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Aaron Copland and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2011

EMILY ABRAMS ANSARI
EMILY ABRAMS ANSARI*
Affiliation:
emily.ansari@uwo.ca
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Abstract

Scholars have largely ignored Aaron Copland's lengthy career as a cultural diplomat, although the documentation surrounding it sheds new light on his political views. Through a consideration of his work with the U.S. government during World War II and the Cold War this article argues that a brand of universalist internationalism, rooted in his earlier musical experiences in Europe and in his leftist politics, motivated many of Copland's political activities at home and overseas during this period. Copland remained committed to this perspective both before and after his McCarthy hearing in 1953, but the Cold War inevitably brought new challenges to a man with such an outlook. Copland's work with the U.S. Information Agency during this period shows that although his beliefs and attitudes remained unchanged, he felt the need to participate in a reconstruction of his image that better matched the new climate. His music written during the Cold War, furthermore, provides an artistic realization of this interaction between pragmatism and idealism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 335 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2011

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References

References

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Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books, 1999.Google Scholar
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Aaron Copland Collection. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection, MC468. Special Collections, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.Google Scholar
Ramey, Phillip, telephone interview by author, 17 November 2006.Google Scholar
Sanders, Terry, telephone interview by author, 17 November 2006.Google Scholar
Copland Portrait. 30 minutes. Produced and written by Frieda Lee Mock and Terry Sanders. Directed by Terry Sanders. United States Information Agency, Washington, D.C., 1975. Available to view at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., call number VAF 2047.Google Scholar
Happy Birthday Aaron Copland. Produced by Rodney Greenberg. Directed by Humphrey Burton. BBC, London. Broadcast by BBC, U.K., 16 November 1975.Google Scholar
“Aaron Copland, 75th Anniversary, Dean of American Composers.” Washington, D.C.: USIA, 1976.Google Scholar
Abrams, Emily. “Aaron Copland Meets the Soviet Composers: A Television Special.” In Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Oja, Carol J. and Tick, Judith, 379–94. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abrams, Emily. “Copland on Television: An Annotated List of Interviews and Documentaries.” In Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Oja, Carol J. and Tick, Judith, 413–38. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansari, Emily Abrams. “‘Masters of the President's Music’: Cold War Composers and the United States Government.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2010.Google Scholar
Campbell, Jennifer. “Shaping Solidarity: Music, Diplomacy, and Inter-American Relations, 1936–1946.” Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2010.Google Scholar
Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copland, Aaron. “Composers in Russia, 1960.” New York Herald Tribune, 8 May 1961.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron. “Connotations.” In Aaron Copland, A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Kostelanetz, Richard, 274–75. New York: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron. “Effect of the Cold War on the Artist in the United States.” In Aaron Copland, A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Kostelanetz, Richard, 128–32. New York: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron, and Perlis, Vivian. Copland: 1900 through 1942. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron, and Perlis, Vivian. Copland: Since 1943. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Crist, Elizabeth B.Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crist, Elizabeth B. “Mutual Responses in the Midst of an Era: Aaron Copland's The Tender Land and Leonard Bernstein's Candide.”Journal of Musicology 23/4 (2006): 485–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLapp, Jennifer. “Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideology in the McCarthy Era.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997.Google Scholar
Falk, Andrew Justin. Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Goehr, Lydia. “Political Music and the Politics of Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52/1 (1994): 99–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Highbrow Stuff.” The Observer (U.K.), 24 August 1958.Google Scholar
Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Robbie. The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Meyer, Felix, and Shreffler, Anne, eds. Elliott Carter: A Centennial Tribute in Letters and Documents. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher. “Shostakovich: Politics and Musical Language.” In Shostakovich: The Man and His Music, ed. Norris, Christopher, 163–87. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982.Google Scholar
OjaCarol, J Carol, J. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Pollack, Howard. “Copland and the Prophetic Voice.” In Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Oja, Carol J. and Tick, Judith, 1–14. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Simms, Bryan. “Serialism in the Early Music of Aaron Copland.” Musical Quarterly 90/2 (2007): 176–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starr, Larry. “War Drums, Tolling Bells, and Copland's Piano Sonata.” In Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Oja, Carol J. and Tick, Judith, 233–55. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Von Eschen, Penny M.Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Willkie, Wendell L.One World. London: Cassell, 1943.Google Scholar