The Classical Tradition
Composer Biographies
Silvestre Revueltas
Born: December 31, 1899. Santiago Papasquiaro (near Durango), Mexico
Died: October 5, 1940. Mexico City, Mexico
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Mexican violinist, conductor, and composer. He helped to create an original Mexican music based on indigenous folk styles.
The first half of the twentieth century was a time of political and creative upheaval in Mexican society. The Mexican Revolution (1910–20), along with global events such as the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), helped to shape a generation of artists (painters and writers as well as musicians) who grounded their work in social issues and in the newly emerging Mexican nationalism. Perhaps the most famous of these is the muralist Diego Rivera. In music, this trend was seen in the music of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas.
Reveultas's work as a composer came relatively late in his life, beginning when he took on the duties of associate conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra (1931–34). Before that he played violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio, Texas, and conducted an orchestra in Mobile, Alabama. He also studied in the United States (in Chicago and Austin), building on his early training in Durango and Mexico City. In the last years of his life, which ended early due to complications of alcoholism, he taught at the conservatory in Mexico City.
The music of Revueltas is striking in its use of distinctive tone colors and complex rhythmic structures, often showing the influence of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky. More importantly, however, Revueltas strove to create a music that reflected the indigenous Mexican culture. To do this, he often used elements of the folk songs and dances of the mestizo culture (a blend of European and native traditions that we recognize in styles such as mariachi music). Revueltas also took elements of the so-called Aztec Renaissance, which tried to evoke pre-Columbian musical and cultural practice. All of this creates a musical style of great variety, one infused with Revueltas's distinctive wit.
Works
- Chamber music, including 4 string quartets; works for violin and piano; 8x radio (Ocho por radio, 1933); and Homenaje a Federico García Lorca (1935)
- Orchestral music, including Venetenas (1931), Janitzio (1933), and Sensemayá (1938)
- 7 film scores, including Redes (1935) and La noche de los mayas (1939)
- 2 ballets, including La Coronela (1940)
- Songs, including 7 Canciones (1938; on poems by García Lorca)
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Aaron Copland
Born: November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, New York
Died: December 2, 1990, Tarrytown, New York
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In his own words....
"To explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts (musical ones...) in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should speak to men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give."
American composer, conductor and author. Copland helped define a twentieth-century American sound. His influence on his contemporaries and students has been tremendous.
Aaron Copland seems at first to be an odd person to create a musical style that combined the myths of the American West and the styles of Latin American music into a populist music that spoke to a large segment of American society. Copland was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York, and found his musical voice in the international, avant-garde atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s. In New York he was part of a musical elite, championing the cause of modern music. At the same time, he had ties to the political and social left with its reformist agenda. Yet it could be argued that all of these elements were important ingredients, not just in the fabric of America in the 20s and 30s, but in the creation of a distinctly American aesthetic.
Copland began his study of music with piano lessons from his older sister. He soon turned to other teachers, and began attending symphonic concerts, soaking up the music of the standard symphonic repertoire. While in high school, he studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration with Rubin Goldmark, who tried to steer his tastes down a conservative path. But at age twenty, Copland left New York to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who was to serve as a teacher and mentor to many of the leading composers of the century. In Paris, and in his travels through Europe, he was exposed to a wide variety of new styles. He returned to a New York that was in the midst of an artistic and social revival, and he immediately became a part of that renewal. From 1928 to 1931 he coordinated a series of concerts with the composer Roger Sessions that presented important new works to the American public. He lectured at the New School for Social Research (from which his book What to Listen for in Music took shape), and built his reputation as a composer.
His early music mixes very modern musical ideas with hints of jazz influence. Pieces such as his Piano Variations stand out for their harmonic and rhythmic experimentation, and jazz rhythms are an important part of his Music for the Theater. Copland's concern with modern techniques lessened during the Great Depression. Reacting to a changing social consciousness, he (along with a number of other composers) began to shape his style to speak to a larger segment of the population. This comes through most clearly in ballets such as
Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring and in his music for films. In these works, simpler (but no less sophisticated) harmonies, broad melodies, and hints of folk melodies created a sound that came to be associated with our pictures of the mythic American West. And works such as Fanfare for the Common Man and A Lincoln Portrait (in which the narrator recites various writings of Lincoln) added a populist and patriotic element. While Copland never abandoned the more adventurous style (including, later in his life, twelve-tone composition), he is best remembered, and justly so, for creating a truly American symphonic style. Over the course of his life he not only served as a trendsetter, but also played an important role in the development of younger composers at places such as the Berkshire Music Center. He was, in fact, the musical father to more than one generation of young composers.
Works
- Orchestral music, including 3 symphonies, Piano Concerto (1926), Short Symphony (1933), Statements for Orchestra (1933–35), El salón México (1936), A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare
for the Common Man (1942), and Connotations for Orchestra (1962)
- 3 ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), Appalachian
Spring (1944)
- Film scores, including The City (1939), Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), T he Red Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1948)
- Piano music, including Piano Variations (1930)
- Chamber music; choral music and songs
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Links
- Life and Works
From the Classical Net site. A good biography of the composer and a guide to recordings of his most popular works.
- Copland, Music and Politics
This site, from WNET's series "Thomas Hampson: I Hear America Singing" contains a biography of the composer. It nicely addresses Copland's involvement in Progressive social movements of the day, and his subsequent forced appearance before the McCarthy committee.
- The Aaron Copland Collection
Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. An online exhibit of writings, letters, and photographs, along with special essays written for the exhibition.
William Grant Still
Born: May 11, 1895, Woodville, Mississippi
Died: December 3, 1978, Los Angeles
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In his own words....
"What are the qualities which must be inherent in the person who aspires to write music? First, and most important, is the ability to induce the flow of inspiration, that indefinable element which transforms lifeless intervals into throbbing, vital, and heartwarming music."
African-American composer and arranger. His Afro-American Symphony was the first symphony by an African-American to be performed by a major orchestra.
When Antonín Dvořák challenged American composers to create an American music, he suggested that they turn to Spirituals and Native American music. Many composers took this track, creating a rich body of works. William Grant Still, however, rejected this approach, seeing the Spirituals as having too strong of a European influence. Instead he turned to a more clearly African-American idiom—the blues.
Still's route to his greatest accomplishments—the performance of his Afro-American Symphony, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and having his opera Troubled Island performed by the New York City Opera—was less than direct. His studies at Wilberforce University (originally aimed at a medical career) were interrupted by marriage. His later studies in music at Oberlin were interrupted by service in the Navy during World War I. In the meantime he also worked as an arranger for W.C. Handy, and after his college studies his career centered in New York, where he worked as an arranger for performers such as Sophie Tucker and Paul Whitman and for shows on Broadway. He also served as music director for Black Swan Records, the first record label owned and operated by African-Americans, aimed solely at black audiences and featuring the work of black artists.
While working in New York, he studied with George Chadwick and the modernist composer Edgard Varèse. It was during this time, especially the early 1930s, that he composed his larger symphonic works, including his Afro-American Symphony. In 1934 a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation allowed him to move to Los Angeles, where he continued his compositional work while writing music for film and television (including for the original Superman and Gunsmoke television shows) and composing music for the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York. His most important work of this period was Trouble Island, in which he collaborated with the great African-American poet Langston Hughes.
While Still's popularity waned in the 1950s, his work gained more critical appreciation as the twentieth century came to and end. And in this century, as scholars begin to turn more serious attention to music and the media, his work as arranger and film and television composer is likely to claim more attention and respect.
Works
- Orchestral music: 4 symphonies, including No. 1: Afro-American Symphony (1930); No. 2: Song for a New Race (1937); No. 3: The Sunday Symphony (1958); many orchestral suites (From the Land of Dreams, 1924); In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943), Festive Overture (1944), The Peaceful Land (1960)
- Stage works, including 4 ballets (La Guiablesse, 1927; Sahdji, 1930; Lenox Avenue, 1937); and 8 operas (Blue Steel, 1934; Troubled Island, 1937–49)
- Vocal music, including Songs of Separation (1949), From the Hearts of Women (texts by Verna Arvey, 1961), and spiritual arrangements
- Choral music, including And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and We Sang Our Songs: The Fisk Jubilee Singers (1971)
- Chamber music, including Four Folk Suites (1962)
- Piano music, including Three Visions (1936) and Seven Traceries (1939)
- Film scores, including Pennies from Heaven (1936) and Lost Horizon (1937); TV theme songs, including Gunsmoke and Perry Mason
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Musical Examples
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