310 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
the past, in folk culture and local life. Murals in post offi ces featured American
themes. Painters and photographers such as Thomas Hart Benton and Dorothea
Lange took ordinary people in American settings as their subjects. W hile artistic
works such as these portrayed the United States as an array of local settings, each
with its own character, citizens were encouraged to think of such localities as
examples of a larger American consciousness.
Such was the background for the nationalism of Roy Harris—born in
Oklahoma, raised in California, trained in Paris—who aspired to compose on
behalf of all Americans. An essay he wrote in 1933 claims that “wonderful, young,
sinew y, timorous, browbeaten, eager, gullible” American society was in the pro-
cess of fi nding a common racial identity that would override local differences.
In Harris’s view, rhythm was the key that separated Americans from Europe-
ans—especially the “asymmetrical balancing of rhythmic phrases.” Moreover, he
wrote, pointing to aspects of his own works, American music showed a fondness
for modal harmony and a tendency to avoid defi nite cadences, features evident
in his Third Symphony (1939), one of the most celebrated compositions of his
generation.
Nowhere is the shift from the ultramodernism of the 1920s to the more
accessible populism of the 1930s more apparent than in the music of Copland.
After spending the early 1920s studying in France with Nadia Boulanger, Copland
returned to the United States in 1924. In January 1925 he saw his fi rst major pre-
miere, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, by the New York Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, with his teacher, Boulanger, at the
organ. At the conclusion of the bristling, dissonant symphony, Damrosch turned
to the audience and remarked, “If a young man in his twenties can compose a
piece like that, by the time he is thirty he should be ready to commit murder.”
Throughout the 1920s Copland continued to write music that was uncompro-
misingly modernist, even when, in works like Music for the Theatre (1925) and the
Piano Concerto (1926), he incorporated elements of jazz.
With the advent of the Great Depression Copland’s socialist sympathies
deepened, and his aesthetic goals shifted as well. At the invitation of the Mexican
composer Carlos Chávez, Copland visited Mexico in 1932, and over the next
fi ve years he worked on an orchestral piece inspired by his visit to a Mexico
City dance hall. Chávez conducted the premiere of El salón Mexico in 1937, and
Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the U.S. premiere
the following year. What happened next was a surprise, as Copland later
recalled:One year after publication in 1938, Boosey [and Hawkes, Copland’s British
publisher] put together a list of orchestras that had played El salón Mexico:
fourteen American orchestras ranging from the BSO to the Women’s Sym-
phony in Chicago; two radio orchestras; and fi ve foreign ensembles. Never
in my wildest dreams did I expect this kind of acceptance for the piece.Yet Copland had tried from the start to make El salón Mexico audience-friendly.
Using local melodies for themes, he kept them recognizable, and he stayed
within the major-minor tonal system. Only the asymmetrical rhythms and occa-
sional “wrong-note” harmonies sounded modern, and these gave the traditional
elements new life and vigor.Roy HarrisAaron Copland172028_13_305-331_r3_ko.indd 310 23/01/13 8:39 PM