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” 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, 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.
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 New York Times editorialized ponderously that “Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Sibelius, Brahms are made manifest in many a remote farm house and in many a plain home.” Sarnoff’s radio idyll was complete.
The trouble was that Toscanini could not make classical music American. As the 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, among others—appeared on his programs. On a typical night, though, Beethoven and Brahms prevailed.
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 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. 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.
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.
Young Copland
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.
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-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. 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.
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,