Copland's Musical Frontier

Agnes de Mille had no Plan B when asked to choose a composer for her new ballet Rodeo. Fellow American Aaron Copland was her pick and she’d think about someone else only when and if he knocked her back. “I’ve heard this Copland is good,” conceded Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo impresario Sergei Ivanovich Denham, who had commissioned de Mille to make a one-act work to premiere in New York in late 1942. “You have heard correctly,” replied the choreographer. Copland was “the best”.

It was fortunate that Copland said yes; he was perfect for de Mille’s tale of a lovelorn young woman working on a ranch alongside a gang of cowboys. His 1938 score for another ballet with a Western theme, Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid, was a smash. In 1944 the music for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring would win him a Pulitzer Prize for Music and further burnish his reputation as a composer of the people.

Regardless of the criticism he received, Copland wanted to be popular and was. His writing had the compositional sophistication expected of one who had studied in Paris with star-maker Nadia Boulanger and, miracles of miracles, was also delightfully accessible.

Appearing at just the right time, Copland’s music aimed to bring joy and a sense of belonging to a disjointed American public. After living through the decade-long Great Depression that didn’t end until 1939, the United States entered WWII just two years later after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.  As Alex Ross posits in his compelling study of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise, Copland was “offering images of an ideal nation, the America that could have been or might still be”. 

It’s worth noting that in the 1960s, prime Cold War territory, Copland headed into the drier, cooler thickets of serialism but in the 1930s and 1940s his most famous pieces evoked earlier days. His portraits of a scarcely touched American landscape and plucky pioneers tapped into a hunger for myth and promise. Copland found his form and material in cheerful folk tunes, old hymns, the syncopated rhythms of jazz, brilliant brass, dynamic eruptions of percussion and yearning strings. He wrote sweeping melodies that sang of open vistas. He could shake things up with harmonies enlivened by a lick of dissonance. 

It was great music and it was for absolutely everyone. Above all, this was American music, written by an American composer for ballets by American choreographers and inspired by the nation’s geography, desires, temperament and ambitions. You could hear in Copland’s music how the country had space and appetite for a can-do mentality and the rugged individualism that nevertheless found safe harbour within a community. 

In 2015 Justin Peck, resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, made a one-act ballet to the Rodeo score. De Mille’s narrative was gone but not Copland’s essence. The fabled New York City Ballet musicality and speed got a great workout. The ballet was exhilarating. It had verve and oodles of style. 

Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes was a big success for Peck. Copland Dance Episodes (2023) builds on that work, adding the Billy the Kid and quieter Appalachian Spring scores to Rodeo to make a full-length ballet. Peck escorts Copland into the 21st century (“Copland in the City” perhaps?) with élan. Times may change but people are still people. They have wants and needs. Peck discards his predecessors’ plots but there’s a multitude of stories to be found in his cast of 30, dressed not in frontier-era attire, but in Ellen Warren’s chic, sleek colour-block costumes that celebrate their extraordinary 21st-century athleticism.

For all the stripping away, the bright energy of the man known as the Dean of American music remains. Rodeo, Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring were made for dance. They are rightly still popular in the concert hall but Copland’s first responsibility was to dances made by American choreographers who wanted to explore American themes.  

It’s a wider world now and Peck’s abstraction gives room for other companies to share the spirit. So far only New York City Ballet has performed Copland Dance Episodes but with The Australian Ballet up next, the Copland qualities of spaciousness, vigour, freedom, connection, optimism and the common touch would seem tailor-made.