Copland: Music for The Theater, Music for Movies, Clarinet Concerto - The Orchestra of St. Luke's, William Blount, Dennis Russell Davies

Copland, Music for Theatre, movies, Quiet City, Clarinet Concerto liner notes

As a young man studying composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the early twenties, Aaron Copland wondered, "If there is a French sounding music and a German sounding music, why not an American sound?" The sure way to achieve this seemed to be with jazz. One of Copland's first pieces after his return to the United States from France in 1923 was a jazzy Piano Concerto. It caused a sensation at Symphony Hall in Boston when the great Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere with Copland as pianist. Copland wrote in his autobiography, "It may be difficult to imagine today that the very idea of jazz in a concert hall was piquant in the twenties, but it seems that any piece based on jazz was assured of a mild succes de scandale ... " Despite the adverse reviews, Koussevitzky was so taken with the young American composer that he offered to play a new work by Copland the following season. With that in mind and a League of Composers commission in hand, Copland wrote Music for the Theatre in 1925.