thumb|Aaron Copland as the subject of a [[Young People's Concerts|Young People's Concert, 1970]]

Connotations is a classical music composition for symphony orchestra written by American composer Aaron Copland. Commissioned by Leonard Bernstein in 1962 to commemorate the opening of Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts) in New York City, United States, this piece marks a departure from Copland's populist period, which began with El Salón México in 1936 and includes the works he is most famous for such as Appalachian Spring, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo. It represents a return to a more dissonant style of composition in which Copland wrote from the end of his studies with French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and return from Europe in 1924 until the Great Depression. It was also Copland's first dodecaphonic work for orchestra, a style he had disparaged until he heard the music of French composer Pierre Boulez and adapted the method for himself in his Piano Quartet of 1950. While the composer had produced other orchestral works contemporary to Connotations, it was his first purely symphonic work since his Third Symphony, written in 1947.

Connotations was received negatively upon its premiere for its harmonic assertiveness and compositional style. The overall impression at the time was that, as critic Alex Ross later phrased it, "Copland was no longer in an ingratiating mood." The composer was accused by some critics of betraying his role as a tonal, populist composer to curry favor with younger composers and give the impression that his music still held contemporary relevance. Copland denied this accusation; he asserted that he had written Connotations as a twelve-tone work to give himself compositional options not available had he written it as a tonal one.

Part of the blame for Connotations initial failure has been ascribed by Copland biographer Howard Pollack, among others, to Bernstein's "harsh and overblown" conducting. Bernstein, known in the classical music community as a long-time champion of Copland's music, had programmed the composer's pieces more frequently with the New York Philharmonic than those of any other living composer. However, these performances were mainly of works from the composer's populist period, with which the conductor was in full sympathy. He was less comfortable in pieces that were atonal or rhythmically disjunctive. While Bernstein might have performed the work purely out of service to an old friend, he was apparently unable to interpret this work persuasively. Subsequent performances with New York Philharmonic during its 1963 European tour and a 1999 all-Copland concert showed that the situation had not changed. Bad acoustics might have also played a part in the work's lack of success at its premiere.

More recent performances, led by conductors Pierre Boulez, Edo de Waart and Sixten Ehrling, have been acknowledged to show the music in a more positive light. Nevertheless, the overall reputation of the music remains mixed. Some critics, including composer John Adams, have remained critical of the work and considered Copland's use of serial techniques detrimental to his later music. Others, which include critics Michael Andrews and Peter Davis, have seen Connotations as proof of Copland's continued growth and inventiveness as a composer while not downplaying the work's melodic and harmonic harshness and potential difficulty overall for listeners.

Background

thumb|The Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center, for the opening of which Connotations was commissioned.

Aaron Copland wrote Connotations to fulfill a commission from Leonard Bernstein for the opening concert of the New York Philharmonic's new home in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Since this hall was slated as the first part of Lincoln Center for completion, its inauguration was considered especially momentous. Among the guest list of 2600 for the first concert and the white-tie gala which would follow it were John D. Rockefeller III (chairman of Lincoln Center), Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Governor and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, United Nations Secretary General U Thant and prominent figures in the arts that included of Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing, violinist Isaac Stern and actress Merle Oberon. Noted composers would also attend included Samuel Barber, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Richard Rodgers, William Schuman and Roger Sessions. United States President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie had also been invited. Their initial inability to attend caused some consternation, since they had voiced their support for American culture. At the last minute, Jackie Kennedy said she would be there.

Copland was one of ten internationally known composers who accepted invitations to contribute music for the opening. His would be the first new piece to be heard. Other compositions included the Eighth Symphony of American composer William Schuman, an Overture Philharmonique by French composer Darius Milhaud and "Andromache's Farewell" for soprano and orchestra by American composer Samuel Barber. It would also be Copland's first purely symphonic piece since his Third Symphony of 1947, although he had penned orchestral works in a number of genres throughout the 1940s and 50s. According to Taruskin, Copland's receipt of such a commission testified to both his status as a creative figure and his close relationship with the American public. This position was unique among "serious" American composers and derived from the populist works he had written in the 1930s and 40s. However, from the 1950s Copland's public works—the ones for which he had developed his populist style—were increasingly written in what he called his "difficult" or "private" style. That style had become increasingly non-tonal.

Copland began sketching the work early in 1961. To gain composing time, he cancelled his 1962 trip to Tanglewood and determined to stay at home the entire year. Even so, he accepted an invitation to revisit Japan early in 1962 for a United States State Department conference and combined the trip with conducting engagements in Seattle and Vancouver. By June 25, Copland wrote to Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, "I am working day and night on my symphony for the Philharmonic commission. It is in three movements and I have just finished the last, the first being more than half done." Copland then went to Mexico at Chavez's invitation, partly to conduct but mainly to compose. From there, he wrote American composer Leo Smit on July 4 that he was not yet finished and was having trouble finding a title for the new work. He completed the piece in September 1962, just in time for orchestra rehearsals.

When he considered the form the work would take, Copland wrote that he "concluded that the classical masters would undoubtedly provide the festive and dedicatory tone appropriate to such an occasion." He therefore decided to offer "a contemporary note," one that would reflect "the tensions, aspirations and drama inherent in the world today." This tension, he explained in 1975, "is inherent in the nature of the chordal structures, and in the general character of the piece."

Composition

Instrumentation

Connotations is scored for full symphony orchestra with augmented percussion. The complete ensemble includes piccolo, three flutes (third flute doubling second piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons (third bassoon doubling contrabassoon), six horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, tympani, five percussionists (glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, conga drums, timbales, cymbals, metal sheet, tam-tam, triangle, claves, temple block, woodblock, bass drum, snare drum, tenor drum), piano (doubling celesta) and strings.

Form

A typical performance of this work lasts 20 minutes.

Composer efforts

Copland conducted Connotations in 1966, 1967 and 1968 around the United States. This included an engagement at the Musica Viva series in San Francisco and concerts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. "I spoke to the audiences," Copland writes, "with humorous accounts of the work's adverse effect on droves of letter writers, who had heard the original performance, in person or on TV. Then I asked the brass section to illustrate the opening chords, and the strings how they sounded. Before they knew it, the audience was sympathetic. My purpose was not to sell the work but to demonstrate it."

Boulez revival

A decade after Bernstein premiered the work, Pierre Boulez, who had succeeded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1971, conducted Connotations with the orchestra for the ten-year anniversary of Philharmonic Hall (subsequently renamed Avery Fisher Hall; later David Geffen Hall). According to Copland, ten years had allowed enough time to change audience perceptions for the better. In his review for The New York Times Harold C. Schonberg wrote that this time, the audience "did not rise in revolt" as it had in 1962. He added, "The composer's cause was helped by, if memory serves, a better performance than had been given in 1962. Mr. Boulez revels in this kind of music, and he brought drama to it as well as a synthesizing quality."

Analysis

Connotations was the first orchestral work in which Copland used serial principles of composition. Serial or twelve-tone music, Copland stated, carried "a built-in tenseness ... a certain drama ... a sense of strain or tension" inherent in its extended use of chromaticism. "These are new tensions," he continued, "different from what I would have dreamt up if I had been thinking tonally." To composer John Adams, Copland's embrace of serial technique was not really such a stretch "because ever since the 1920s, he'd already a piss-'n-vinegar penchant for sour intervals, like he did in the Piano Variations." Contrary to the charge that would be made after Connotations premiere that Copland wrote a twelve-tone work to impress younger composers, he had actually begun using the method at a time when few other American composers were doing so. While Copland's first expressly serial works were his Piano Quartet of 1950 and Piano Fantasy and he noted that some critics (whom he did not name) had traced a similarity in those pieces to his Piano Variations of 1930, he claimed in his 1967 "conversation" with Edward T. Cone that the Variations were "the start of my interest in serial writing ... Although it doesn't use all twelve tones, it does use seven of them in what I hope is a consistently logical way." Prior to that interview, few had related Copland's early work to that of the founder of twelve-tone composition, Arnold Schoenberg.

thumb|left|180px|Copland in 1962.

By the time he wrote Connotations, Copland had come to the view that serial composition was "like looking at a picture from a different point of view" and used it "with the hope that it would freshen and enrich my [compositional] technique." Part of that changed viewpoint, Copland said, "was that I began to hear chords that I wouldn't have heard otherwise. Heretofore, I had been thinking tonally, but this was a new way of moving tones about." Serialism also allowed Copland a synthesis of serial and non-serial practices that had long concerned Copland and he had previously felt impossible to attain. One challenge Copland said he faced while he composed Connotations was "to construct an overall line that had continuity, dramatic force and an inherent unity." He stated that he had faced a similar challenge in his Orchestral Variations (his orchestration of the Piano Variations). He added that while dodecaphonic techniques supplied "the building blocks" for Connotations, it was up to him to supply "the edifice" that these blocks would eventually form.

Critic Paul Henry Lang, among others, lamented Copland's "yield to the conformism of 12-tone music." As serial and serial-inspired music was considered more academically viable than music utilizing common practice tonality (especially in Europe), some contemporary critics felt that Copland was trying to retain his place at the apex of the American classical music scene by conforming to "academic standards." Taruskin suggests that it might have appeared to these critics that Copland "had sacrificed his hard-won, well-nigh unique public appeal for what seemed ... an 'alienated' modernist stance." As the composer had been one of the first American composers to import the style from Europe—in the mid twenties—these critics may have overlooked the possibility that his "populist period" may have represented the more jarring deviation in his compositional style.

It had also been some time since a Copland piece had been appreciated widely by audiences. His opera The Tender Land had not fared well, either in its original or revised forms. Choreographer Jerome Robbins never produced Copland's ballet Dance Panels, despite the fact that he had commissioned it. None of his major orchestral works from the 1960s—Connotations, Music for a Great City, Emblems and Inscape—made much of an impact with audiences. Nor do they fit in either the populist or modernist parts of Copland's compositional output. Copland was aware that dodecaphonism did not hold as high a place as it had previously and writes, "By the sixties, serialism had been around for over fifty years; young composers were not so fascinated with it anymore." Nonetheless, he did not want to be pigeonholed. He told American composer Walter Piston in 1963, "People always want to shove me into the American idea more than I really want. Nobody wants to be an 'American' composer now as they did." He told another friend, "Young composers today wouldn't be caught dead with a folk tune!" He heard a considerable amount of new music through his association with Tanglewood and might not have wanted to be left behind. At the same time, he might not have become totally at home with serialism. He confided to Verna Fine, "I don't feel comfortable with the twelve-tone system, but I don't want to keep repeating myself."

Ballet

Choreographer John Neumier, noted for his ballets based on literary themes, received permission from Copland to use music from Connotations, the Piano Variations and Piano Fantasy for a ballet, The Fall Hamlet (The Hamlet Affair). Staged by the American Ballet Theatre on January 6, 1976, the title role was danced by Mikhail Barishnikov, Ophelia by Gelsie Kirkland, Gertrude by Marcia Haydée and Claudius by Erik Bruhn. The ballet was received poorly, due to ineffective choreography. Critic Bob Micklin noted, however, that Copland's "prickly, restless music" reflected the ballet's story very well.

Legacy

Despite its initial reception, Connotations was listed in 1979 by Billboard magazine among Copland works that continued to be programmed by orchestras, with subsequent performances by Pierre Boulez, Edo de Waart and Sixten Ehrling received positively. Reaction to the work itself remains mixed. Ross dismisses Connotations as a "barbaric yawp of a piece." Morin calls it a "thorny, riveting patchwork" and listening to it "like the unrelenting pummeling of a prizefighter at times." Adams calls its style "very simplistic ... strident" and "generally unpleasant sounding" and adds that "the rigor [of twelve-tone composition] seemed more to cramp [Copland's] natural spontaneity than to aid it." Composer Kyle Gann calls Connotations "big, unwieldy ... and [not] that good ... Copland's imagination seemed constrained by the technique. On a more positive note, Davis wrote after a performance of the work under Ehrling by The Juilliard Orchestra that while Connotations remains a "spiky" composition, Copland "adopts Schoenberg's serial procedures to produce a sequence of typically pungent and exhilarating Coplandesque sonorities." Desmond Shawe-Taylor called the work "beautifully put together: full of energy, variety, thought" after he had heard Boulez conduct the piece. Michael Andrews wrote of Copland's "mammoth, anxious and angry vision" and Barlett Naylor of "a majesty hidden in this dark piece" after both had heard de Waart's performance.

Recordings

Along with Bernstein's two performances, Copland recorded Connotations with the Orchestre National de France (no longer available). More recently, The Juilliard Orchestra recorded the work under the direction of Sixten Ehrling for New World Records.

References

Citations

Bibliography

  • Essay by music critic Kyle Gann [http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_gann03.html]
  • Brief Description of Connotations [http://americansymphony.org/?s=copland+connotations]
  • Video – Aaron Copland – Connotations (20:11).