Leonard Bernstein - Fancy Free

A few weeks ago I picked up this LP along with a bunch of other classical albums at one of my local thrift store haunts. I was initially attracted to the Copland piece - El Salon Mexico - since I had heard about it yet never heard it. This was apparently Copland's "breakthrough" piece - the work that opened the door to a more appealing, populist style of writing though no less artistically valid. Before El Salon Mexico, Copland had been writing some pretty wild and ugly sounding stuff (like many modernists of the 1920s). Of course I'm a fan of his more popular pieces - Appalachian Spring, etc.... - so I wanted to hear Copland's turning point.

The Copland piece was not the main event of the album, however. That honor went to Bernstein's own composition - the music for a ballet called Fancy Free. Placing it into context, the ballet debut was in 1944 - at the height of World War II. Reading the description of the ballet on the back cover notes, there is nothing terribly revolutionary about the storyline. In fact, it seems to be not much more elaborate than what is depicted on the front cover - sailors chasing women on shore leave. Ho-hum. Yet, the music for the ballet is interesting in its own way (much like how Stravinsky's ballet music for The Firebird and The Rite of Sping does not require the visual - it stands on its own). I've often found this about ballet scores - I could care less about the half-baked storylines and leaping about - the music, since it is designed for dance routines, often is much more rhythmic and experimental than the typical Symphony or Concerto. So, although I'll pass on the dance routines, ballet music - at least the modern kind - is pretty wide open for me.

As it is, the Bernstein music is pretty good. I can't help thinking that Fancy Free was a dry-run of sorts for him. Bernstein only started his conducting career in earnest in 1943 with his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic. He was a young guy who needed to prove his worth. Fancy Free's immediate commercial appeal can't be denied. This is probably why the record was not issued on the grey Columbia masterworks label, but on the pop-oriented red label instead.

Although the ballet dates to 1944, this LP issue must have appeared in the mid-to-late 1950s. By that time, Bernstein was already riding pretty high in his career with new vistas ready to conquer (West Side Story was unveiled in 1957 - arguably his peak). As it happens, the idea of the ballet for Fancy Free would eventually morph into a full-blown musical (and later still - movie) called On the Town. Same mundane, yet commercially appealing, storyline.

However, this particular LP did manage to catch my interest for another reason. As goofy as the cover art is and as blatantly commercial as the ballet it illustrates was, the other material included on the record turns this platter into a quick synopsis of American-influenced "classical" music of the early 20th Century. Here's what I mean..........

The Fancy Free piece could be considered the quintessential World War II period-piece. The year is 1944. Although Americans have made tremendous sacrifices, this war is a just war and we're winning it. Though victory would be another year off, I can imagine the feeling in the country was that it was merely a matter of time before the world fell at our feet. How else could an American composer have the courage to compose a piece of light-ballet to elevate the nobility of the cause while the battles were still raging? Well, Bernstein wasn't alone - Hollywood had been cranking out plenty of patriotic movie musicals to raise the spirits of the soldiers as well as the folks at home during the war. So, in that context, Fancy Free is a great example of this type of populist art though perhaps not one of the more well-known examples (which makes it even more interesting, ultimately).

When we flip the record over onto Side Two the listener travels back in time to two previous decades - long before the call to war and the seemingly inevitable victory that awaited us on the other side.....

Aaron Copland was a "difficult" composer in his early years. Like many other serious composers at the turn of the 20th Century he took it as his sacred duty to challenge the old order to replace the syrupy sentiments of the Romantic Age with bold, new and sometimes frightening sounds. The Great Depression changed all that. Copland would be hired on as part of New Deal programs to create populist, accessible and, with any luck, uplifting and uniquely American music to bolster the spirits of the demoralized American population. His first successful attempt toward this new approach was El Salon Mexico. He took as his inspiration traditional folk melodies he heard while visiting in Mexico and molded them into a bold and cohesive (not to mention sonically pleasing) tone poem. This is the same approach he would later apply to all his more famous American compositions.

Even before the Great Depression, there were moves being made to discover what kind of contribution American music could make to the "serious music" world. In France, quite a number of composers had been testing the limits of western music for some time. Erik Satie and his elliptical piano pieces had been setting the more adventurous listeners on their collective ears. One of Satie's disciples was Darius Milhaud. Mildhaud's 1923 composition "La Creation Du Monde" is included as the last piece on the above LP and is arguably Milhaud's most famous work. In it, he successfully incorporates tonalities from American jazz music - a style that would later influence George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, as well as other classical-jazz amalgamations. Milhaud himself would eventually find among his own disciples none other than future jazz great Dave Brubeck who was quite taken with Milhaud's jazz-inflected classical composing style. There were other, less successful attempts to infuse jazz tonalities into classical forms in the 1920s - to the point where a good many composers considered the bridging of those two worlds nothing more than a mere passing fad. How wrong they were!

So, you never quite know what could be lurking on some goofy-looking platter tucked away in a thrift store. This Bernstein LP turns out to be a brilliant little exposition on musical trends of the early 20th Century and the influence of American culture upon the highbrow world of Classical Music. Well worth the $1 I invested. Happy Listening!