Ives and Copland
At the beginning of the twentieth century, American
music and music making were still strongly
influenced by the mid-nineteenth-century European
tradition.
 At the time of the nationalist wave 1860-1890, the U.S.
was involved in its own inner turmoil: the Civil War,
the assassination of President Lincoln and
Reconstruction.
 American composers were mostly trained in Europe.
They often did not pay attention to the music around
them: African-American spirituals, New England
hymn tunes, Native American songs and dances and
jazz bands.
 The American public was only interested in
imported music.
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 Conservatories
of music were founded,
concert halls were built and music began to
be taught as a serious discipline on university
campuses.
 At the turn of the century, many composers
began or concentrated their careers in
Boston.
 Many women and African-Americans were
also composing
 Although music is better established in the
U.S., American music often does not get
performed in the concert halls.
 He
was the first modernist composer whose work
was distinctively American.
 He grew up in a small Connecticut town and was
the son of a bandmaster and music teacher.
 His father’s approach to music was fun-loving and
unconventional; he used to play tunes in two
different keys at once. This open-minded and
experimental approach stayed with Ives all his
life.
 Ives went to Yale as an undergraduate and then
went into the insurance business, devoting his
spare time to music.
 Over the next ten years, he wrote an enormous
quantity of music.
Most of his compositions are based on American
cultural themes: baseball, Thanksgiving, marching
bands, popular songs, the Fourth of July, fireworks
and American literature.
 He wrote music with wild dissonances; Ives wrote a
note to his music copyist, who had “corrected” some
of the notes in his manuscript: “Please don’t correct
the wrong notes. The wrong notes are right.”
 He composed for pianos specially tuned in quarter
tones
 In The Unanswered Question, two different
instrumental groups, sitting separately, play different
music at the same time.

Second Movement from Three Places in New England
(“Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Conn.”)
 Composed in 1903-11 for Flute/piccolo, oboe, English
horn, clarinet, bassoon, 2 or more horns, 2 or more
trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, piano, timpani, drums,
cymbals, strings
 Captures a child’s impression of a Fourth of July picnic
with singing and marching bands.
 In the middle of the picnic, the boy falls asleep and
dreams of songs and marches form the time of the
American Revolution. When he awakes, he hears the
noise of the picnic celebration.
 Aural collage – contrasting sounds and textures are
overlaid and connected.
 Listen multiple times: different ideas surface with every
hearing.
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Born into a Jewish immigrant family. He decided to become a
composer at age 15.
At twenty, he went to Paris to study with the famous Nadia
Boulanger.
When Copland returned to America in 1924, he decided to
compose works that were specifically American in style. He
drew from the jazz idiom. His compositions include syncopated
rhythms and chord combinations of American jazz.
He also strove to put America into his music by using purely
American cultural topics: Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian
Spring
He also quotes folk songs, hymns and country tunes.
Finally, he used very widely space sonorities – deep basses
and high, soaring violins- to evoke the wide-open spaces of the
American landscape.
Copland wrote books on music, gave lectures, conducted
around the world, composed film scores and was the mentor of
Leonard Bernstein.
Fanfare
for the Common Man
Composed in 1942 for 3 trumpets, 4
horns, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani,
bass drum, tam-tam
Listen for the open, spacious quality
of the piece – his use of triads, fifths
and octaves