REVIEW: TŌN and the MET Revisit 1930s Art Relevant to Today
Above, a photo of Aaron Copland in 1933.
December 3, 2023
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sight and Sound Series, featuring Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now, delivered an insightful lesson in art appreciation, placing the music of Aaron Copland within the context of 1930s America in a program called Copland, Culture, and Politics in the 1930s. This delightful series is the sort of thing we rarely see anymore — quality entertainment that educates.
Allison Rudnick, curator of the current Met exhibition (on display through December 10) Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s, explained the show’s focus on the various political and ideological messages communicated to the public in this era of rising leftist politics, the organization and celebration of the laborer, Nationalism, and the promise of progress.
An earlier Sight & Sound event. Photo by David DeNee.
Botstein spoke with authority and wry humor about the 1930s as a “strangely relevant subject to our time.” Even though nearly a century has passed, Botstein noted, it’s a decade that “hangs over us in positive and negative ways.” The art of the era grappled with the outsize amount of suffering, the resulting social tension and violence, and reflected an overarching anxiety about the modern world.
Aaron Copland had returned from studying in Paris in time for the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and found that the modernism he brought back from Europe did not earn a composer a living in America during the Great Depression. He strove to find a musical rhetoric that would speak, like his famous Fanfare, to the Common Man.
Copland’s Statements, five movements for orchestra from 1935, suffers the fate of being, as Botstein remarked, “the ugly duckling” of Copland’s orchestral output. Yet, they are precisely of a piece with the themes in the Met’s exhibit. This is Copland’s musical portrait of America during the Depression.
The first movement, “Militant,” uses an uncompromising rhythm to signal the anger of the people. The second movement, “Cryptic,” is contemplative and mysterious. Botstein points to a painting by Georgia O’Keefe that might be as ‘cryptic’ as Copland’s music.
The bombastic third movement, “Dogmatic,” echoed cover art from journals like Daily Worker, while the enigmatic fourth movement, “Subjective,” finds Copland in a reflective mood. The sarcastic and ironic “Jingo” could be mistaken for Stravinsky or Shostakovich. “Prophetic,” the last movement, indeed looks to the future, pointing the way toward the expansive sound Copland would soon cultivate, grand and lyrical.
Like artwork advertising the National Park Service, Copland drew upon the vast American landscape for inspiration. His 1938 ballet Billy the Kid represents a kind of musical nationalism, too, incorporating cowboy tunes and folk melodies. Botstein led a surefooted reading of the score, and TŌN — currently featured on the big screen in the film Maestro — sounds terrific.
Tomorrow’s Philharmonic musicians in training, the orchestra is anchored by polished, gently gleaming strings, the brass section boasts warmth and heft, and the woodwind section is a source of promising soloists in Copland’s lean, exposed textures.
“The Open Prairie” had a spacious, unaffected quality, enhanced by impressively melancholy high clarinet tones. Woodwind solos jostled in the “Street in a Frontier Town” with enviable energy. The secure, expressive trumpet solo in “Card Game at Night” belied the soloist’s years. The ensuing “Gun Battle” proved the mettle of TŌN’s percussion section, with sharply menacing timpani and drum interjections.
Another reason to recommend Sight & Sound: the crisp acoustics in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Atop the bittersweet molto espressivo of “Billy’s Death,” delicate interplay between solo violin, quasi tremolando, and harp startled like faint echoes of gunshots ricocheting across the Great Plains.
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Next in Sight & Sound at the MET:
