An Introduction to America’s Music

368 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II

In various writings about movie music in the 1940s,

Copland distinguished his own efforts from those

of his Holly wood predecessors on several counts.

Unlike Korngold and company, Copland rejected

the notion that a late romantic style was appropriate

for all fi lm subjects. He also dismissed the leitmotif

as an overworked cliché, too often hammered home

in an obvious way. Moreover, he criticized compos-

ers like Steiner for matching the music too closely

to the screen action, an effect more appropriate for

cartoons than for live action pictures—an attitude

implied by the industry term mickey-mousing to

describe such scoring. Finally, another attribute that

separates Copland from earlier fi lm composers is his

greater reliance on silence; instead of fi lling a scene

with neutral background music that might swell up

for the climax of a scene, he withholds the music until

the dramatic climax, where its entry can increase the

scene’s emotional impact.

Recognizing that his movie music was more than

background fi ller, Copland reworked music from all

his fi lm scores into orchestral concert works. One

of the fi nest is The Red Pony Suite, a series of six move-

ments that had its premiere in Houston in 1948, before

the fi lm had been released. The music is perhaps the

best thing about the fi lm, an unsuccessful attempt

at a “prestige picture” by Republic, a studio that had

established itself in the 1930s as a manufacturer of

low-budget science fi ction serials and B westerns (Republic’s biggest star was Gene

Autry; see chapter 14). In an attempt to raise its artistic status, Republic’s executives

took on two highbrow projects in 1948: Orson Welles’s version of Shakespeare’s

Macbeth, and The Red Pony, using the same artistic team that had fi lmed Steinbeck’s

Of Mice and Men in 1939. Despite being Republic’s most expensive picture to date,

The Red Pony did poorly at the box offi ce when it was released in 1949, and it failed

to earn a single Academy Award nomination. (The Best Music award that year went

to Copland’s score for The Heiress.) Consequently, Copland’s music for The Red Pony

is more familiar today in its concert form than in its original cinematic context.

The score of the concert suite contains the following note by the composer:

Steinbeck’s well-known tale is a series of vignettes concerning a ten-year-

old boy called Jody, and his life in a California ranch setting. There is a min-

imum of action of a dramatic or startling kind. The story gets its warmth

and sensitive quality from the character studies of the boy Jody, Jody’s

grandfather, the cow-hand Billy Buck, and Jody’s parents, the Tifl ins. The

kind of emotions that Steinbeck evokes in his story are basically musical

ones, since they deal so much with the unexpressed feelings of daily living.

The suite’s opening movement, “Morning on the Ranch” (LG 15.2), carries the

following description: “Sounds of daybreak. The daily chores begin. A folk-like

LG 15.2

K Regarded today as the

fi lm’s best feature, Aaron

Copland’s music is barely

mentioned in this poster for

The Red Pony (19 49).

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