Clarinet Concerto
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

[1948]

Aaron Copland, the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, was born in 1900 in Brooklyn. Like so many eager American artists, he spent time in the 1920s in Paris, where lessons with Nadia Boulanger helped him find his true voice. In the 1930s, visits to Mexico and a pair of ballet scores meant to evoke cowboy culture helped this neurotic city slicker tap into a spacious ethos of simple intervals and pure harmonies. His bold yet humble American sound captivated the nation, and his wartime works including “Fanfare for the Common Man” and Appalachian Spring confirmed his arrival as the country’s leading composer.

Copland’s music even caught the ear of an unlikely champion of contemporary concert music: Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” who was on a mission to use his considerable earnings to commission new repertoire for the clarinet. With a $2,000 advance and free rein on what to compose, Copland made fitful progress in 1947-48, until he finally delivered a Clarinet Concerto that Goodman debuted during a national radio broadcast with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1950.

Copland scored the concerto for a reduced orchestra of strings, harp and piano. The structure is also more compact than a typical concerto, using only two linked sections instead of three separate movements. The opening section, played “slowly and expressively,” has the clarinet weaving long, delicate strands over a sparing accompaniment. The clarinet connects the two sections with an extended cadenza, which gives an impression of free improvisation, even though it is fully notated. The “rather fast” second section begins with “staccato, delicate, wraith-like” music, as marked in the piano part that enters here for the first time. A more playful side emerges when the clarinet plays lazy phrases over the jazzy sound of slap bass.

Solo clarinet; harp, piano, strings