(09-18-2016, 10:50 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It's time for this one. The early 40s were undoubtedly the peak of Aaron Copland's career, as well as the peak of the big band era. This piece is also the peak of MY musical career, so far. I wrote a transcription for organ of this piece in 1986, and in recent years have made it available on my website, and received hundreds of requests for a copy. It shows how people all over America respond to this piece and need it to celebrate and mark their milestones in life. It is sometimes even thought of as an alternative national anthem. As the poster of this video says, however, it really belongs to all people. Fanfare for the Common Man (1942)
In spite of terrormarie's predictable reaction, I'm going to post this too:
http://philosopherswheel.com/sheetmusic.htm#Reviews of Fanfare
1942 -- when the fascists debasing the ordinary person everywhere, including even the supposed Master Races of Germany and Japan who had been turned from citizens to serfs, were still on the advance. People in the democracies needed to be reminded of what the war was about on their side, namely the defense of humane decencies established in the American and French Revolutions and the British reform era, and in spirit (if not fully in practice) the Bolshevik Revolution. The common man would defeat the fascists or the fascists would destroy everything good in life.
I think also of the Sandburg-Copland Lincoln Portrait, as clear a rejection of the new manifestations of slavery in the infernal empires of Germany and Japan as a rejection in Lincoln's words of the moribund slavery of the Confederacy. Not even Churchill or FDR could match those words of Lincoln as anti-fascist propaganda. The brave talk of "a new birth of freedom" (from the Gettysburg Address) would be as necessary for defining victory in the Civil War of Western Civilization (better known as World War II) as in the American Civil War. I don;t know how significant it is, but while the Allies were recognizing a heroic death as a tragedy, the fascists were glorifying death in the name of the Fatherland or the Party.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.