A A RON CO P L A N D
Copland composed El Salón México between 1932 and 1936. Inspired by his travels south of the border, Copland began to find his signature sound in this piece, which first won him a wider audience. First performance: August 27, 1937, in Mexico City, with Carlos Chávez conducting the Mexico Symphony First Nashville Symphony performance: December 3, 1957, with Music Director Guy Taylor Estimated length: 12 minutes
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t’s often pointed out that the composer who created one of the most recognizable strands of the “American sound” in orchestral music was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Moreover, Aaron Copland arrived at his style after assimilating influences from his travels outside the United States. He enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Mexican
W H AT TO L I ST E N FO R Copland avails himself of several folk tunes and weaves them into a single, collage-like movement, incorporating some of the modernist techniques he had explored in earlier works. Biographer Howard Pollack suggests that this almost cinematic treatment may have been inspired by “the kinds of collage and patchwork practiced by folk artisans.” Repeated hearings yield different perspectives on the piece, including just how to divide up its succession of slow and fast sections. Copland also employs his unusually large percussion battery (listen for the classic Latin sound of the ratchet-like guiro) to amplify the orchestral colors. Overall, notes Pollack, his method here provided a
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S E R I ES
El Salón México
CL A SS I C A L
Born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York; died on December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York
composer and conductor Carlos Chávez, a contemporary whose own artistic and political evolution paralleled Copland’s. The two shared an interest in combining folk music with modernist developments in composition. It was Chávez who encouraged Copland to undertake his first trip to Mexico in 1932, during the height of the Great Depression. “In some inexplicable way, while milling about in those crowded halls,” recalled Copland, “one felt a really live contact with the Mexican ‘people’ — the electric sense one gets sometimes in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people — their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm. I remember quite well that it was at just such a moment that I conceived the idea of composing a piece about Mexico….” The result, El Salón México, which takes its name from a famous dance hall in the capital city, is a vibrant miniature tone poem. Both the raucous dance hall and the bands that kept couples moving through the sticky night suggested to Copland a kind of microcosm for the power of music to sustain people in desperate times. As the Great Depression lingered, it intensified Copland’s desire to communicate with a broader audience. El Salón México, which the composer dedicated to his lover at the time, photographer Victor Kraft, scored an instant success when Chávez premiered it, and it was his first orchestral work to be recorded commercially.