This 1960 Nonet by Copland is one of my favorite pieces by him. The scoring for three each of violins, violas and cellos is pitched lower than many string ensembles and the vast arrays of light and shadows, occasionally bursting into brilliance, joy but the predominance of somber sadness, even stoic endurance is how I see that period, when I was just becoming aware of the wider world.
The Cuban missile crisis was two years in the future, when things would start looking dark, indeed, then the assassinations, the revelations of the foreign policies of the Kennedy administration, the war in Vietnam. But the extent to the tragedy that America was becoming and which it would bring to other countries wasn't yet known.
Aaron Copland was already sort of the composer laureate of the country, an artist who is entirely misunderstood as people listen to the concert version of Appalachian Spring, the setting of Bonaparte's Retreat in Hoedown and the such, seldom catching the sober evaluation of the quite mitigated good that the country was in reality instead of Chamber of Commerce, military-industrial complex lies and the even bigger and enabling lie that spewed from Hollywood and the pop culture industry. Aaron Copland was of the political and cultural left, after all, someone who got hauled in front of HUAC in a degradation ceremony, though, from all I can gather, he kept his integrity and dignity in the process. It has always seemed like a major irony to me that the man who created the "American sound" was a gay, Jewish, leftist intellectual from New York City. Or, maybe, that is as it should be in America as it should be instead of how it has been.
This is music that can make me cry, as Coplands' sometimes can. Though seldon the pieces that get a lot of air play on programmed, format and ratings driven public radio in the United States.
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