The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland

286 Pages·2006·1.81 MB·English

by  Aaron Copland

The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland

The Selected Correspondence of
Aaron
Copland
Edited by
and
ELIZABETH B. CRIST WAYNE SHIRLEY
E E E
Yale University Press New Haven & London
Publication of this volume was supported by a University Cooperative Society Subvention Grant
awarded by the University of Texas at Austin.
Copyright ∫ 2006 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by James J. Johnson and set in New Caledonia type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Copland, Aaron, 1900–
[Correspondence. Selections]
The selected correspondence of Aaron Copland / edited by Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-300-11121-7 (alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-300-11121-5 (alk. paper)
1. Copland, Aaron, 1900– —Correspondence. 2. Composers—United States—Correspondence.
I. Crist, Elizabeth Bergman. II. Shirley, Wayne D. III. Title.
ml410.c756a4 2006
780%.92–dc22
[B]
2005021094
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Clurman of May 8, 1945, is reprinted by permission of
the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The letter
from Ronald Caltabiano to Leonard Bernstein of May 3, 1988, is reprinted by permission of
Ronald Caltabiano. All other letters are reprinted by permission of the Aaron Copland Fund for
Music, Inc., copyright owner.
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xiii
Chapter One: Brooklyn and Paris, 1909–24 1
Chapter Two: The World of Modern Music, 1924–31 43
Chapter Three: The Depression Years, 1932–37 88
Chapter Four: Musical Triumphs, 1937–42 120
Chapter Five: During and After the War, 1942–48 148
Chapter Six: The Post-War Decade, 1948–58 191
Chapter Seven: 1958 and Beyond 221
Index of Correspondents 251
Index of Copland’s Works 253
General Index 256

Preface
‘‘I’m a pig! I’m a pig and a sinner and a wretch. But apparently I’d rather be all
those things than write a letter.’’ Every line of this book belies these words,
which open Aaron Copland’s letter to Nicolas Slonimsky of July 14, 1927.
Perhaps Copland was simply joking, or perhaps, like many of us, he felt a
reluctance to begin something, which he then enjoyed once he had started.
What is sure is that Copland always wrote with confidence and élan. He was a
gifted and natural letter writer with a knack for expressing himself clearly and
colloquially. Even a standard business acknowledgment—there are none in
this collection—reads graciously. Letters to friends are written with wit and
warmth and an amount of self-revelation that Copland, conscious of his posi-
tion as spokesman for modern music, did not allow in his more formal writings.
In his later years Copland himself enjoyed his earlier letters, quoting from
them often in his memoirs (co-written with Vivian Perlis), and they remain a
joy to read today.
The letters in this collection have been selected for their readability, their
interest, and the light they cast on Copland’s thoughts about his career. There
has been some attempt to represent the general flow of his life from the 1920s
through the 1970s, but we have preferred to let the richer periods of the
correspondence (especially the early 1920s and early 1940s) take up more
space rather than to seek an equal representation of all years. We have not
excluded anything as unsuitable for public print, nor have we included any-
thing for sensational content. While we have striven to reproduce letters to a
wide variety of correspondents, we have not published items simply to get
viii PREFACE
another name on the list: indeed, we have omitted letters of moderate inter-
est to such notables as William Grant Still, Henry Cowell, and Walter Piston.
A composer’s life, to a large extent, is lived in his or her compositions, and
we have allotted a generous portion of this collection to letters that deal with
the creation and reception of Copland’s works. Not all are well documented,
however, and no mention is made of such obscurities as The World of Nick
Adams or The Cummington Story. We have not excluded letters because they
are available elsewhere or have already been widely excerpted. This is a col-
lection of Copland’s correspondence and should be the first place for a reader
to turn.
Every letter in this collection has been published intact. The only omission
has been the address of the recipient on the few letters typed by a secretary
that follow the convention of giving the name and address of the recipient at
the bottom. (We have included indications of secretarial aid—‘‘AC:dw’’ and the
like—when they occur, as proof that a letter has been dictated.) Any ellipsis
dots found in the text of Copland’s letters in this collection are Copland’s own.
Ellipsis dots in the footnotes and commentary, including Copland’s letters
quoted there, are editorial and represent omitted text. At the top of each letter,
we have noted the letter’s recipient and physical description. If the original
paper has a letterhead, it is indicated here as well, in brackets. The date of
each letter appears in the upper-right corner—Copland’s usual place for such
dating—with editorial additions given in brackets. Postscripts appear at the
bottom of the letter. Names of locations in annotations have been given in
English when an English form exists—Rome, not Roma. The single exception
is the letterhead for the letter of April 11, 1922, which caused Copland to try to
translate ‘‘Firenze’’ for his parents.
This collection reproduces Copland’s somewhat informal punctuation, in
particular his habit of omitting the apostrophe in such contractions as ‘‘it’s’’
when he wants to sound conversational. (Copland rarely adds an incorrect
apostrophe.) We have also kept Copland’s usage in citing the names of works.
Although Copland often placed periods and commas outside closing quotation
marks or parentheses, we have followed the conventions of contemporary
punctuation and tucked them back inside where appropriate. Likewise, we
have moved periods outside close-parentheses marks when they should be
there. Always, the goal is readability.
The few obvious slips of the pen and typos have been corrected. In most
cases, we have allowed Copland’s own misspellings to stand without comment,
rather than clutter the text with ‘‘[sic]’’ or footnotes. Most of the misspellings
are fairly innocent—‘‘appartment,’’ ‘‘Teusday,’’ ‘‘rehearsel’’—but he found
proper names somewhat of a trap. It was many years before he learned that the
name of the conductor who most influenced his career was not ‘‘Koussevitsky.’’
We have left Koussevitzky’s name as Copland spelled it. Other names he had
PREFACE ix
problems spelling include Damrosch, Honegger, Jan Peerce, and the always
troublesome Isidor Philipp. We have identified these at their first appearance
with proper spelling in a footnote. In the very few spots where Copland’s
syntax is obscure enough to cause difficulty for a reader, we have attempted to
clarify his meaning, either in brackets or a footnote. In his correspondence
with Leonard Bernstein, Copland would occasionally employ Koussevitzkyese,
imitating the accent and phraseology of their beloved Russian-born mentor.
When this is not clear, we have annotated such Koussevitzkyisms, but we have
tried not to explain the obvious. Copland’s French orthography is preserved as
well, even with the occasional error. The occasional foreign phrase has been
translated (liberally, not literally) in brackets if its meaning does not seem
obvious, and the single letter in French has been translated by the editors.
Editors must choose what to annotate, but editors who have spent their lives
studying and enjoying twentieth-century music may find themselves unsure of
how much to explain. We have assumed that our readership will know the
major figures in twentieth-century composition—those with many pages in
Schwann and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—but have
not assumed detailed knowledge of their work lists. Thus we have identified
Oedipus Rex, Elektra, Le Poème de l’exstase, and other works known to most
musicians. One litmus test was Les Six, the group of French musicians en-
demic to undergraduate music exams. The spouse of one editor, a woman of
wide general culture but not a musician, did not know the term, so it and
anything not better known have been annotated. We have also assumed that
the reader needs no introduction to such literary figures as Gertrude Stein,
John Steinbeck, and Thornton Wilder.
We have identified Copland’s own pieces on first appearance unless they are
utterly clear in context; after that they are identified only when the reader
might be unsure of what piece is being referred to. When Copland mentions a
composition by another composer but does not give a title (‘‘Piston’s latest’’),
we have tried to identify the piece. Though we could refer to Copland’s two-
volume autobiography, co-authored with Vivian Perlis, in nearly every note,
references have been kept to the bare minimum. Readers interested in a
narrative account of Copland’s life and music are advised to consult that excel-
lent work as well as Howard Pollack’s biography, Aaron Copland: The Life and
Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). The hope has
been to strike a balance between fussy overannotation and the assumption that
our readership knows everything.
Copland often mentions that he is enclosing something (clippings, a photo-
graph, a letter to Copland himself) with his letter. In no case in the correspon-
dence published here is this enclosure still with the letter. We have therefore
dispensed with the standard note ‘‘no longer with letter.’’ In some cases, the
materials may exist elsewhere in the Aaron Copland Collection in the Music