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These pages contain program notes written for Redwood
Symphony. You are free to use the information in your own program
notes. If you quote me directly, please attribute it. Thanks!
These notes were edited, amended, and otherwise
improved by Eric Kujawsky, Peter Stahl, and others.
Barbara Heninger
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Aaron Copland
Fanfare for the Common Man
In
1942, in the midst World War II, conductor Eugene Goossens of the Cincinnati
Symphony approached Aaron Copland with a request to write a fanfare. As
assistant conductor of Thomas Beecham’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra during the
first world war, Goossens had asked British composers to write fanfares with
which the orchestra would open each concert. He wished to repeat this gesture
during the current conflict, and engaged 18
composers
to write fanfares for the 1942-43
season. Of them, only Copland’s has stood the test of
time.
Goossen
suggested to the composers that the works be titled after various allies and
fighting organizations; some of the fanfares included A
Fanfare for Russia
by Deems Taylor, Fanfare
for the Signal Corps
by Howard Hanson, Fanfare
de la Liberte
by Darius Milhaud, and A
Fanfare for the Fighting French
by Walter Piston. Even Goossens tried his hand at one, with Fanfare
for the Merchant Marine.
But when Copland, who toyed with Fanfare
for a Solemn Ceremony
and Fanfare
for Four Freedoms, finally chose the common man as his dedicatee,
Goossen declared the work’s title “as original as its music,” and chose
what he thought was a suitable special occasion for its premiere: March 12,
1943, near the time to file income tax. Copland is said to
have replied, “I [am] all for honoring the common man at income tax time.”
Copland’s
fanfare is by now so familiar that it is difficult to assess what makes it so
memorable. Copland himself knew he had something notable, and he used the theme
again in the final movement of his Third Symphony (1946). Certainly it evidences
the strong, spare open-fourth and -fifth harmonies that were so integral to
Copland’s compositions during this “populist” period. It is also
remarkably slow, for a fanfare: Copland marked it "Very deliberately."
It begins with a call to arms from the percussion (timpani, bass drum, and tam
tam or gong). But it is the heroic trumpet theme that draws us in, with both its
majesty and energy. The theme is soon passed between trombones and tuba, and
then horns and trumpets. With each repetition and additional voice it increases
in grandeur, until the work closes with a crescendo in the percussion matched by
a swelling chord in the brass. The whole is one of those happy works that seem
so ‘right,’ it is as if the composer had discovered a force of nature and
simply set it to paper.
July 19, 2008
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