One of the most recognizable pieces of heraldic music of the last century is Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," ranking slightly under "Thus Spake Zarathustra" as pure classical hook coupled with populist pomp and pageant, proving its metal-mettle at sports rallies and the on-stage arrivals of countless rock bands. Copland, a vernacular poet in his combine of folk and sophisticated orchestration, also wrote for the dance, and he created physical, accessible music; the rarefied airs of discordant dozen-tones that were so trendy among his peers aren't a bad compositional vantage point, but sometimes you want to get out of the lab.

Copland had completed his Eurocentric apprenticing, influenced as much by Diagelev's Ballet Russes in 1925 as Paris 'compositional dissonances, studying under Nadia Boulanger and experiencing jazz from a French perspective, more Bricktop than Louis Armstrong. But the America he returned to was on the verge of Depression, and despite its once-limitless reaches, communities like the cowboys, or even Appalachian dwellers from far western Pennsylvania, would be an endangered species within these months leading to another world war.

For Copland the west represented the most American of myths, an endless space to throw a body around in the great… read more »