The Achievement of American Identity in Aaron Copland's Works for Theater

Abstract

Aaron Copland’s music is commonly identified with experiences and values associated with the United States. This link between the American nation and Copland’s music is a component of an enduring legacy that the composer began to construct during the apex of his career in the 1940s and 1950s. This dissertation interrogates the process of building this legacy and the lingering implications for America’s social and cultural landscape that were a consequence of its construction through a study of Copland’s works written specifically for and alluding to the theater, including Music for the Theatre (1925), Vitebsk (1929), Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934), The Second Hurricane (1937), Quiet City (1939), Rodeo (1942), Appalachian Spring (1945), and The Tender Land (1954). My project is informed by archival research in the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, and interdisciplinary approaches drawn from critical theory, performance studies, and social psychology. The content of Copland’s theatrical music is discussed in relation to the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions of their production. In addition, I also evaluate how these works contributed to the solidification of Copland’s identification as an American and a composer of American music and the reification of a discernable white culture. In this dissertation the interpretation of meaning serves as a starting point for evaluating how Copland’s music influences the perception of reality across space and time. Analyzing what these works do, in addition to what they say, acknowledges their distributive authorship, the collaborative nature of their genesis, and the implications of actions Copland took to shape his own legacy.