Fanfare for The Common Man : The man and his music

Abstract

Aaron Copland's iconic Fanfare for the Common Man is without question his most internationally popular work, not least because it was once featured in an album by the rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer, in which form it reached a global audience of huge numbers. The piece, which is scored for brass ensemble with timpani, bass drum, and tam-tam, originally came into existence as the result of a commission from the conductor Eugene Goossens, who in 1942 was serving as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. The work was one of a set of 18 fanfares written by various American composers during the dark days of World War II, all of which were expressly intended to promote feelings of patriotism and national unity. Copland's contribution to the project has been the only one of the set to find a place in the regular orchestral repertory; its original siblings have faded away.

Analyzing its success, Stuart Ledbetter points out that "part of the reason for this is surely its splendid title, but even more is the soaring, heroic character of its opening trumpet theme." Appropriately, too, for a ceremonial expression of national pride, the fanfare begins with an arresting call to attention, with solemn, regular strokes from the percussion instruments, whose measured salvo precedes the first statement of the trumpet theme itself. The entire work is built around this original statement, which grows in intensity through exchanges of the theme between trombones and tuba, and then horns and trumpets. The score concludes with a magnificently effective percussion crescendo supporting a thrilling final sustained chord for the brass.

While Copland was working on his Symphony No. 3 in the years 1944-1946, he commented that he was "certainly reaching for the grandest gesture." Indeed, the grandiloquence and colossal sense of optimism that underlies what is widely regarded as the greatest symphony by any U.S. composer is stunningly crowned by the reappearance of the Fanfare for the Common Man as a preface to the final movement. Actually, however, as Anthony Burton suggests, it "provides a focus for the work in a more subtle way: its intervals, especially the rising fourth and fifth of the first phrase, permeate the thematic material of the entire symphony."

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