The Private Canon: Copland's Wild Organ Scherzo
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Aaron Copland isn’t exactly one of those cultural ubiquities I alluded to in my Hamilton post—the kind I don’t feel compelled to lean into and claim for myself because they have somehow seeped into my bloodstream without any active effort on my part—but his music has close to that taken-for-granted status in my pantheon. When I do attend to it, I find it alternately stirring, stimulating, and a bit cool to the touch. This may not be fair—my second favorite composer has often been similarly and unjustly accused of a certain remoteness—but there's no accounting for taste.
I learned this cheeky novelty as a young piano student, and while I never regret hearing Copland's big showpieces (Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare, etc.), I seldom seek them out. To me there’s something about the marriage of the stately mid-century orchestral sound to his spare, deceptively folksy-sounding harmonies that's just too foursquare to me; I prefer a rendition like this, by Bill Frisell and a band, as part of a mini-suite on his record Have a Little Faith, which seems to unleash the music’s ornery American-ness by loosening its orchestral collar:
Indeed I’d love to hear a whole record like that, one that would effectively roots-ify Copland’s Americana in much the way Daniel Kluger’s new Oklahoma! orchestrations brought out that score's do-si-do without sacrificing an inch of its complexity or feeling. (And btw, imo this Randy Newman tribute almost out-Coplands Copland.)
There is, however, a Copland I fully embrace. Not to get all hipster about it, but it’s the early stuff, in particular the tracks on a two-CD collection of orchestral works from 1922 to 1935 that I've cherished for a few decades. It includes his gorgeous piano concerto, his brash, impish Music for the Theatre (not actually for the theatre!), his decisive and diverting Statements for Orchestra. Some of these works have the distinctive glint of social realism, or whatever the musical equivalent of that visual style would be—of a time when composers on both sides of the Atlantic were grasping for a sound that was both rigorously modernist and bracingly populist, and seeming to strike a different balance with each piece. This is the ground in which the music of Weill, my favorite composer, grew, but also the soil from which sprang some of the best work of the French masters I love (Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud, et al.).
One of the gardeners of that fertile scene was undoubtedly Paris composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, whose pupils famously ranged from Copland to Quincy Jones, Milhaud to Astor Piazzolla. What is less known about Boulanger, at least by me, is that she was an organist, and toured as one. The story goes that it was 1924 in Paris, and as Copland was nearing the end of his studies with her, she decided to take him to see the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, for whom she was to play organ in a concert he would guest-conduct at the Boston Symphony. She got the young American to play Koussevitzky some of his pieces, and, as Copland later recounted it in his memoir, the conductor was impressed enough to commission a work on the spot, exclaiming, “You vill write an organ concerto, Mademoiselle Boulanger vill play it, and I vill conduct!"
And so, despite never having written an orchestral work he'd heard performed, and not having written for the organ before, Copland took the gig. The result is an odd, ingenious three-movement piece he somewhat perversely called a "Symphony for Organ and Orchestra," though it really is more of a concerto. I don't care what it's called; all told it's a lustrous, unbiddable minor masterpiece, bearing clear influences of its time (especially Stravinsky and Poulenc) while announcing its own unmistakably distinct voice and carving its own unique path between the great 20th-century Scylla and Charybdis of tunefulness and dissonance.
The second movement, the scherzo, is a particular banger. This impressive stampede of winds, percussion, brass, and organ is notable for many things—its catchy two-against-three ostinato, its delightfully jarring mood swings—but perhaps above all for the way it uses its most exotic instrument. The organ here doesn't have even a trace of churchy reverence or false majesty, but is instead employed for its unique timbre and quality in contrast with the orchestra, sounding alternately spidery, breathy, and cutting—listen for the way it seems to cascade like some kind of bubbling liquid down the jutting peak of a sharp horn line at 1:39 (in the clip above), then at 2:01 begins to churn as if we're hearing the gears under the music. The pieces then gives way to a meditative middle section that curls through some strange chord shapes until a lush string harmony settles in at about 4:16 (it's an F#major11 in the score, but the recording sounds like F), and the thing starts to circle back before a sudden climax rushes in. Compositionally it's all somewhat capricious, but the piece's sudden turns and grabby effects sound to me less like juvenile inexperience than like the savvy legerdemain of a budding natural showman.
Though this "organ symphony" apparently didn't go over well at its New York premiere—after the audience's chilly reception, conductor Walter Damrosch reportedly uttered the famous words, "If a young man can write like that at the age of 23, in five years he will be ready to commit murder"—it sounds to me precisely like the kind of raucous curtain raiser one would expect to be a staple of concert programs. The problem is that most symphonies don't typically have an organ or organist handy for one eight-minute piece (or 15-minute concerto). That performance obstacle is why Copland rescored it all for traditional orchestra as his Symphony No. 1, giving the keyboard parts to horns and winds. But while the Scherzo is similarly gripping in this setting, it lacks the glittering, transfixing strangeness of the original, in which the organ is transformed into a kind of organism. I don't begrudge the direction Copland would take over his long career, which led not to murder but to international triumph and acclaim, but for sheer brio he never topped this initial shot across the bow.
One of the gardeners of that fertile scene was undoubtedly Paris composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, whose pupils famously ranged from Copland to Quincy Jones, Milhaud to Astor Piazzolla. What is less known about Boulanger, at least by me, is that she was an organist, and toured as one. The story goes that it was 1924 in Paris, and as Copland was nearing the end of his studies with her, she decided to take him to see the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, for whom she was to play organ in a concert he would guest-conduct at the Boston Symphony. She got the young American to play Koussevitzky some of his pieces, and, as Copland later recounted it in his memoir, the conductor was impressed enough to commission a work on the spot, exclaiming, “You vill write an organ concerto, Mademoiselle Boulanger vill play it, and I vill conduct!"
And so, despite never having written an orchestral work he'd heard performed, and not having written for the organ before, Copland took the gig. The result is an odd, ingenious three-movement piece he somewhat perversely called a "Symphony for Organ and Orchestra," though it really is more of a concerto. I don't care what it's called; all told it's a lustrous, unbiddable minor masterpiece, bearing clear influences of its time (especially Stravinsky and Poulenc) while announcing its own unmistakably distinct voice and carving its own unique path between the great 20th-century Scylla and Charybdis of tunefulness and dissonance.
The second movement, the scherzo, is a particular banger. This impressive stampede of winds, percussion, brass, and organ is notable for many things—its catchy two-against-three ostinato, its delightfully jarring mood swings—but perhaps above all for the way it uses its most exotic instrument. The organ here doesn't have even a trace of churchy reverence or false majesty, but is instead employed for its unique timbre and quality in contrast with the orchestra, sounding alternately spidery, breathy, and cutting—listen for the way it seems to cascade like some kind of bubbling liquid down the jutting peak of a sharp horn line at 1:39 (in the clip above), then at 2:01 begins to churn as if we're hearing the gears under the music. The pieces then gives way to a meditative middle section that curls through some strange chord shapes until a lush string harmony settles in at about 4:16 (it's an F#major11 in the score, but the recording sounds like F), and the thing starts to circle back before a sudden climax rushes in. Compositionally it's all somewhat capricious, but the piece's sudden turns and grabby effects sound to me less like juvenile inexperience than like the savvy legerdemain of a budding natural showman.
Though this "organ symphony" apparently didn't go over well at its New York premiere—after the audience's chilly reception, conductor Walter Damrosch reportedly uttered the famous words, "If a young man can write like that at the age of 23, in five years he will be ready to commit murder"—it sounds to me precisely like the kind of raucous curtain raiser one would expect to be a staple of concert programs. The problem is that most symphonies don't typically have an organ or organist handy for one eight-minute piece (or 15-minute concerto). That performance obstacle is why Copland rescored it all for traditional orchestra as his Symphony No. 1, giving the keyboard parts to horns and winds. But while the Scherzo is similarly gripping in this setting, it lacks the glittering, transfixing strangeness of the original, in which the organ is transformed into a kind of organism. I don't begrudge the direction Copland would take over his long career, which led not to murder but to international triumph and acclaim, but for sheer brio he never topped this initial shot across the bow.
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