I just heard the music of Elie Siegmeister on the radio, an oft-forgotten from America's musical past who seemed to intersect with my life relatively frequently. His music was very much in the Copland vein, but more progressive, closer to the avant-garde, certainly more challenging, much more like the acerbic, ascetic vein of early or late Copland than his more beloved middle period. It causes one to wonder, what ultimately is originality? There are so many American composers who sound like Aaron Copland that Copland can't possibly be said to be particularly original, and yet Copland produced a series of masterpieces in the late 30s and early 40s that define a period in American classical music - he simply 'got it right' in a way that perhaps no other composer of his generation did. And yet, there are so many other great works by his contemporaries.
Siegmeister may not have Copland's innate sense for ideal proportion - a work like Fanfare for the Common Man is absolutely perfect - not a single wasted note, and on a different much more impressive scale, Appalachian Spring is pretty much as perfect a piece of music as a half-hour ballet score could ever be allowed to be. But Siegmeister goes further than Copland into both the avant-garde and populism. Schoenberg and Stravinsky are in his music, but so is jazz and folk and R&B. On the one hand, there's a work like the Western Suite, premiered by Toscanini, and incorporating all kinds of cowboy tunes, or the Ozark Suite which I've linked to below. On the other, works like his symphonies which use snippets of every genre of American music plummet into the atonal depths of the American darkness like Roger Sessions and Wallingford Rigger.
Siegmeister's son-in-law was a professor at my podunk music school who probably should have retired at least ten years before I had him, but he was a brilliant pianist and I'll do a much more affectionate reminiscence of him here at some point than that would imply. But nearly every American piano student of intermediate level plays something by Siegmeister - usually something from the American Kaleidescope which was clearly meant to be an answer to Bartok's Mikrokosmos.
But Siegmeister wrote in heady days for American classical music, as they were heady days in America. On the east coast there were establishmentarian composers like Copland and Siegmeister who could simultaneously write both for the public and for the specialist, and know that their works would get at least a couple performances by the best conductors and pianists in the world. In the West, perhaps even more interesting things happening from the 'mavericks' like Cowell and Partch who reset the boundaries of what music was thought conceivable to do. All civilizations have golden ages, and while later periods always have their glories, the flesh flush of achievement can never truly be recaptured. Immigrants and their children, white immigrants in New York at least..., could embrace an American identity that matched patriotism with the liberalism of the FDR era, the bulwark against tyranny which their cousins unfortunate enough to never make it out could never experience in Europe.
The featured music here is the Ozark Set for Orchestra, based on music of the Ozark mountains in Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos, one of the very greatest of all time, in a performance of sadly deficient sound. This rendering of rural Americana is so very different from Copland's. Copland's music is not truly meant to be Appalachian, it was merely a tacked on title by the choreographer Martha Graham after she decided to choreograph Copland's music as a scene in American Appalachia. On the other hand, this is far truer music to the spirit of the Ozarks, rough-hewn and rednecked but simultaneously with great appreciation for beauty. Just another masterpiece by a forgotten name....
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