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Composer: Copland, Aaron

Dvorak's Prophecy - A New Narrative for American Classical Music: Film 4: Aaron Copland: American Populist

Pasternack, Benjamin

Guinan, Francis

Conductor: Gil-Ordonez, Angel

Post-Classical Ensemble

Television Director: Horowitz, Joseph

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Narrator: Guinan, Francis

Piano: Pasternack, Benjamin

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Year of Production: 2021

Playing Time: 01:23:42

Catalogue Number: 2.110698

UPC: 747313569854

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Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicised by the Depression - and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanized national identity and progressive thought. He wrote a prize winning workers' song and addressed a Communist picnic in Minnesota. Twenty years later, the Red Scare targeted him as a traitor. Can his odyssey be read as a parable illuminating the fate of the American artist?

The film features a re-enactment of Copland's grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don't know: his ingenious music for Lewis Mumford's 1939 World's Fair film The City, itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy, in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots - a galvanising performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer. Our other commentators include the American historians Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, who ponder the tangled legacy of American populism of the left and right.