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317 COPLAND ON THE LEFT At a time when Russian-Jewish immigrants were considered America’s most likely Bolsheviks, Copland’s voluntary association with the left probably came as no surprise. Elizabeth Bergman Crist has detailed the prevalence of communist and socialist ideals among Copland’s associates and has persuasively situated Copland’s own activities within the purview of the Popular Front. For my purposes , the most notable aspects of Copland’s political engagement are the geographical settings that agitated his political conscience and the impact that leftism had on his views about folk music. As Bergman Crist has shown, Copland seems to have developed many of his populist ideals while visiting Mexico in the fall of 1932. He was deeply influenced by the example of his friend and colleague Carlos Chávez and by the opportunities offered under the country’s quasisocialist government, confiding in Chávez that he was “a little envious of the opportunity you had to serve your country in a musical way” and praising the Mexican composer’s rapport with audiences. Equally distant from factories and sweatshops, Copland’s most active engagement with communism occurred in rural Minnesota, where he gave an impromptu speech at a meeting of farmers near Bemidji. Copland’s friend Harold Clurman noted this as a departure from the usual pattern when he wrote to congratulate Copland on his political awakening : “Some people go east to the U.S.S.R. to become ‘radicalized’ but you went west to the U.S.A.” Back in New York, Copland’s musical attitudes were shaped in part by his involvement with the Composers’ Collective (established by Cowell and Charles 12 Communal Song, Cosmopolitan Song 318 Aaron Copland Seeger as a branch of the American Communist Party’s Workers’ Music League). He shared their early ambivalence toward folk sources, considering the “large mass singing” of the international workers’ chorus (not the folk song of rural localities) to be the appropriate proletarian antidote to the “poignant subjective lieder” of the bourgeoisie. When Copland’s setting of “Into the Streets May First!” won the New Masses song contest in 1934, folk qualities were far from the judges’ list of criteria. And although the title of The Young Pioneers (1935)—Copland’s contribution to a collection of children’s piano pieces—might seem in retrospect to be crying out for a folk interpretation, Copland was probably motivated less by the title’s pastoral connotations than by its association with the Soviet youth organization of the same name. Gradually, however, under the revised Popular Front slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism,” Copland joined most of his leftist contemporaries in embracing folk song as the true music of the people. The advocacy of Seeger and Elie Siegmeister solidified Copland’s already substantial interest in popular culture and folk song. As Pollack has noted, it may also have channeled this interest in new directions: “The Popular Front’s emphasis on Anglo-American folklore undoubtedly fostered a growing familiarity with and receptivity toward that particular repertoire” (HP, 280). Copland’s first experiment with Anglo folklore appeared in The Second Hurricane, when high school students, stranded during their rescue mission, muster their courage by singing “The Capture of Burgoyne.” Copland borrowed the eighteenth-century song almost literally from S. Foster Damon’s Series of Old American Songs (1936), making few changes to the tune or the text (HP, 308). More interesting is the song’s placement in the operetta shortly after the solo for the only African American character, Jeff. Jeff’s jazzy number and the rousing British ballad sung by the teenagers are separated by a memorable soprano solo sung by Queenie, a student selected for the trip because of her nursing skills. Despite this lyric interlude, the musical contrast between “Jeff’s Song” and “The Capture of Burgoyne” strongly suggests that Copland was more comfortable with the syncopated idiom that had characterized his earlier music than with the foursquare rhythms of the British tune. Copland had already tried to reconcile his interest in African American music with the rhetoric of folk-based musical nationalism. In 1925, around the time of Music for the Theatre and the Piano Concerto, one such attempt was documented in a newspaper report given the telling title “Jazz as Folk-Music.” Here, the writer conveyed Copland’s belief that “distinctively national” music required “a literature of folk music as a background.” “If we haven’t a folk-song foundation, we must invent one,” he said. “I...

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