Plains sounds
‘Whenever I have crossed the Pampa or have lived in it for a time, my spirit felt itself inundated by changing impressions, now joyful, now melancholy, some full of euphoria and others replete with a profound tranquility, produced by its limitless immensity and by the transformation that the countryside undergoes in the course of a day.’ Alberto Ginastera, on the Argentinian plains that inspired his ballet Estancia.
Ginastera – Estancia, Danza del Trigo [Wheat Dance]
WCFSO – March 2010
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New media music
It’s easy to assume that new media is a strictly 21st-century preoccupation for musicians. Experience Aaron Copland’s Prairie Journal this Saturday at the WCFSO and you may reconsider that assumption.
In 1936 Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned an unprecedented six orchestral works for broadcast on its fledgeling national radio network, including a new piece by Copland. The composer, already writing in a variety of media and soon to embrace film, approached his first radio commission with an uncanny sensitivity to the amplifying power that so often accompanies the development of new media forms.
Enthusiastic about the ‘exciting new medium,’ Copland recognized that ‘the very idea of reaching so many people with a single performance’ would reward a specific type of music – ’profound in content, simple in expression and understandable to all.’
It is also worth noting that the original presentation of Prairie Journal featured a quintessential new media marketing ruse – the crowdsourced contest. The piece’s first subtitle, Saga of the Prairie, was chosen from hundreds submitted by listeners.
Manuscript via the Library of Congress Aaron Copland Collection. Top image shows Andre Kostelanetz with the CBS Radio Orchestra in 1930; Howard Barlow conducted the premiere of Copland’s piece in 1937. Quotes from Howard Pollack’s biography of the composer.
