In 1923 Boulanger did Copland the gigantic favor of introducing him to Koussevitzky, who, she had heard, would be taking over the Boston Symphony the following season. After hearing Copland bang out his Cortège macabre on the piano (Prokofiev happened to be in the room as well), Koussevitzky proposed that Copland write a work for organ and orchestra, with Boulanger as soloist. Walter Damrosch also promised the young composer a place on his New York Symphony concerts. Thus, Copland’s Organ Symphony was booked for performances in both New York and Boston—a sensational send-off for a composer aged twenty-four. The symphony begins in an atmosphere of spacious mystery, with a sweet, ambiguous flute melody unfolding over sustained notes on the viola. The ending is all action and gesture and dancing motion; the solo instrument begins to sound less like the voice of God and more like an organ at a fairground. The journey from nocturnal meditation to communal celebration brings to mind Ives’s American idylls, but Copland executes his design with a clarity and an economy that do credit to his French training.
Copland showed an uncommon flair for the lowlier arts of organization and publicity. He recognized that composers would make little headway with the public unless they formed a common front, as Les Six had done in Paris. “The day of the neglected American composer is over,” he wrote in 1926. The announcement had been made before, but Copland made it stick. He helped design Koussevitzky’s epoch-making American programming in Boston and also became the dominant figure in the League of Composers, which had formed as an alternative to the modernist-minded, racially bigoted International Composers’ Guild. (Carl Ruggles promptly dubbed the league a “filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews.”) With Roger Sessions, another Brooklyn-born music fiend, Copland developed the Copland-Sessions Concerts, which tried to bridge the gap between modernist and populist camps. A spirit of camaraderie and derring-do broke out among younger American composers. Virgil Thomson later fondly called this group Copland’s “commando unit.”
Copland acquired a degree of notoriety with two jazz-inflected works, the Music for the Theatre of 1925 and the Piano Concerto of 1926. Although his comprehension of jazz went not too much deeper than that of his Parisian contemporaries (“It began, I suppose, on some negro’s dull tomtom in Africa,” he wrote), he did send a strong rhythmic jolt into American concert music. The jabbing, bluesy riffs of the Piano Concerto point the way to Leonard Bern-stein’s West Side Story, while the climactic theme of Music for the Theatre’s “Burlesque” sounds like Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River,” written two years later. As Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack observes, the racy hint of striptease in the title can also be felt in the raucous, how-ya-doin’-honey orchestration.
Having “done” jazz, Copland moved on to the dissonant high modern. His Piano Variations of 1930 is a monolithic masterpiece that threatens to surpass the ultra-modern school of Varèse and Ruggles in the relentlessness of its attack. It is based on a broadly gesticulating four-note motif—E, C, D-sharp, C-sharp an octave above—that Copland probably extracted from the slow movement of Stravinsky’s Octet. The theme is subjected to an astringent sequence of permutations that at times approaches twelve-tone writing. By the end, the music is heading in a tonal direction: grand triads of A major and E major ring out in the treble, though with sharp dissonances attached. A new American harmony, brash and bluesy, grows from primordial chaos.
Copland’s early works won raves from progressive critics. Paul Rosenfeld, Varèse’s celebrant, called them “harsh and solemn, like the sentences of brooding rabbis.” But brooding did not pay the bills. In 1938, Pollack tells us, the composer’s checking account contained $6.93, and he was asking himself whether he should seek refuge in academia. He continued to struggle with feelings of spiritual hollowness, of social irrelevance. “I might force myself a little,” he wrote in his diary in 1927, contemplating the possibility of getting drunk. “My everpresent fear is that by thinking that I know myself, i.e. my normal self completely, I may circumscribe whatever latent possibilities I may have.” On Christmas Day of 1930 he wrote: “How does one deepen one’s experience of life. That is a problem that interests me deeply. Would serving as dish washer for a week help—or doing a term in prison? Or the Gurdjieff Method?” Copland soon found an answer to these nagging questions: his spiritual plunge, his drunken adventure, would take the form of leftist politics.
Popular Front Music
On October 24, 1929, Wall Street posted nine billion dollars of losses in a few hours, and the Great Depression began. The economic collapse staggered America’s urban elites, but it came as no great shock to farmers and agricultural workers, who had remained ungilt during the Gilded Age and had not roared during the Roaring Twenties.
Most rural Americans were still part of an agrarian society, functioning largely without indoor plumbing and electricity. Back in the final years of the nineteenth century, resentment against the powers that be had spawned the People’s or Populist Party, which mixed utopian socialism with religious revivalism and old-fashioned dem-agoguery. Populism was the first effective progressive movement in American politics, even though it never caught fire at the national level. Crucial to its rhetoric was a sacralization of the heartland and the Wild West, where, it was thought, a pure American spirit had resisted the encroachments of industrial capitalism. Populism entered the mainstream with the onset of the Depression, altering the vocabulary of urban intellectuals and Democratic politicians. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural speech, mimicked Populist jargon when he decried the “practices of the unscrupulous money changers” and demanded “a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”
According to polls, one quarter of the American people wanted a socialist government and another quarter had an “open mind” about the prospect. Such statistics gave Moscow the idea that America was ripe for the plucking. In the 1932 presidential campaign, William Foster and James Ford ran as the first serious Communist Party candidates. Ford was also the first African-American to appear on a presidential ticket, the Communist International having determined that blacks were instrumental to the cause. Many in the Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia, Duke Ellington included, committed themselves to Communism to a greater or lesser degree. But the Communist vote in 1932 was meager; for America, Roosevelt was radical enough.
In the mid-thirties a new directive went forth from Moscow: Western Communists should find common ground with other leftist groups, the better to insinuate themselves into positions of power. From the order stemmed the Popular Front, which bound together various parties of the left around a limited set of pro-union, anti-fascist, anti-racist positions. The American Communist Party, under the leadership of Earl Browder, adopted the slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” Such formulations charmed the gentler spirits in the Popular Front coalition—those who envisaged a gradual interpenetration of Soviet and American values rather than an overthrow of the government. Michael Denning, in his book The Cultural Front, argues that Popular Fronters manipulated the Soviets as much as the Soviets manipulated them. Americans are said to have drawn on the intellectual resources of the Soviet cause—and on its finances—while pursuing their own agenda.
Still, the Popular Front was in many ways a shut-in, fanatical world, faithfully replicating the worst of the Soviet mind-set. Ideologues encouraged conformity and discouraged dissent, even if it meant denouncing yesterday’s conformity as dissent and vice versa. Most American Communists refused to acknowledge the violence of Stalin’s regime, even when evidence of it was placed in front of them. After Shostakovich was denounced in 1936, the New Masses reporter Joshua Kunitz quoted the soothing words of a young Communist: “Don’t worry. There’ll be no blood, no prisons, no ruin and no darkness. The fellows who deserve it will be criticized—that’s all.” (Kunitz retailed these rationalizations in a lecture to New Yorkers that May: “The Truth About Shostakovich,” followed by refreshments and dancing.) Others knew of the violence and chose simply to accept it. Back in 1933, New Masses had invited its readers to ask themselves this ominous question: “Based not on my words, or thoughts, but on the day-to-day acts of my life, would the working-class leaders of the future American Soviet Government be justified in putting me in a responsible job—or