headway with the

public unless they formed a common front, as Les Six had done in Paris. “The

day of the neglected American composer is over,” he wrote in 1926. The

announcement had been made before, but Copland made it stick. He helped

design Koussevitzky’s epoch-making American programming in Boston and

also became the dominant figure in the League of Composers, which had

formed as an alternative to the modernist-minded, racially bigoted International

Composers’ Guild. (Carl Ruggles promptly dubbed the league a “filthy bunch of

Juilliard Jews.”) With Roger Sessions, another Brooklyn-born music fiend,

Copland developed the Copland-Sessions Concerts, which tried to bridge the

gap between modernist and populist camps. A spirit of camaraderie and

derring-do broke out among younger American composers. Virgil Thomson later

fondly called this group Copland’s “commando unit.”

Copland acquired a degree of notoriety with two jazz-inflected works, the Music

for the Theatre of 1925 and the Piano Concerto of 1926. Although his

comprehension of jazz went not too much deeper than that of his Parisian

contemporaries (“It began, I suppose, on some negro’s dull tomtom in Africa,”

he wrote), he did send a strong rhythmic jolt into American concert music. The

jabbing, bluesy riffs of the Piano Concerto point the way to Leonard Bernstein’s

West Side Story, while the climactic theme of Music for the Theatre

Having “done” jazz, Copland moved on to the dissonant high modern. His

’s

“Burlesque” sounds like Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River,” written two years later.

As Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack observes, the racy hint of striptease in

the title can also be felt in the raucous, how-ya-doin’-honey orchestration.

Piano

Variations

Copland’s early works won raves from progressive critics. Paul Rosenfeld,

Varèse’s celebrant, called them “harsh and solemn, like the sentences of

brooding rabbis.” But brooding did not pay the bills. In 1938, Pollack tells us, the

composer’s checking account contained $6.93, and he was asking himself

whether he should seek refuge in academia. He continued to struggle with

feelings of spiritual hollowness, of social irrelevance. “I might force myself a

little,” he wrote in his diary in 1927, contemplating the possibility of getting

drunk. “My everpresent fear is that by thinking that I know myself, i.e. my normal

self completely, I may circumscribe whatever latent possibilities I may have.” On

of 1930 is a monolithic masterpiece that threatens to surpass the

ultra-modern school of Varèse and Ruggles in the relentlessness of its attack. It

is based on a broadly gesticulating four-note motif—E, C, D-sharp, C-sharp an

octave above—that Copland probably extracted from the slow movement of

Stravinsky’s Octet. The theme is subjected to an astringent sequence of

permutations that at times approaches twelve-tone writing. By the end, the

music is heading in a tonal direction: grand triads of A major and E major ring

out in the treble, though with sharp dissonances attached. A new American

harmony, brash and bluesy, grows from primordial chaos.

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Christmas Day of 1930 he wrote: “How does one deepen one’s experience of

life. That is a problem that interests me deeply. Would serving as dish washer

for a week help—or doing a term in prison? Or the Gurdjieff Method?” Copland

soon found an answer to these nagging questions: his spiritual plunge, his

drunken adventure, would take the form of leftist politics.

Popular Front Music

On October 24, 1929, Wall Street posted nine billion dollars of losses in a few

hours, and the Great Depression began. The economic collapse staggered

America’s urban elites, but it came as no great shock to farmers and agricultural

workers, who had remained ungilt during the Gilded Age and had not roared

during the Roaring Twenties.

Most rural Americans were still part of an agrarian society, functioning largely

without indoor plumbing and electricity. Back in the final years of the nineteenth

century, resentment against the powers that be had spawned the People’s or

Populist Party, which mixed utopian socialism with religious revivalism and old-

fashioned demagoguery. Populism was the first effective progressive movement

in American politics, even though it never caught fire at the national level.

Crucial to its rhetoric was a sacralization of the heartland and the Wild West,

where, it was thought, a pure American spirit had resisted the encroachments of

industrial capitalism. Populism entered the mainstream with the onset of the

Depression, altering the vocabulary of urban intellectuals and Democratic

politicians. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural speech, mimicked Populist jargon

when he decried the “practices of the unscrupulous money changers” and

demanded “a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”

According to polls, one quarter of the American people wanted a socialist

government and another quarter had an “open mind” about the prospect. Such

statistics gave Moscow the idea that America was ripe for the plucking. In the

1932 presidential campaign, William Foster and James Ford ran as the first

serious Communist Party candidates. Ford was also the first African-American

to appear on a presidential ticket, the Communist International having

determined that blacks were instrumental to the cause. Many in the Harlem

Renaissance intelligentsia, Duke Ellington included, committed themselves to

Communism to a greater or lesser degree. But the Communist vote in 1932 was

meager; for America, Roosevelt was radical enough.

In the mid-thirties a new directive went forth from Moscow: Western

Communists should find common ground with other leftist groups, the better to

insinuate themselves into positions of power. From the order stemmed the

Popular Front, which bound together various parties of the left around a limited

set of pro-union, antifascist, anti-racist positions. The American Communist

Party, under the leadership of Earl Browder, adopted the slogan “Communism

is twentieth-century Americanism.” Such formulations charmed the gentler

spirits in the Popular Front coalition—those who envisaged a gradual

interpenetration of Soviet and American values rather than an overthrow of the

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government. Michael Denning, in his book The Cultural Front, argues that

Popular Fronters manipulated the Soviets as much as the Soviets manipulated

them. Americans are said to have drawn on the intellectual resources of the

Soviet cause—and on its finances—while pursuing their own agenda.

Still, the Popular Front was in many ways a shut-in, fanatical world, faithfully

replicating the worst of the Soviet mind-set. Ideologues encouraged conformity

and discouraged dissent, even if it meant denouncing yesterday’s conformity as

dissent and vice versa. Most American Communists refused to acknowledge

the violence of Stalin’s regime, even when evidence of it was placed in front of

them. After Shostakovich was denounced in 1936, the New Masses reporter

Joshua Kunitz quoted the soothing words of a young Communist: “Don’t worry.

There’ll be no blood, no prisons, no ruin and no darkness. The fellows who

deserve it will be criticized—that’s all.” (Kunitz retailed these rationalizations in a

lecture to New Yorkers that May: “The Truth About Shostakovich,” followed by

refreshments and dancing.) Others knew of the violence and chose simply to

accept it. Back in 1933, New Masses had invited its readers to ask themselves

this ominous question: “Based not on my words, or thoughts, but on the day-to-

day acts of my life, would the workingclass leaders of the future American

Soviet Government be justified in putting me in a responsible job—or in a prison

camp for class enemies?” At its most frightening, American Communism

exhibited a kind of voluntary self-repression.

The man in charge of coordinating international Communist activity in the

musical area was Hanns Eisler. The firebrand of pre-Nazi Berlin was now hailed

by the Daily Worker as the “foremost revolutionary composer…beloved of all

the masses of every country.” As chairman of the International Music Bureau of

the Comintern, Eisler visited America twice in 1935, lecturing in New York at the

New School for Social Research and at Town Hall. The latter appearance shook

up the local composers, Copland and Blitzstein included. Eisler informed them

that modern composers had become nothing more than luxury tools of the

capitalist system—“dealers in narcotics”—and that if they wished to break out of

their prison they would have to fulfill a new social function. They were told to

abandon purely instrumental music for more “useful” forms—workers’ songs,

workers’ choruses, socially critical theater pieces. In another lecture Eisler

stated bluntly that “the modern composer must change from a parasite into a

fighter.”

Charles Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford, two exemplary leftist composers,

so feared the sin of formalism that they nearly barred themselves from

composing altogether. Seeger, who came from old New England stock, began

as an Ivesian modernist, formulating a method of “dissonant counterpoint” that

spread widely among the ultra-modern composers. His best disciple was

Crawford, a young Chicago-based composer, who began studying with him in

late 1929 and fell in love with him not long after. This earnest, self-deprecating

woman went on to write some of the most fabulously byzantine music of her

time. In String Quartet 1931, orderings of pitch, rhythm, durations, and

dynamics anticipate avant-garde music of the post-World War II era; in Chant 3,

a women’s chorus is divided into twelve parts, each assigned a separate

chromatic note and shifting through a variety of polyrhythms. Even as she

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indulged in these experiments, Crawford gave strong narrative shape to her

material. The slow movement of the Quartet unfurls as a continuous wave of

sound, its complexities concealed behind a softly shimmering exterior.

Ruth and Charles were married in 1932, and around the same time they fell

under the influence of Communist ideology. Charles helped to found a new

organization called the Composers’ Collective, wrote a column for the Daily

Worker, and penned a song titled “Lenin! Who’s That Guy.” Most important, he

undertook to collect American folk songs in league with the father-son team of

John and Alan Lomax, who were in the process of recording traditional music in

the South and West.

Judith Tick’s biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger movingly records the stages

by which this gifted composer gave up her urge to create. She worked for a

while on a second quartet, which was to have blended modern techniques with

folk sources in a “combination of simplicity and complexity,” but it never

materialized. Her confidence sapped by her husband’s neolithic belief that

“women can’t compose symphonies,” she devoted herself instead to meticulous

folk-song transcriptions. Her work appeared in two Lomax anthologies, Our

Singing Country and Folk Song USA, which became bibles of the postwar folk-

song revival (one of whose leaders was her stepson Pete). Only after the war

did she regain interest in composition, completing in 1952 a Suite for Wind

Quintet. But cancer claimed her the following year. Thus ended the career of

one of the few major women composers of the early twentieth century.

Copland had been leaning leftward since his days playing piano at the Finnish

Socialist Union. On European trips in 1927 and 1929 he encountered

Mahagonny Songspiel and The Threepenny Opera, and fell to thinking about

how a composer could combine social critique with mass appeal. Later, in 1930

and 1931, he attended the first meetings of Harold Clurman’s Group Theatre in

New York, which included among its regular collaborators such theater notables

as Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Elia

Kazan. Copland, who had been Clurman’s roommate back in the Paris days,

became a stalwart of the Group Theatre, finding space for meetings, identifying

potential donors, and offering financial support from his own almost empty

pockets.

There was a Communist cell within the Group Theatre, but most members

understood the project in largely aesthetic terms, as a corrective to the

intellectual flight from society. Odets, who made his breakthrough with the pro-

union play Waiting for Lefty in 1935, was obsessed with the figure of

Beethoven, who represented for him not only the triumph of genius but also the

tragedy of isolation. “[Beethoven] was the first great individualist in art,” Odets

wrote. “Today we are locked in a death grip with our individualities and coming

back to a social thing again. Call it Communism, call it Group Theatre, call it the

life of farms, but artists are coming back to the truth of root things, fundamentals

again.”

Political themes infiltrated Copland’s scores in the early and mid-thirties. The

ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934) uses a distorted version of “The Star-Spangled