I looked at his hair. It was thick. It had a tendency to curl. It was exactly the right length — not too long, not too short. It wasn’t a butch through which his scalp showed pinkly. I envied him his hair and his even tan, every inch of which was exactly the same degree of darkness. There were no freckles, no peeling spots, I thought, figures that his hair should look right. He should know about such things. After all, fit’s the most famous barber since Delilah, although he abandoned his tonsorial trade about twenty-five years ago to sing for his living.

“I understand you’re a big man in the icechomping field,” I said to Perry Como. “I’m an ice eater myself, and it drives my wife to distraction. She says she can hear the echo of my molars all over the house. Does your dentist tell you it’s bad for your teeth when you crack a whole cube with one bite?”

Como looked cautiously around his office as if he were afraid it was bugged. “I’ve never told him,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“You mean he can’t tell by just looking into your mouth?” I asked.

“He’s preoccupied with some other dental problems of mine,” Como explained. “For eighteen years I’ve had a small space between my two front teeth. That was my Number One problem. It was a minor one. I acquired a major one many years ago when they drilled why you should know this, but once your teeth are ground and capped, they’re tender afterward. If you get a little cavity or decay on the uncapped part of the tooth, the dentist has to take the cap off, drill a little higher and put on another cap. Dentically speaking, I’ve been going through hell for eighteen years. In all honesty, I guess if I had laid off my ice-breaker bit, my teeth would be in pretty good shape.”

I said, “I’m curious about how you go about crunching ice with caps on.”

“Obviously my caps are made of concrete,” Como said, “I can polish off a whole bowl of ice in no time at all.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m an ice craver. When I play a lot of golf, as I frequently do, and it’s very hot, I perspire bucketfuls. I get dehydrated and I have to push that lost water back into my body, I’m not very big, but in one round of golf I can ooze between five and seven pounds.”

“On just an ordinary, peaceful, quiet day of golf?” I asked.

“It’s actually water. It’s bloat that vanishes.”

I said, “I understand that you play a very leisurely game of golf, a lazy game. So why all the perspiration?”

He smiled, confessing, “I can sweat like a herd of wild animals. My pores are wide open and ready to go any time. I’ll tell you a secret,” he went on, “I know your spies have told you that my rounds of golf aren’t strenuous, that I keep my eyes and ears open to the crunch of grass underfoot and the sound of birdsong as I journey around eighteen holes. They doubtless tell you also that I seem to relish these things so greatly that I play very slowly. Well, to use a sweet word instead of a crude one, that’s a lot of hooey. I may appear to loiter, but honestly I’m just as fast as anybody else on a golf course.” He thought of something and added, “With the exception of England. I really had a problem there. For some reason, British players hit the ball and run. Their wives may find them something less than volcanic at home, but put them down on a golf course, and it’s Balaklava and The Charge of the Light Brigade all over again. They charge at you like wild boars — polite wild boars, mind you, but if they want to play through you, if you’re smart, you let them play.”

I said, “The only English golf match I’ve ever seen was one played between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for the Playing Fields of England Fund, They had to call it off on the fourth hole because they were driving their balls right down the spectators’ throats. Twelve or fifteen thousand people crowded onto the fairways until there weren’t any fairways; there were just masses of people.”

“I played in a few of those things myself,” Como said. “They’re fun until they start leaving you no room to play in. After that they’re murder.”

I said, “I helped Bob Hope write his story for The Saturday Evening Post. There are those who say he’s no good without his writers around him, but I can testify that there were many times when he said sidesplitting things to me on his own, without his writers thinking them up for him.”

“He’s a swifty with an ad lib,” Como agreed. “Hope’s played a lot of golf exhibitions for charity, and I’ve played with him on some of them. You gather together three or four characters like Hope, and ten or twenty thousand people are apt to turn out. When the galleries start lining up on the fairways until they leave only a long, narrow slit for you to drive through, it scares the hell out of you. You could kill a spectator if you hit him in the wrong spot.

“Most of the benefits I’ve played,” he went on, “have been for boys’ clubs or for such things as cerebral-palsy funds. I remember one day in Washington, D.C, when there were five of us—Hope and I, Ben Hogan, Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Demaret. Most of the people who’d come out to see us play weren’t golfers and knew no golf etiquette. They didn’t even have enough gumption to know they were in danger and get out of the way when Hope and Sullivan and I were shooting. Hogan and Demaret knew where their shots were going, but you can’t stand in front of Hope or me when we’re shooting without running a good chance of having a slice or a hook slam into you.

“That was the maddest day I can remember. Bob was flying in from somewhere with Jim Demaret. They were supposed to be there at one o’clock, but when they didn’t show up, Hogan gave the crowd a golf clinic.
He showed them how to hit some balls, then he explained his shots over a microphone to kill time. People were milling and trampling around out of hand, and I was hiding in the locker room. I wasn’t about to go out there and get flattened. Finally there was the sound of police-motorcycle sirens, and in came Hope.

“From the moment we teed off on the first hole, trying to play golf was ridiculous. By the time we got to where a ball had landed, it was gone, and we never saw it again. I didn’t see the same ball twice all day. There were supposed to be marshals to protect us — they were really to protect the crowd —but they didn’t. So the people gathered in the middle of the fairways and grabbed the balls as fast as we hit them. We kept trying anyhow and finally got to the fifth hole, which was a well-trapped par three. I’ll never forget what Bob did then. It showed a softer and kinder side of this man who seems so cocky on the outside. He told the rest of us, ‘I’m going to hit it in the trap,’ and sure enough, that’s where he hit it.

“I wish I had a movie of the action for the next fifteen minutes. Bob deliberately hit that ball from one trap to another, dealing out stale jokes for the crowd every second of the time. He was giving the crowd a show for their money, and it was hilariously funny. He’d hit under the ball so it would go straight up in the air, or he’d top it and bury it in the sand. You know, people consistently underestimate Bob. He’s much more than just a funny man; he’s a very kind man too.

“We played four more holes because we thought we ought to play at least nine, after which we dropped everything and ran for the clubhouse like rabbits. I simply couldn’t have stood another nine holes. We’d be there yet. It had taken us four and a half hours to play the holes we did play. When we saw a ball, we hit it. The rest of the time we were signing autographs and walking. A couple of times I even walked in the wrong direction because I couldn’t see the fairway.”

From Our Archives: I Call On Perry Como The Saturday Evening Post

The King of Rock 'n Roll, Elvis Presley.

The recent passing of Dick Clark reminded us of the early days of rock music—back when it was alternately called “rock and roll” and The End of Civilization.

Though we remember Clark as a perennially nice, inoffensive guy, he was a force for change in the ’50s. Not only did he play the teen music that parents disliked so much, he insisted on welcoming black teens into his studio audience, and traveling through the South in a racially mixed tour. His “Caravan of the Stars” bus was often denied service and even threatened by armed segregationists.

Just as significant, though, was his promoting of rock ‘n’ roll, which helped integrate black and white traditions and audiences.

When it emerged unexpected in the 1950s, many Americans were shocked and suspicious of this strange, energetic new sound.They were accustomed to “pop” music. But rock ‘n’ roll was, in fact, true “pop” music if the word is meant as an abbreviation of “popular.”

Up to that time, the musical tastes of Americans had been largely shaped by a big industry with a few record labels, which determined much of the music America heard.

As a 1959 article reported, however, the predominance of these companies fell when a few small, independent studios, with little budget and no advertising, produced enormous hit records.

Up until a few years ago there was a fairly orderly sequence that took place in the launching of a new “pop” record. Everything was done big. Whenever one of the major recording companies came across a catchy tune, the company assigned it to a big-name singer, backed him up with a big-name band, then unleashed a barrage of publicity.

Today the popular-record business… is dominated by the smalls and the unknowns.

Knowledgeable men in the field agree … the record revolution started on a hot day in 1953 when a slim high-school boy, with his hair nearly down to his shoulders, fidgeted with a beat-up guitar below the windows of the newly opened Sun Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.

The boy, who had taken time off from his after-school job at the Crown Electric Company, spent an hour of indecision out on the sidewalk before he got his courage up and walked one flight up to the small one-room studio. When Sam Phillips, [Sun’s] owner, approached, the boy gulped and said, “Please, mister, I’d like to make a record for my mother.”

“Sure, buddy, just relax and we’ll give it a try,” Phillips said encouragingly.

Phillips was impressed, “the boy was just a raw kid with no training, but he had an interesting sound.” Phillips eventually found the “right song” for Presley —“Without Love.” As Phillips told the reporters, they “had to work hard to get the best out of his style”.

And even when we got something that sounded right, we had a terrible time getting any disc jockey to play it. The only place we got his records played at first was in the Negro sections of Chicago and Detroit and in California.”

Buddy Holly.

But the sound eventually drifted into the hearing of America’s teenagers, where it struck a resounding chord.

After Presley’s overwhelming success [selling 35 million records by that year], unknown studios and artists were eager to try their luck, completely bypassing the big record labels.

Buddy Holly was another star-out-of-nowhere. Throwing together a few songs with a combo he’d assembled in Lubbock, Texas, he drove with his band—The Crickets—out to a tiny recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico—as far from the heart of the recording industry as you can get in the lower 48 states. By the time of his death, 30 months later, he had sold 6 million records—most of which had been recorded in the shadow of the big grain elevator in ‘downtown’ Clovis.

[Inspired by these successes,] youngsters with dreams of glory and gold pooled their talents. A singer would write his own song, hunt up a couple of instrumentalists, and they’d bang out tunes in rumpus rooms, living rooms or basements until they had something they thought was worth recording. Then they’d try to peddle their tapes. If a producer thought they had a “sound,” some unusual quality, either instrumental or vocal, that might drive the teen-agers wild, he’d take a gamble and make records.

This pattern, repeated over and over, revolutionized the popular-record field.

Today 70 to 80 per cent of the hits are being turned out by youngsters you never heard of a month or two ago, and who may disappear from the public scene just as abruptly as they came.

The major companies [are]… still turning out many records, but their hits don’t come as easily as they used to.

The biggest [obstacle] is the inflexibility of the major record companies. The independents are able to adapt quickly to any shift in teen-age tastes; the big organizations, saddled with protocol and chains of command, can’t move as fast.

Many record companies have found, too, that it’s a risky business to buy a new hit and re-record it with big-name singers and musicians. The teen-agers almost always prefer the original recording… [they] refuse to be impressed by the big-name approach.

The Everly Brothers.

As the early sounds of rock music poured out of teenager’s radios and record players, adults who were accustomed to ‘big name talent’ (Tony Martin, Jo Stafford, Kay Starr) created their own ‘new sound’: a strident, continual chorus of complaints about that ‘gawdawful music.’

As the Post authors noted, their criticism could actually ensure the survival of rock ‘n’ roll.

According to many teenagers, rock ‘n’ roll never would have got as popular as it is if their elders didn’t hate it so violently. It’s something to think about. The young parents of today compose the generation that went all out for swing against the noisy objections of their parents; and their parents used to get all giggly over ragtime. And so on and so on, back to the day some Neanderthal father listened in outrage as his son got off some hot licks with matched dinosaur-bone drumsticks on the family tom-tom. It must have seemed to that early man that the kids were going absolutely to the dogs.

Today the budding Elvis or Buddy doesn’t even need a small-town recording studio. They can put together their own hit in front of their computer, launch it on YouTube, then sit back and wait for the agents and record companies to show up.

The no-studio viral-marketing approach might have given us Justin Bieber, or any number of other rising artists you don’t like, but if the music industry was still controlled by a few record labels, we might still be listening to Frankie Laine and Rosemary Clooney.

The Rock Revolution in the Dick Clark Days The Saturday Evening Post

It was the first Carnegie program dedicated entirely to the compositions of a black composer. It was also one of the first attempts to bring jazz tried into the world of serious “art music”—the realm of experimental music where new rhythms, sounds, and styles are attempted.

This was still a radical idea in 1943, when the musical world was a land with well defined borders. Jazz was still classified as “popular” music, principally intended for dancing not listening.

In 1924, George Gershwin had tried to merge jazz and classical traditions with his “Rhapsody in Blue.” The critics of important periodicals had tossed him a few crumbs of praise but had generally dismissed the work.

Almost twenty years later, they were no more generous to Ellington after his Carnegie concert, though Maurice Zolotow, who wrote “The Duke of Hot” for the Post that August noted that the Duke has plenty of prestigious admirers. Just before the concert began, Ellington was presented with a plaque honoring his contributions to music. It was signed by Leopold Stokowski, Artur Rodzinski, Fritz Reiner, Deems Taylor, and others — America’s foremost conductors and musicologists.

At this concert Ellington gave the world premiere of his “Black, Brown and Beige,” the longest swing tune ever written. It lasted forty-five minutes and stunned the Carnegie Hall audience. Ellington described it as a tone poem, a musical history of the Negro in America from slavery to the present time.

The music critic of the New York Herald Tribune remarked the next morning, “Duke Ellington is the only jazz musi­cian whose programs have enough musi­cal interest to be judged by the same standards one applies to art music.” The critic of the Harlem People’s Voice stated, “He is the articulate spokesman for the existence of a new Negro with a new point of view.” And the jitterbug viewpoint was less sedately expressed in Downbeat. The jive periodical head­lined: DUKE KILLS CARNEGIE CATS!

Generally, though, the critics were dismissive. Ellington filed the work away and never recorded it. But he never abandoned his goal of breaking new ground for jazz and enabling it to express the spirit of his times and his people.

America never doubted his mastery of the popular melody.

The man, who is considered by musicians themselves to be the supreme master of the music that swings, has composed some 950 tunes, including “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Solitude,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and his current hit, “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”

But a growing number of music lovers, especially symphonic composers of the time, were fascinated by the innovation they heard within his works.

Some of Ellington’s most advanced jazz compositions—“Reminiscing in Tempo,” which takes up four sides on records, or “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which takes up two sides—require two or three attentive listenings until they make sense, and a num ber of critics compare the later Ellington to Stravinsky and Ravel.

Stravinsky himself compares Ellington to Stravinsky, and when the ultramodern Russian com­poser visited New York several years ago and was asked by a reception committee what he wished to see in the metropolis, he replied that the first thing he wanted to do was to chase up to Harlem and hear Duke Ellington’s magnifique jazz symphonies at the Cotton Club. The reception committee had never heard of the Cotton Club.

European audiences, which were hearing Ellington’s music for the first time, responded as if these works were the next development in the classical tradition. When Ellington performed overseas, he found

The programs were annotated in scholarly style. The critics read ponderous implications into his tunes. After a concert in Utrecht, Holland, a Dutch critic wrote concerning a number called “The Mooche”: ‘I feel in this piece a conflict of two elemental forces: the one the violence of Nature, which is in an eternal struggle with the other, the force of Man, a more melan­choly, restrained and mental force.’

Ellington was pleased, and bemused, by these interpretations. The true inspiration of his increasingly complex music, he readily told anyone, came out of the history and experience of black Americans.

“People think,” Ellington likes to ex­plain, “that Negro music is different mainly because of the strong rhythm. But they don’t appreciate that the Negro, besides being full of the beat-beat-beat, also has terrific changes of mood and changes of pace, and he has greater ex­tremes of emotion and quicker changes of mood than other groups of people. And that is what our music expresses. And that is why I suppose it seems com­plicated to some people. Well, the Negro is a complicated person; that’s what some people don’t understand.”

It’s difficult now to get a sense of how Ellington and other jazz musicians—both black and white—re-defined American culture. The adventurous, explorative style of jazz—dismissed by Ellington’s 1943 critics as “formless and meaningless” and “too complex”—has become one of our greatest contributions to world culture. As described at this week’s White House jazz concert for Chinese president Hu Jintao, it is “quintessentially American.”

The Eventual Triumph of Duke Ellington The Saturday Evening Post

There are differences, of course; America was a vastly different country in the late 1800s. But the one difference that stood out in Sousa’s articles was the opportunities for musicians. When all music was ‘live,’ there was a constant need for musicians in theaters, vaudeville houses, concert halls, ballrooms, banquet halls, and eventually movie theaters. Sousa seems to walk from one engagement into another with little unemployed time between.

He began his career while still a teenager. By age 26, he was conducting the Marine Corps band. By 46 he was conducting the band that represented America at the Paris World Exposition. Such opportunities weren’t open for just any musician. He entered the world with natural talent, perfect pitch, a musical family, and ambition. But he also happened to arrive when the country seemed to have a never-ending demand for musicians. If he didn’t think there was enough opportunity in one position, he could find another quickly enough — an enviable position for any musician today.

Consider this: in the census of 1910, just as the recording industry was beginning, 92 million people lived in America, and 139,000 made their living as “musicians and composers.” Today, the population is 308 million, but the number of employed musicians has barely changed. Assuming the percentage of aspiring musicians has remained constant, struggling performers/composers have a third of the opportunities today that they had a century ago.

Sousa benefited from working in a music market where demand exceeded supply. But as his autobiography shows, supply exceeded talent. There were more people calling themselves “musician” than could actually play. In this excerpt, for example, he leaves Washington after his girlfriend’s father rejects him as an unsuitable son-in-law. He travels to Illinois to join an old associate who managed a theater.

I reported to him and the first question he asked was, “Have you had any experi­ence in engaging musicians?”

“No,” I said, “except at home, a little dance orchestra or something like that.”

“You go down to the theater,” he said, “and find out who the leader of the or­chestra is, then go out and engage not over ten men at the best price you can, have a thorough rehearsal, because they’ll need it, and then report conditions to me.”

I found the local leader in a paint shop, and after ascertaining that he was the man with whom to do business, I told him that I was the leader of the traveling company, which was to perform that night and asked if he could supply ten men for the orchestra.

He took his cigar from his mouth and said, “Can supply you as many as you want.”

“How much,” I asked, “do you charge a man?”

“Two dollars a skull,” was his reply.

“Well,” I said, falling into his mode of expression, “I want ten skulls—one first skull, one second skull, viola, cello and bass skulls for the strings, and flute, clarinet, cornet and trombone skulls for the wind, and a drum skull besides.”

“Anything else you want?” he asked.

“Yes, I would like them at the theater for rehearsal at two o’clock sharp,” I said.

He looked at me with a half-sorry-for-you expression and said: “Stranger, there are just two things that you don’t want here. One is that you don’t want any first fid [fiddle], and you don’t want any viola or ‘celly’ and you don’t want no flute, ’cause we ain’t got them. The second thing you don’t want is a rehearsal at two o’clock or any other time.”

“But,” I said, “we must have a re­hearsal.”

“Rehearsal be blowed,” he said. “We never rehearse here.”

“But,” I persisted, “my music is diffi­cult and a rehearsal is absolutely neces­sary. Several numbers must be transposed. Can your orchestra transpose?”

With a wave of his hand, he disdainfully said, “Transpose? Don’t worry. We trans­pose anything.”

No argument could budge him; and he finally stopped any further discussion by saying that I could take his orchestra or leave it, just as I liked.

It was Hobson’s choice with me, so I said, ” Well, I’ll take your orchestra, and I do hope everything will go all right to­night.”

“Don’t you lose any sleep over us. We’re all right,” he called to me as I was leaving his store.

Opening Night

John Philip Sousa in 1900.Photo by Elmer Chickering. (Wikimedia Commons)

Shortly after seven I went to the theater and found the orchestra in the music room under the stage. The leader said, “You might as well know the boys, and I’ll just introduce you. What is your name?”

“My name,” I answered, “is Sousa.”

“Well, Sousa,” this with an awkward bow, “allow me to introduce Professor Smith, our second fid; and, Sousa, this is Professor Brown, our clarinet player; and, Sousa, this is Professor Perkins, our bull fid; and this,” pointing to a cadaverous­-looking fellow, “is Professor Jones, who agitates the ivories on our pipe organ. Sousa, these are Professors Jim and Bill Simpson, solo and first cornet; this is Pro­fessor Reed, who whacks the bun drum, and yours truly, solo trombone. Now that all of us know each other, what is your overture? ”

I explained that the overture we used I had written myself and it had met with great favor.

“I ain’t sayin’ that’s so or not, but it won’t go here. Will it, boys?”

A unanimous “No” from the orchestra dispelled any doubt as to their feelings. I expostulated with warmth and injured pride, “But you have never heard my over­ture, you know nothing about it, and I can assure you it is all right.”

“It may be all right in Chicago or Boston, but I tell you it won’t go here. I got the overture that our people want and that’s the one we are going to play to­night.”

“But I think __ ”

“Don’t think”, said the leader, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Just make up your mind that you are going to play our overture. Do you read first fid at sight?”

I mildly admitted that I could do so. “Well, just take a look at this thing,” and he held up the first violin part of his “overture.”

“Now, I want to explain this piece to you. When we open up on her we go along quietly, not making any fuss, almost sneaking like,” and he pantomimed the tempo. “When you are playin’ that first strain you do it just as if you didn’t have no train to ketch but when we get here”, he pointed at the next strain marked allegro, “just go as fast as hell! You’ll have to chase your fingers all over the fiddle.”

I sighed and answered, “All right, I think I understand.”

After we were seated in the orchestra box I rapped for attention and we began the overture. I noticed immediately that all of them were wretched players, and when I started into the movement which the local man told me was to be taken “fast as hell,” they began playing the strain with a rapid­ity evidently unknown to the orchestra, and pandemonium reigned. But curiously enough each man felt that it was his duty to play the notes to the end regardless of what the rest did, and they finished one after the other, stretched out like a bunch of horses in a race. I had no time to express my disgust as the curtain was raised imme­diately and the first number was to be sung. It was “Come Back to Erin,” in E flat. When we began the introduction of the song, every member of the orchestra was blowing a note either in a different time or different key.

I shouted, “It’s in E flat.”

The louder I shouted, the louder they played. The singer sang on, trying to ap­pear oblivious to the cacophony that reigned. As soon as the song was finished, I turned to the leader, and said, “This is the rottenest orchestra I have ever heard. You do not know one note from another.”

He looked at me calmly, and said, “You are too particular. If you don’t like our style of playin’, pay us and we’ll go.”

“Pay you?” I cried. “You have not earned a cent.”

“Well, if you don’t like us, give us our money and we will go.”

I was very much excited, and I shouted, “Give you your money? Not under any circumstances. Pack up your instruments and get out of this theater.”

“We’ll go when we are paid, and not be­fore,” said the leader.

“I’ll see about that,” I said, jumping up and walking through the center aisle of the theater; and going to the box office, I ex­plained the situation to my manager. He called the manager of the theater over and told him, and he said, “All right, just call in the constable and put them out as usual.”

As the constable walked in to drive out the orchestra, I said to the local manager, “Just think, these men told me they could read anything, and when I wanted them to come to rehearsal they said they never re­hearsed in this town.”

“Yes,” said the local manager, “that is true; they never have a rehearsal because, if they did, they would be discharged before the performance.”

Young Sousa And The Musician Shortage The Saturday Evening Post

Copland, born November 14, 1900, is probably America’s most famous, and most popular, composer of symphonic music. He obviously didn’t consider himself a “literary man” because he put many words together in writing “The Pleasure of Music” for a 1959 issue of the Post.

How well does he do as a writer? Not bad. He’s smart enough not to dwell on the contents of music. Instead, he talks about the human experience it creates. For example, he describes the pleasure of musical motion.

“All of us … can understand and feel the joy of being carried forward by the flow of music. Our love of music is bound up with its forward motion … Music’s incessant movement forward exerts a double and contradictory fascination: On the one hand it appears to be immobilizing time itself by filling out a specific temporal space while generating at the same moment the sensation of flowing past us with all the pressure and sparkle of a great river. To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”

The Pleasures of Musicby Aaron Copland

He notes how music contains a sense of human contact.

“In our Western World, music speaks with a composer’s voice, and half the pleasure we get comes from the fact that we are listening to a particular voice making an individual statement at a specific moment in history. Unless you take off from there you are certain to miss one of the principal attractions of musical art—namely, contact with a strong and absorbing personality.”

He observes how we prefer our music to be familiar.

“The same people who find it quite natural that modern books, plays or paintings are likely to be controversial seem to want to escape being challenged and troubled when they turn to music. In the musical field there appears to be an unquenchable thirst for the familiar, and very little curiosity as to what the newer composers are up to. Such music lovers, as I see it, simply don’t love music enough, for if they did their minds would not be closed to an area that holds the promise of fresh and unusual musical experience. Charles Ives used to say that people who couldn’t put up with dissonance in music had ‘sissy ears.’ Fortunately, there are in all countries today some braver souls who mind not at all having to dig a bit for their musical pleasure, who actually enjoy being confronted with the creative artist who is problematical.

“These adventurous listeners refuse to be frightened off too easily. I myself, when I encounter a piece of music, whose import escapes me immediately, think, I’m not getting this; I shall have to come back to it for a second or third try. I don’t at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it, I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business.”

Copland was so willing to try new music because he wanted to discover all its possibilities. This was the goal, he said, of “serious music,” which tried to stir the broadest range of emotions. To this purpose, he expanded the scope of the symphony, to see what new feelings and sensations it could stir. He readily incorporated  jazz into his works, but he recognized its limitations.

“Jazz does not do what serious music does either in its range of emotional expression or in its depth of feeling, or in its universality of language—though it does have universality of appeal, which is not the same thing. On the other hand, jazz does do what serious music cannot do—namely, suggest a colloquialism of musical speech that is indigenously delightful, a kind of here-and-now feeling, less enduring than classical music, perhaps, but with an immediacy and vibrancy that audiences throughout the world find exhilarating.”

His experimenting with sound produced astonishing results. In “Appalachian Spring,” we “hear” the first damp winds of springtime. “The Tender Land” musically conveys the dizzying sight of endless prairies. In “Fanfare for the Common Man,” he evokes a sense for the struggling nobility of laborers. And in “Rodeo,” he delivers a good, old-fashioned, boot-stompin’, high-kickin’ hoe-down. Across all his works—symphonies, ballets, songs, and concertos—he offers listeners new musical experiences, as well as his own interpretation of the great topics: war, love, death, and cowboys.

For further information about this great American artist, try these Web sites:

classical.net/music/comp.lst/copland.php
americancomposers.org/raksin_copland.htm
essentialsofmusic.com/composer/copland.html

Also, for a look at the hill-top house where Copland did much of his composing, go to coplandhouse.org.

youtube.com/watch?v=9IFY1DN-qM4&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=XiLTwtuBi-o&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=6rnHpNWy7KE&feature=related
youtube.com/watch?v=cqah1rucyRg&feature=fvw

Aaron Copland Tries to Put It Into Words The Saturday Evening Post

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$12,000-a-week Preacher’s Boy The Saturday Evening Post