Music for the Common Man asserts as its main thesis that Copland's “music between 1932 and 1946 is distinguished by a commitment to aesthetic accessibility and social relevance, expressed within and informed by the cultural and political context of the Great Depression and World War II” (7). The author persuasively argues the point through a wide-ranging exploration of this “cultural and political context” alongside an examination of a number of major works written by Copland during this period.

Proceeding more or less chronologically, the monograph locates certain themes and issues related to Copland's middle-period works, and then works backwards, as it were, by summarizing key writings by contemporaneous American critics—including Casey Nelson Blake, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, and Edmund Wilson—that in one way or another intersect with those works subsequently discussed. Chapter 1 accordingly progresses from a discussion of communism and the Popular Front to “Into the Streets May First” and Statements; chapter 2, from “new world nationalism” to El Salón México and Danzón Cubano; chapter 3, from urban planning and other community issues to The Second Hurricane and The City; chapter 4, from the mythic West to Billy the Kid and Rodeo; and chapter 5, from wartime concerns to Lincoln Portrait, Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man, and the Third Symphony. A brief conclusion considers Copland's music after 1946, in particular The Tender Land and the ambiguities of his lasting legacy.

The book's primary contribution might be to introduce to students and admirers of Copland some of the popular and influential sociopolitical ideas and writings of his time and to offer nuanced and informed readings of the various scenarios of some of his best-known work. Crist generally has less to say about the music per se, though her discussion of the finale to the Third Symphony offers a fresh analysis that draws upon the theoretical writings of James Hepokoski.

Crist makes some trenchant use of reception history as well, including this reflection prompted by the silence that greeted a performance of Lincoln Portrait by André Kostelanetz in the dark days of July 1942: “Admittedly, Copland's music is grand and even, perhaps, overwhelming, but it is only in the postwar context that this sounds like bombast” (165). Some further sense of the author's approach can be gleaned by a few other quotes. On El Salón México: “And so the Mexican people, encompassing both a mythical folk culture and modern proletariat, served for Copland as an idol in the veneration of a precapitalist naïveté, constructed in opposition to the modern industrial social order” (53–54). On the high school opera, The Second Hurricane: “Although the work avoids sentimental populism, the sociality achieved through shared emotional reactions to lived and observed experience perhaps begs important questions of representation in the context of middle-class participation in the Popular Front” (92). On his film documentary score: “The City never descends into fascistic propaganda despite its persuasive visual and spoken rhetoric, because the structure of the images, presentation of narrative, and character of Copland's music imbue the utopic city with flexibility, motion and change” (109). On Billy the Kid and Rodeo: “Ultimately, the aesthetic is akin to the disorder of the Popular Front, which rejects statist authority and embraces the complexities of leftist politics, standing outside the conventional political boundaries to challenge the presumed structures of American society” (146). Such thoughtful commentary on Copland's more popular scores is unusual.

This study naturally raises the question, how political was Copland, even in the 1930s and 1940s? Crist seems to regard the question as somewhat moot, stating her goal as one of establishing “ideological affinities that go beyond explanations of authorial intent or mechanical causality” (11–12). Still, the author occasionally refers to Copland's “political values” (181) and “progressive politics” (194). Copland certainly empathized with farmers, workers, and artists; supported the rights of oppressed peoples; and promoted friendly international relations. At the same time, he was strongly anti-ideological and antisectarian. Perhaps it was Copland's ability to give a tender, poignant, sometimes ironic face to the sociopolitical ideals of his time that helps give his work its enduring value. In any case, he clearly was more humanist than ideologue.

In this context, Crist's book makes an intriguing complement to Nadine Hubbs's The Queer Composition of America's Sound, which Crist cites appreciatively.¹

Both regard Copland's work of the thirties and forties, even if later dismissed by postwar avant-garde trends and co-opted by seemingly antithetical political forces, as exemplary in various ways. And yet, aside from her discussion of Rodeo, Crist rarely addresses psychological or sexual subtexts, while Hubbs rarely addresses political ones. Crist focuses on American critics; Hubbs emphasizes French connections. Virgil Thomson, a marginal figure in Crist's narrative, proves a determinant one in Hubbs's. Not that these two approaches are mutually exclusive. Rather, they amplify each other, and help to underscore the richness and complexity of Copland's achievement.

Copland's elusiveness is on full display in The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, expertly edited by Crist and Wayne Shirley. Even in the context of the aforementioned political matters, one finds, aside from an outburst about the horror of war to his parents in 1921 (19), and an expression of solidarity with Communist farmers to Israel Citkowitz in 1934 (106), hardly a reference to social issues, domestic politics, or international affairs. Small wonder that Crist, in her foresaid monograph, undertakes an exploration of the composer's “ideological affinities” without much recourse to any stated “authorial intent.”

Far from overly serious, Copland's letters rather tend to be on the amiably chatty side. He tells his parents how much things cost, he reports to his colleagues about this or that goings-on, and he informs friends and family alike about piquant customs when traveling abroad. He generally frames such missives with a kind of bemused, ingenuous, sometimes breathless quality, especially in his early letters, with their many exclamation marks (“Let me catch my breath,” he actually writes in two letters to his parents from 1921 [18, 21]). He's tickled “silly” at the start of his career (22) and he's “tickled pink” and “pleased as punch” toward its end (226–27). Only in a 1949 letter to Virgil Thomson (published in the New York Herald Tribune) on the occasion of Arnold Schoenberg's public censure of Copland as, along with Stalin, one of the suppressors of his music, does he seem to raise his voice (196); and even this letter—calculated for public consumption—is followed up with a highly deferential one sent directly to Schoenberg (197).

Early on, Copland assumes his legendary avuncular role (literally avuncular in the matter of naming his niece: “I hereby suggest a name which I think is neither too common nor too fancy, too Jewish nor too Goyish,” etc. [36]) by parceling out advice, sometimes requested, often not. He recommends self-analysis to Prentiss Taylor (70), counsels Henry Brant on how to bow (“Be a great composer but be natural and unaffected about it” [94]), bucks up a despondent Leonard Bernstein (124), sets Benjamin Britten's mind at rest about sitting out the war (“After all anyone can shoot a gun” [129]), urges Carlos Chávez to publish more of his music (135), and offers editorial guidance to Minna Lederman (167), and Claire Reis (188).

All this leaves a rather tepid impression—in 1962, Copland himself seconded Robert Evett's assessment of his letters as “dull” (232)—and the editors might have spiced things up a bit by including, say, Copland's letters to Sessions in the early 1930s as their friendship unraveled against the background of differing aesthetic views;²

or his exasperated 1947 letter to David Diamond that put the blast on the latter's alcoholic binges, marking a turning point in the younger man's life.³ The collection also could have done with more letters to close friends outside of music, such as playwright Clifford Odets or the photographer Paul Strand, neither of whom is represented here. Moreover, there are no letters to known lovers and boyfriends, indeed, no discussion at all in the biographical narrative interspersed between letters or in the plentiful annotations of Copland's homosexuality or romantic life. Victor Kraft is cited simply in one footnote as a “companion” (104), and Erik Johns is not even accorded that much. Nor do any of the various homosexual innuendos found in the letters—Copland's allusion to Gide's Corydon to Nadia Boulanger (45), his admitted “weakness for college ‘atmosphere’” to Paul Bowles (110), his coded references to “Spanish lessons” to Bernstein (139, 140)—receive any special notice.

At the same time, this book presents, in this latter context, an intriguing find: little-known correspondence to Prentiss Taylor (1907–91), a gay artist friend from the MacDowell Colony with whom Copland grew especially close in 1928 and 1929. Apparently infatuated with Taylor, Copland mentored Prentiss in his inimitable fashion; a letter dated 4 July 1929 from Copland, in France at the time, to Prentiss back home, suggests that they might have been lovers for a while as well, but this remarkable letter is noteworthy more so for the light it sheds (dim though it might be) on the composer's Whitmanesque temperament:

None of Prentiss's letters to Copland from the 1920s seem to have survived (68–69), which is especially unfortunate as many of the more interesting and telling letters were often those sent to, not written by, Copland, none of which are found in this collection. “You seldom write, you know, and when you do, you say nothing of importance,” chided Paul Bowles in 1933. “Sometimes I find an old letter of yours in a trunk, and upon reading it over, manage to imagine that it was written recently and is still valid.”⁴ Bowles exaggerated, however. The letters are not only important but extremely helpful, as Copland demonstrated in his autobiography with Vivian Perlis, and one is grateful to have so many of them now published. But even Copland's published criticism seems yet more revealing and engaging, while he reserved his “deep, deeper, deepest” self for his music.