It was an almost strange sensation of familiarity as soon as I saw the section on Aaron Copland headlining one in part of chapter 3 in Gann's book. Somehow the music in this chapter (Populists - 1930's) was both familiar and regrettably unknown.
All see Copland as the quintessential American composer. If you haven't listened to any excerpts from Music for Theater before the culmination of your 5th grade music education, that might be a sincere issue for that music educator. But I digress; I was not shocked to realize how Copland evolved over his long compositional career, taking on an almost serial technique in pieces like Connotations, or utilizing an eleven-tone row. Once you set yourself up for musical success, no popular audience is going to want to sit down in a concert hall and hear pseudo-serialist music when it's preceded by Fanfare for the Common Man.
More important, are the lesser known American composers whose works failed to endure the test of time and survive decades as "quintessential American music". Roy Harris was to be hailed as the great American Symphonist. Now, amateurs and young professionals alike may not have even heard of him, nevermind his works and compositional style. What happened to Elie Siegmeister (a name that was entirely unfamiliar to me until reading this chapter)? David Diamond? It makes me feel uncomfortable as a musician and American that I've never heard of these people.
How did they come to fame in the first place? For some, it was location, location location, just as we discussed regarding Ives and New England Composers. Copland was from New York, a prime location for fertile musical development. Virgil Thomson was from Missouri, of all places, but was lucky enough to be loaned the support to go to Harvard (because we all know not much was going on in Missouri while Thomson was a young lad...)
Yet location can't be all of it; So what went wrong?
Was it the depression? When the market crashed, so did all or most of any kind of disposable income that could be used for arts, music, entertainment or patronage of these fine arts. And of course you can't discount the financial, emotional and physical toll the crash had on individuals and families in general.
Was it a change in American musical standards? Perhaps at the time of composition and/or success, these composers embodied the American ideals, but this in no way would stay constant in the coming centuries. This theory is discounted by the success of Copland, Gershwin and countless other jazz and classical musicians.
I've battled with a few other ideas: cultural boundaries, race or gender issues (e.g. William Grant Still or Ruth Crawford), socio-economic factors and the whole gamut of financial reasons a composer might struggle.
So I guess the jury is still out...Why exactly do the works some American composers still survive and thrive in the current decade, but other, equally important composers fade into the chapters of a music history textbook?
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