Most of Australia’s sports-watching beer-swilling couch potatoes could unwittingly hum Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, the theme tune to Channel 9′s ‘Wide World of Sport’, but there’s more to the American composer than that catchy ditty. Copland featured prominently in Alex Ross’s thrilling history of twentieth century music ‘The Rest Is Noise’, and his ‘Clarinet Concerto’ is one of the staples of the genre. Along with Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, Copland’s Concerto helped give the instrument a distinctly American classical voice, complimenting that established by jazz players like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw (indeed, Benny Goodman commissioned the piece and performed its premiere). Copland viewed popular music as ripe for the picking, bringing vernacular American forms into classical composition, and the ‘Concerto’ fuses elements of jazz, folk and wide-screen cinematic country into a grand and rollicking arrangement, one very difficult to resist happily humming along to, tinny in hand, watching cricket.
Robert L Aldridge’s ‘Clarinet Concerto’ is described as a direct descendant of Copland’s work, and explores a similar hodgepodge of musical styles, all comfortably packed in, jostling like a cattle-train. Aldridge also introduces klezmer elements, particularly well detailed in the vicious opening movement, giving way to serene introspection in the second. The finale locks into a jaunty polka dance which, alongside the jazzy riffs and sweeping orchestral touches, evokes the heterogenous high-culture Americana of Woody Allen soundtracks.
Joshua Meggitt
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