Run Time: Approx. 42 minutes

To today’s ears, there is no composer that more readily personifies the American symphonic sound than Aaron Copland. From Fanfare for the Common Man to Appalachian Spring, his sensibility seems to capture something intrinsic about the United States, from its spirit to its diverse landscapes. But what is it about his music that sounds so American? Is it just that we’ve come to associate it with Americana because of the many patriotic, military, and western films that have so effectively utilized his music? Or is there really something about it that speaks specifically to this land?

It’s easy to forget that barely a century ago, the United States was still unsure of its artistic identity. The country was still young, and its artistic life was still largely shaped by European imports, while the traditions of Native peoples and other non-European cultures were overlooked. As Jeff Counts has written, “Much like the search for the Great American Novel, the Great American Symphony was an aspirational mid-century dream for a country that longed to compete credibly with the Old World.”

Copland himself explored many different styles and voices throughout his career. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants, his formative musical studies took him to Paris where he studied with renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulenger. Later, he traveled extensively throughout America, Africa, and Mexico, where he formed an important friendship with composer Carlos Chávez. He experimented with various genres, moving from avant-garde compositions to an appreciation for the music of the American Southwest and Mexico. Late in his life he delved into serialism, a modernist technique that rethinks the treatment of pitches entirely. But the works for which he is most beloved are the ones hailing from his middle period, where his personal style culminated in the sound perhaps best personified by the 3rd symphony: Americana.

If you Google the characteristics of Copland’s Americana period, the words you’ll most often find are things like “open,” “broad,” and “simple.” Though these words may seem metaphorical, they actually do reflect real musical traits Copland used to create his sound. The types of intervals he favored, fourths and fifths, are less definitive than the usual building blocks of the Western canon. They do not have major or minor qualities; you need 3rds for that. In the absence of this defining quality, they have a sense of possibility. There are fewer rules governing how they might function harmonically. They can be anything. What an impeccable allegory for the American dream. And the harmonies, uncomplicated and widely spaced, give such a sense of scale as to evoke a great expanse. How could we not see this as the perfect backdrop for a scene depicting the Great Plains or the Mountain West?

Besides the pure musical qualities, Copland is not withholding in his titles, particularly when it comes to music of this period. Rodeo; Billy the Kid; Fanfare for the Common Man—these are American stories, and he’s made sure we know it.

The Third Symphony is built from precisely these qualities, but don’t take openness and simplicity to indicate a lack of drama. The first movement offers all the might, and perhaps menace, a brass section can muster, before yielding to an austere lullaby in the strings and winds. If the first movement evokes the natural world, the second is much more urban—bustling even, featuring shorter spurts of melody that buzz hurriedly around the orchestra like a busy cosmopolitan scene. Here, the influence of jazz as well as the avant-garde contemporaries like Stravinsky can really be heard in the snappy articulations and syncopated rhythms.

The lush, but angst-filled third movement offers a sharp turn from the excitement, reminding us that this work was premiered just one year after the close of World War II. But halfway through the movement, Copland revisits material from the second, perhaps nodding to the persistence of the human spirit.

In the transition from the third to the fourth movement, Copland arrives at perhaps his most salient point. Here he inserts the Fanfare for the Common Man—written just 3 years prior in fulfillment of a commission for uplifting and patriotic music to bolster the war effort—in its entirety, before continuing with his joyously hopeful conclusion.

If readers will indulge a bit of a leap: the placement of the Fanfare for the Common Man in this symphony reminds me very much of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th—a defining melody placed late in the work and carrying with it a philosophical message. If Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was indeed searching for the “Great American Symphony,” he certainly got it. And if Beethoven’s Ninth serves as a totem for European artistic and philosophical achievement, then one might make the case that Copland’s Third Symphony occupies a similar symbolic space for American music, offering a message of hope and forward looking optimism for the country amidst a time of darkness.

Finally, because it’s too wonderful a full-circle conclusion to resist, I’ll end with a bit of trivia: this work received its European premiere in 1947, conducted by none other than Leonard Bernstein leading the Czech Philharmonic.