a radical pariah destroying Anglo-Saxon America” (Bayor, 1986, p.182).
Bayor goes on to suggest that the association between anit-radicalism
and antisemitism fuelled fears that McCarthyism in the 1950s had major
anti-Jewish undercurrents, particularly during the Rosenberg case. While
he concludes that McCarthy’s association with Jews like Roy Cohn
delegitimised those fears, it still follows that the antisemitism may have
influenced the targeting of high-profile, liberal Jewish cultural figures like
Bernstein. Copland’s case may have been less about his Jewishness,
however, considering his association with groups like the Popular Front.
The two composers were broadly politically aligned, but the ways in
which their political views manifested in their musical careers were,
despite both reflecting elements of 20th century Jewish American political
culture, rather divergent. Furthermore, as a result of this practical and
aesthetic divergence, the critical responses were contrasting, as were
the political consequences.
Copland, the Popular Front and Folk Music
Copland’s move towards populist works, as stated in the previous
chapter, was in response to a widening view of what constituted, and
who was included in American identity. His imposed simplicity on his
composition process in the 1930s was meant to be “Clarifying and
simplifying, reaching out to a wider audience, promoting some form of
communal bonding” (Dickstein, 2005, p.92). This was an expression
of Copland’s liberalism, one which led him to the use of American
folk tunes in his writing. Morris Dickstein identifies an element of the
culture of the Popular Front, a left-wing political movement with which
Copland was involved in the 1930s, as an embracing of new media and
technology as a way to better democratise art for a larger, more diverse
American audience (Dickstein, 2005, p.91). This ideological approach
was criticised in the post-war period when American politics on the
whole was pushing in the opposite direction. Dickstein says that “They
saw it as hopelessly middlebrow” (Dickstein, 2005, p.91), a criticism that
he doesn’t link to Copland’s personal identity, but the idea that Copland’s
music using new media to bridge the gap between high and low-brow
art was deemed problematic. This is a criticism of the kind of cultural
activism that Copland was best positioned to do because of the cultural
mediator status of Jews in America at the time.
Additionally, Copland’s use of American folk tunes, over which he had
no claim of cultural ownership, was in pursuit of finding the best way to
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