Reflections on Music: Rodeo — By Aaron Copland
I’m frequently moved by music, whether it’s an orchestral score to a film, a stadium rock ballad, or a sincere folksong or bluegrass serenade. For me and most of us, music is emotional catharsis. It’s why we love it so much. As we get older, we tend to cling to music and styles of music that remind us of our youth. I’m no different.
I actively struggle to go out of my way to listen to new music (at least music that I am unfamiliar with) in the hopes of discovering something mind-blowing. Something striking. Something moving. I’ve started listening to Hip-hop with some more frequency. I’ve embraced the idea of pop music. I still struggle to find enjoyment in country music over the last 20 years, and I gravitate to the much older fare in that genre. But I still have music I come back to. Music that I can’t shake, and that not only feels comfortable but in many ways feels profound.
Rodeo is one of the first pieces of Western Art Music (Classical Music) that I remember hearing and loving. Growing up, the local country music station used the last refrain of fanfare from the first movement, Buckaroo Holiday, as a stinger between songs, chatter, and advertisement segments. It was so ubiquitous growing up that it never occurred to me that it was from something else for a long time.
When I was in my early teens, I started listening to the classical music station at night to fall asleep. Most nights, I was lulled to dreamland via Mozart, Vivaldi, Respighi, or one of the hundreds of composers that lived during the last 400 years. However, one night, a very boisterous piece began to play. The entire orchestra performed a descending, syncopated scale.
It was the opening to the above-mentioned Buckaroo Holliday and the ballet suite for Rodeo. During this first movement, I heard it. That fanfare stinger I’d heard all those years on the radio was part of this piece of music. A short time later, the Hoe-down that had aired on all those advertisements for the cattle industry played, and I was hooked.
A little background about Rodeo, before I get into the piece itself and some final thoughts about it and its impact on my life:
Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo commissioned Copland to compose the music in 1942, and the ballet premiered in October of that year. The ballet tells the story of the Cowgirl smitten with the Head Wrangler at a ranch. Who is, in turn, smitten with the Rancher’s Daughter and is competing with the Champion Roper for her affection. The primary protagonist of the ballet is the Cowgirl, who competes for the love of the Head Wrangler before falling for the Champion Roper and ending up with him at the end. She also has to prove to the other cowboys that she can keep up with them. Anges de Mille choreographed the original ballet and danced the lead part.
The piece is quintessentially American, specifically western America. Copland succeeds in this primarily by using folk songs, most of which are all but forgotten now. This reuse of folk music in a classical music setting wasn’t new. Chopin, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky all did it, and contemporary composers to Copland, such as Bartok, Hindemith, and Stravinsky, were heavily influenced by the folk music of their home countries.
Copland’s use of folk songs isn’t simply inspirational references. He quotes complete themes and melodies throughout Rodeo to the point that a listener familiar with the composition can point to specific spots in the music upon hearing the original folk song quoted. This isn’t a criticism of Copland. He manages to inject exciting energy and play with the melodies and style in such a way as to give it a personal grounding. Good composers borrow. Great composers steal and make the piece their own.
A shortlist of the folk songs used just in the first movement, Buckaroo Holiday (and links to the renditions of each piece) includes: He’d Be a Buckaroo and Sis Joe as the primary melodic sources. While the following movements reference these tunes (as they are the heart of ballet), the most apparent lifting comes in the final movement, Hoedown.
The folk song Bonaparte’s Retreat is used heavily for the Hoedown. Still, it’s not the tune itself, but a specific version of the tune performed by William Hamilton Stepp in a recording for the Library of Congress in 1937 (only five years before the ballet was composed.) While Stepp’s version is a lilting, wickedly fun fiddle tune, Copland manages to elevate it. Copland masterfully takes the song whole-cloth and then weaves a carousing 3-minute dance finale that feels overwhelmingly satisfying to listen to.
Copland would a short time later take four of the five movements to the ballet (leaving out the movement Ranch House Party) to form a suite, which is still widely performed to this day. This suite, conducted by Copland’s longtime friend Leonard Bernstein and performed by the New York Philharmonic, features on the CD I bought in 1995, an album that pushed me to discover more of Copland’s music and one of my favorite pieces of music. But I got it for Rodeo.
Picking up that album, I was excited. It opened with Appalachian Spring, which I will talk about in another Musical Reflections post. It also had the orchestral suite for Billy the Kid and Fanfare for the Common Man, which we were currently playing an arrangement of in the marching band that closed out the album. It was one of the few purchases I made while in my first year at college. Probably one of the best.
Rodeo holds a special place for me. While I don’t do much with music anymore (aside from listening and sparking off the occasional inspirational composition), Rodeo was one of the first non-film scores that excited me. I realized that America had an exceptional sound in the classical music world that separated it from Europe. It’s a sound and feeling that inspired me when writing my music.
I still remember laying in bed, nearly 30 years later, listening to the little boombox mom and dad got me for Christmas, tuned in carefully to public radio to be lulled asleep by the classical music. Then, Buckaroo Holiday started, and I stayed awake for another half hour to listen to this revelation of a piece of music. I spent the next several months telling anybody who would listen that I knew where the fanfare was from on KNEU or that the name of the “Beef It’s What’s For Dinner” was the Hoe-Down from Rodeo. People smirked and nodded, it was a bit of novel trivia that didn’t necessarily change their lives, but it made me happy.
My love for the Rodeo helped me discover other pieces and helped me see classical composers’ influence on Hollywood film scores. It encouraged me to pursue music for a decade of my life. It still inspires me to this day. Perhaps there’s as much nostalgia as anything, but the music is still great, no matter.
References
Library of Congress Entry on Bonaparte’s Retreat
Wikipedia Article on the Ballet
Wikipedia Article on Copland (Which is heavily researched and sourced)
