CHAPTER 15 | FILM MUSIC 367
THE MODERNIST FILM SCORE: COPLAND IN
HOLLYWOODIn addition to musicals, other fi lm genres included the occasional on-screen
performance of a popular song. Low-budget westerns, for example, mass pro-
duced by the minor fi lm studios, featured singing cowboys like Gene Autry
crooning country and western songs. It was in a western, in fact, that the next
major development in fi lm music took place, shortly before World War II: a shift
toward more American-sounding music, often with a modernist slant.
When Stagecoach (1939) won two Academy Awards and was nominated for
fi ve others, director John Ford established the western as more than B-movie
fodder for Saturday matinees; fi lms set in the American West could now be
prestige fi lms for the major studios. One of Stagecoach’s two Oscars was for
best music scoring, indicating that the fi lm’s soundtrack would prove infl u-
ential. The score—the work of a team of studio composers headed by Richard
Hageman, a Dutch musician who had conducted at the Metropolitan Opera—
was, according to the credits, “based on American folk songs,” an accurate
enough description if the designation “folk” is taken in its broadest meaning.
A tapestry of cowboy songs, minstrel tunes, parlor songs, and gospel hymns,
the Stagecoach soundtrack counted on “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “The
Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” and a fi stful of other
familiar melodies to trigger emotional associations for the fi lm’s viewers.
By combining the symphonic techniques of the golden-age fi lm score with
American folk songs, Stagecoach shared in the populist tendencies found in the
1930s music of modernist composers like Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson. Only a
year earlier, in 1938, Aaron Copland had used cowboy songs in his ballet Billy the
Kid, and he would do so again in his ballet Rodeo (1942). The key difference lay in
the kind of symphonic scoring used: lush and romantic in the fi lm scores, lean
and astringent in Copland’s ballets. By the 1950s and later, however, western fi lm
scores would come to resemble Copland’s style almost to the point of parody. The
infl uence of Copland on fi lm music stemmed mostly from his success in working
within the Holly wood studio system as a fi lm composer himself.
Copland’s fi rst opportunity to try his hand as a movie composer came not
from Holly wood but from the Carnegie Corporation, which sponsored the cre-
ation of a documentary fi lm to be shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The
City is a half-hour fi lm about urban planning with a strong ideological slant, con-
trasting an idealized New England village of the past with present-day indus-
trialized slums and closing with a utopian vision of the city of the future. The
scenario is perfectly suited to Copland’s musical style: pastoral Americana in the
outer sections contrast with jarring dissonance for the central depiction of urban
blight, the whole framed by modernist fanfares that sound like a call to action.
Critical acclaim for The City attracted the attention of Holly wood studios, and
soon Copland had a contract to write music for the 1939 fi lm version of John
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the fi rst of Copland’s fi ve scores for feature motion
pictures. The 1940 fi lm version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town quickly followed.
Copland also wrote scores for The Red Pony, another Steinbeck adaptation, and
The Heiress, based on Henry James’s novella Washington Square (both 1949). More
than a decade separates those literary adaptations from Copland’s fi nal movie
score, for the independent fi lm Something Wild (1961).The CityCopland’s cowboy
balletsStagecoach172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 367 23/01/13 8:36 PM