Connotations (Copland)

Connotations is scored for full symphony orchestra with augmented percussion. The complete ensemble includes piccolo, three flutes (third flute doubling second piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons (third bassoon doubling contrabassoon), six horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, tympani, five percussionists (glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, conga drums, timbales, cymbals, metal sheet, tam-tam, triangle, claves, temple block, woodblock, bass drum, snare drum, tenor drum), piano (doubling celesta) and strings.[15]

A typical performance of this work lasts 20 minutes.[16]

Connotations is twelve-tone, a style of composition which is among the first introduced, and certainly most well known, forms of musical Serialism. Through this technique, Copland wrote that he felt he could express "something of the tensions, aspirations and drama" of that time.[8] Three four-note chords, musicologist Neil Butterworth writes, spell out the 12-note row on two trumpets and two trombones.[17] Each chord is separated by echoes from the remaining trumpets and trombones, which also introduces one of the work's main rhythmic elements.[17] The row is repeated, transposed up an augmented fourth with a different distribution of notes within each chord.[17] The chords "are repeated several times in various transpositions" so they can become firmly established in both the musical fabric and the listener's ear.[17]

From these chords, Copland builds an overall structure that he calls "closest to a free treatment of the baroque form of the chaconne," with a succession of variations "based on the opening chords and their implied melodic intervals."[18] A series of variations alternate fast and slow sections, which according to Copland biographer Howard Pollack creates a complex structure overall.[19] This structure forms a musical arch, sectioned ABCBA.[20] Pollack calls the A sections "prophetic, tragic," the B sections "jazzy, frentic [sic]" and the C section "pastoral, reflective." While these are all moods long familiar to listeners of Copland's music, Pollack asserts, "a new darkness hangs over the whole. The outer sections are grave; the jazzy sections rather cheerless; the pastoral contrast more weary than peaceful. The music often seems lost, uncertain, trapped."[20] The piece ends in a series of strict 12-note chords that Copland called "aggregates."[21]

Both Chavez and American composer David Diamond were confused initially about what musical form Connotations would take. The work's title seemed to give no clear indication, they said, and Chavez told Copland that he found Connotations too abstract.[22] As Copland explained to both men and later wrote, in selecting the title, he took the dictionary meaning of the word "connote" to imply or signify meanings in addition to the primary one as an impetus for musical exploration.[8]

Butterworth writes, "Connotations is an essay in contrasts that do not destroy the inherent unity: the chordal writing gives way to outbursts of complex counterpoint."[23] The entire composition, Copland explains, is derived from the "three harsh chords" with which it begins. Each of these chords contained four notes of the twelve-note row upon which the work is based. "When spelled out horizontally," they supplied him "with various versions of a more lyrical discourse."[8] This "skeletal frame of the row," he told Diamond and Chavez, was the "primary meaning" and as such denoted the area which would be explored in the course of the piece. "The subsequent treatment," he explained, "seeks out other implications—connotations that come in a flash or connotations that the composer himself may gradually uncover."[22] From there, the listener was "free to discover his or her own connotative meanings, including perhaps some not suspected by the author.[18]

Overall, both Pollack and the composer label Connotations as one of three works written in "the grand manner," as Copland wrote about his Third Symphony.[24][25] The other two works in this category were the Symphonic Ode and the Third Symphony.[26] Copland also calls those works transitional pieces, anomalies which stand between different compositional styles of his oeuvre.[27][28] All three works proved, as musicologist William W. Austin notes and Pollack states about the symphony, "challenging to grasp."[29] While music historian Judith Tick notes the work's "massive chordal assaults on the ear," she adds that while Copland 's stated intent was to evoke the dissonance of modern life, he also acknowledges "the darkness revealed in such early works from the 1920s as the Symphonic Ode and Piano Variations."[30]

As for details, Pollack elaborates in his biography of the composer about the similarity of Connotations to the Ode in its overall length, single-movement form, solemn tone and "hard-edged" orchestration.[19] Butterworth points out that both works are structured as an arch composed of five sections. The first section, slow and chordal, gives way to a scherzo. The third section is slower, followed by another scherzo and a finale which restates passages taken from the opening.[17] The rhythmic patterns in both pieces resemblance each other.[23] This would have been no surprise, Butterworth writes, since Copland revised that score in 1955.[31] Pollock states that another work that might have been fresh on the composer's mind was his Nonet for strings, composed in 1960, which also employs an arch form.[20]

The melodic lines' wide leaps and arpeggios are not far removed from those in the Short Symphony, written 30 years earlier, and the prevalence of the interval of the minor ninth hearkens back to his Orchestral Variations, as does his use of alternating fast and slow sections.[19][32]

The overall impression, as critic Alex Ross writes in his book The Rest is Noise, was that "Copland was no longer in an ingratiating mood; some sudden rage welled up in him, some urge to confront the gala Lincoln Center audience with an old whiff of revolutionary mystique."[1] Copland himself remembers, "The acidulous harmonies of my score ... upset a good many people, especially those who were expecting another Appalachian Spring."[35] Jacqueline Kennedy was left unable to say anything other than "Oh, Mr. Copland" when taken backstage during intermission to meet with the composer. When Copland later asked Verna Fine, wife of American composer Irving Fine, what this meant, Fine answered, "Oh, Aaron, it's obvious. She hated your piece!"[36] In Variety, Robert J. Landry called Connotations "an assault on [the audience's] nervous systems" and added, "Seldom has this reviewer heard such outspoken comment in the lobbies after such dull response. It is strictly accurate to declare that an audience paying $100 a seat and in mood for self-congratulation and schmaltz hated Copland's reminder of the ugly realities of industrialization, inflation and cold war—which his music seems to be talking about."[20]

A minority of apparently more discerning listeners felt that Connotations was the right music for its time and place. Composer Arthur Berger states, "I think [Copland] wrote exactly the piece he wanted to write because he wanted to make a statement about the new Philharmonic Hall in New York—it wasn't going to be a temple of easy listening, as it were, but a place for serious music-making."[37] Minna Lederman Daniel, a music writer and editor of Modern Music magazine, told Copland, "I think Connotations was the right place for the people and the occasion—indeed the only one properly related to them. It sounds a good deal like certain aspects of the building—big, spacious, clear, long-lined, and it sounds very like you ... To those familiar with your music, the characteristic, identifying moods are perfectly apparent. The special Copland eloquence is there."[38]

A few critics were positive. Louis Biancolli wrote in The New York Telegram that the work was "a turning point in [Copland's] career, a powerful score in 12-tone style that has liberated new stores of creative energy."[20] John Molleson write for the New York Herald Tribune that while the new piece was "a difficult work and like most music difficult to understand at one hearing ... this piece has flesh where others have only skin, and there was a good deal of arresting lyricism."[39] Others, however, dismissed Connotations: Everett Helm thought it "unnecessarily strident," Harriet Johnson "too long for its content" and Richard Franko Johnson "completely without charm."[20]

The concert was telecast live by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to an audience of 26 million viewers.[1] As part of its program, NBC asked Copland to talk to the television audience about Connotations. While the cameras alternated between shots of the composer and the manuscript score, Copland said, "It seems to me that there are two things you can do when listening to any new work. The most important thing is to lend yourself—or to put it another way—try to be as sensitive as you can to the overall feeling the new piece gives off. The second way is to listen with some awareness of the general shape of the new piece, realizing that a composer works with his musical materials just as an architect works with his building materials in order to construct an edifice that makes sense."[39] He then discussed the work briefly but in some detail.[39]

To Copland's surprise, his lecture was taken as an apologia, not an explanation, by the majority of the television audience. Moreover, vehement letters poured into NBC after the broadcast from across the United States. One read, "If last night is any criterion of what can be expected in Lincoln Center, it should be called 'Center of Jungle Culture.'" Another read, "Dear Mr. Copland, Shame Shame Shame!"[39]

Bernstein conducted Connotations again during the first week of regular Philharmonic concerts in 1963 and included it among the pieces the orchestra played on its European tour that February.[38] Despite the composer's claim in Copland Since 1943 that "The European premiere was more successful than the New York reception,"[38] reviews about Connotations remained mainly negative; comments abounded about "mere din" and "dodecaphonic deserts."[2] When the London audience gave the work a lengthy ovation, Bernstein responded that he would conduct another Copland work as an encore. When cries of "Oh, oh" ensued, he added, "But this will be in a different style." He then conducted "Hoe-Down" from the ballet Rodeo.[40]

A release of the New York performance by Columbia Records fared no better. Robert Marsh found the music "dreary" and "dull."[2] Irving Kolodin called it "rather relentlessly grim."[2] Everett Helm, who had been able to hear the work live before he sampled the recording, wrote, "Connotations for Orchestra sounded rather strident on September 23; on the disc it becomes ear-piercing."[2] Bernstein rerecorded Connotations with the New York Philharmonic for Columbia in 1973. This recording was released with Copland's Inscape and Carter's Concerto for Orchestra.[40]

The composer admitted that Connotations possessed "a rather severe and somewhat intellectual tone."[4] However, while he did not expect it to be an immediate success, he had still hoped that the music's intensity and drama might lend it some appeal.[41] While Copland maintained that "It bothers me not at all to realize that my range as a composer includes both accessible and problematic works," composer and musicologist Peter Dickinson notes "a tone of defensiveness" in this remark.[42] Nevertheless, Connotations' abrasiveness to many listeners might not have been the only factor in its initial failure.

The negative initial reaction to Connotations has also been claimed to have been due to Bernstein's conducting. Bernstein was especially antipathetic toward works that were atonal or rhythmically disjunctive and "could not overcome a deep-seated antipathy, an almost gut reaction" against them.[43] Of the contemporary composers with whom he could relate, he had been "generous and enthusiastic" in his support of Copland. His frequent programming of Copland's works during his tenure with the New York Philharmonic might, Adams suggests, have been partly in reaction against works of the twelve-tone school.[43] Now he was confronted with what American composer John Adams terms a "stridently dissonant, piss-n-vinegar" work "written in an idiom so alien to his own sensibilities," the first performance of which he would not only conduct but would also be televised to a national audience.[44] Pollack claims Bernstein might have found Connotations "boring" and kept it on the program solely out of duty to his old friend.[45]

Despite Bernstein's own musical antipathies, Adams claims the conductor generally remained open-minded and curious enough "to try something at least once."[46] Among the world premieres of "difficult" works he led were Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie in Boston in 1949 and Carter's Concerto for Orchestra in New York in 1970; and despite his apparent lack of identification with Carter's music, he described the composer in 1975 as "a brilliant mind and a supremely intelligent musician."[46][47] Bernstein conducted Connotations again during the first week of regular Philharmonic concerts in 1963 and included it among the pieces the orchestra played on its European tour in February 1963.[38] He would also commission a subsequent orchestral work from Copland, which became Inscape, and conduct Connotations again in an all-Copland concert with the New York Philharmonic in 1989.[3][48] Even with this advocacy and the chance to familiarize himself at length, Connotations apparently remained a work that Bernstein did not conduct well. Critic Peter Davis, in his review of the 1989 performance, writes that while Connotations remained "admittedly not a very lovable piece," in Bernstein's hands it "sounded more fulsome than portentous."[49]

Copland acknowledged that the acoustics at the premiere were "shrill."[35] While Philharmonic Hall was being renovated in 1976 in an attempt to improve its sound, Harold C. Schonberg wrote, "For all we know, Connotations is a masterpiece. But one thing is certain—it did not make many friends for Lincoln Center in 1962." While admitting the work was "written in Copland's austere, objective, abstract style," he suggested that bad acoustics might have also played a part in the work's failure at the premiere. The orchestra that night had been augmented by a large chorus to perform the first movement of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony, which pushed the orchestra forward, "out of its normal playing position ... The sound was bad, bad. The bass response was sorely deficient, the hall was plagued with echoes, the musicians on stage reported that they could not hear each other very well (just great for ensemble) and in general Philharmonic Hall sounded like a cheap hi-fi set with the bass speakers out of the circuit.[50]

Copland conducted Connotations in 1966, 1967 and 1968 around the United States. This included an engagement at the Musica Viva series in San Francisco and concerts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. "I spoke to the audiences," Copland writes, "with humorous accounts of the work's adverse effect on droves of letter writers, who had heard the original performance, in person or on TV. Then I asked the brass section to illustrate the opening chords, and the strings how they sounded. Before they knew it, the audience was sympathetic. My purpose was not to sell the work but to demonstrate it."[40]

A decade after Bernstein premiered the work, Pierre Boulez, who had succeeded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1971, conducted Connotations with the orchestra for the ten-year anniversary of Philharmonic Hall (subsequently renamed Avery Fisher Hall; later David Geffen Hall). According to Copland, ten years had allowed enough time to change audience perceptions for the better. In his review for The New York Times Harold C. Schonberg wrote that this time, the audience "did not rise in revolt" as it had in 1962. He added, "The composer's cause was helped by, if memory serves, a better performance than had been given in 1962. Mr. Boulez revels in this kind of music, and he brought drama to it as well as a synthesizing quality."[51]