Chapter 16 - Years of Expansion, Challenge, and Change

Summary

We flew back to Rochester from Europe in August 1975. After Robert Freeman returned from his vacation, I made an appointment with him to dis¬cuss the next season. I felt that the first item of business should be the upcom¬ing seventy-fifth birthday of Aaron Copland and the possibility of granting him an honorary doctorate from the Eastman School of Music on that occasion. We were one of the few music schools in the country that had not done so, because of a fact of which I was unaware. It seems that Copland wrote a long article in the New York Times about all the New Music festivals and in particular about those festivals featuring American music. In the article he praised How¬ard Hanson for the largest and longest-lasting of such festivals, but he also complained that Hanson neglected many composers who were stylistically not to his liking. Hanson did not take criticism lightly and wrote an op-ed letter the following week, stating that Copland had been wrong in his assessment of the Festivals of American Music in Rochester, and he added a barb to the effect that one could never satisfy the cultural elite establishment of New York. And im¬plied in the term “elite establishment” may have been (and Copland perceived it that way, as he admitted to me later) that the New York group of artists was largely Jewish and consisted, to some extent, of gay men. The exchange created a schism between these two men, and they ceased to communicate from that time on. This was in the late 1920s. As a matter of fact, I must say that Copland was mistaken in his assessment of the Festivals of American Music at Eastman, since Hanson performed many composers he did not like personally or whose style he abhorred, including Copland's “far-out” ballet Grohg as well as Roy Har¬ris, with whom he was not particularly close despite some stylistic affinity. But the perception, justified or not, of Hanson's skewed preferences was the reason why Copland never had come to Eastman in any capacity during the many years Hanson was the director of the school.

I had heard that story many times and proposed to Bob Freeman that, at the time of Copland's seventy-fifth, we might be able to finally put an end to this situation.