Classical Music during the War
In September 1939, long before the Blitz had begun in England, British citizens were required to maintain blackout conditions, so it would be more difficult for German bombers to spot their targets. Evening entertainments, church services, and the like all had to be abandoned; the concert halls were closed. Since it was months before the bombs began to fall, British citizens soon chafed at the blackout restrictions. An English pianist, Myra Hess (1890–1965), had an inspiration: why not offer daytime concerts in the National Gallery, in London’s central Trafalgar Square? Hess helped to organize hundreds of lunchtime concerts, performing 146 times herself. At the first performance, almost a thousand listeners squeezed into a hall intended to seat seven hundred, and still more people were turned away. The Times reported that after each concert, “People hurry out into Trafalgar Square, shouldering their gas masks and looking all the better for having been lifted for an hour to a plane where boredom and fear seem irrelevant.”
In September 1939, long before the Blitz had begun in England, British citizens were required to maintain blackout conditions, so it would be more difficult for German bombers to spot their targets. Evening entertainments, church services, and the like all had to be abandoned; the concert halls were closed. Since it was months before the bombs began to fall, British citizens soon chafed at the blackout restrictions. An English pianist, Myra Hess (1890–1965), had an inspiration: why not offer daytime concerts in the National Gallery, in London’s central Trafalgar Square? Hess helped to organize hundreds of lunchtime concerts, performing 146 times herself. At the first performance, almost a thousand listeners squeezed into a hall intended to seat seven hundred, and still more people were turned away. The Times reported that after each concert, “People hurry out into Trafalgar Square, shouldering their gas masks and looking all the better for having been lifted for an hour to a plane where boredom and fear seem irrelevant.”
In August 1942, the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, London-born Eugene Goossens (1893–1962), decided to commission some pieces himself. During World War I, when he was living in England, he had asked for fanfares from British composers to begin each concert. The enthusiastic response encouraged him to repeat the idea in World War II, this time requesting works from American composers. Goossens told the composers that these would be “stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.”
One of these fanfares, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, became a perennial favorite. The piece has lived on in several ways. Copland himself reused the Fanfare by embedding it within his Third Symphony (1946), explaining that he wanted to give the piece “an affirmative tone. After all, it was a wartime piece— or more accurately, an end-of-war piece—intended to reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time.”
And, like the music of Robert Johnson, Copland’s fanfare has experienced some cross-style adaptations: jazz and rock groups, including the Rolling Stones and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, have incorporated the Fanfare in various ways (although Copland, who heard several of these versions before his death, preferred his original!) Nevertheless, the Fanfare for the Common Man, no matter what its incarnation, is a piece that continues to resonate with listeners.