BY ANDREW MESSENGER
On 26 May 1953, Aaron Copland sat before Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s notorious Senate Permanent Sub- Committee on Investigations. He was given little more than a weekend’s notice. Copland’s actions had been un-American in the extreme, McCarthy claimed. He had supported a variety of unacceptable causes. Unstated was the implication that he may have been a traitor to his country.
It can be difficult today to imagine the scene: McCarthy, at the height of his powers, a screaming red-faced tyrant with the support of the American government behind him. This was the era of actual – not metaphorical – black lists for artists declared communists, often on the scantiest of evidence. This was the era of McCarthyism, the exploitation of the national paranoia over the alleged subversive influence of the non-conformist. Many of those censured in the witch-hunt were never to work again. For Copland, the stakes were high. Senator McCarthy, in one of the accusations with which he liked to punctuate his interrogations, denounced Copland thus: “according to the records, you have what appears to be one of the longest Communist-front records of anyone we have had here.”
What made this claim truly frightening was that McCarthy’s hyperbole was, for once, not so far off the mark.
Copland’s response – “I spend my days writing symphonies, concertos, ballads, and I am not a political thinker” – was disingenuous. It is unquestionably true that above all he loved music for its own sake – but his music was also a reflection and an expression of a society. Copland spent most of his life consciously constructing a recognizably American style that would be accessible to any citizen. He called this music his “vernacular”, a common American language for serious art, comprehensible to all. It’s easy to see how this rejection of class barriers reflects a certain type of political thought.
It is not in doubt today that Copland held communist sympathies. Once everyone had calmed down from their Red Scare, he admitted as much. Is Copland’s music political? Certainly not in a doctrinaire, propagandistic fashion, as he was much too serious a composer for that. Nonetheless, Copland’s ‘vernacular’ music celebrates a certain type of American culture. Copland’s America is the America for all, the America of, say, the working class steelmaker – not the stockbroker or the capitalist.
Copland’s loudest proclamation of this patriotic creed came in the brief work written in 1942 for his friend Eugene Goossens, the Fanfare for the Common Man. It was one of 18 fanfares commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony at the height of the war. Its title is almost a self-contradiction. Traditionally, fanfares are a quick-moving form, often written to venerate a royal individual. By sharply reducing the tempo, Copland emphasizes the stateliness of the already regal form. His music is not written to praise an individual, but the sacrifice of an entire class. This is a piece that has earned its ubiquity. It has been used repeatedly on television, by pop musicians, to inaugurate presidents, to psych up sports teams. Copland’s Fanfare has survived because he so effectively achieved his aim; revering the average Joe.
Ultimately, McCarthy achieved nothing by his grilling of Copland. The composer evaded his line of questioning, and even obliged the Senator to acknowledge that, “you have a right to defend communism or the Communist party … or anything else.” After all, in America, there is a First Amendment. It was this free society, this nation “of the Common Man,” in Vice President Henry Wallace’s phrase, that Aaron Copland spent his entire life celebrating. McCarthy had it totally backwards. It was not Copland who had betrayed the ideals of America, but the Senator from Wisconsin. Thirty-three years after accusing him of being un-American, the very same Congress of the United States gave him its Medal of Freedom.
Image: Senator McCarthy’s sub-committee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
