In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed called Aaron Copland’s score to The City “an astonishing missing link not only in the genesis of Copland’s Americana style, but in American music and cinema.” On January 27, Naxos releases The City (Naxos 2110231) with a newly-recorded soundtrack of the complete Copland score, featuring the Washington, D.C.-based Post-Classical Ensemble and conductor Angel Gil Ordóñez. Francis Guinan, a founding member of the renowned, Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble, narrates. This DVD is a sequel to The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains (Naxos 2110521), two classic Pare Lorentz documentaries that strongly influenced The City. The new DVD marks the first time Copland’s score has been recorded in its entirety.The DVD is produced by the Post-Classical Ensemble’s Artistic Director, Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America: A History and the recently-released Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. Horowitz considers Copland’s little-known score (which was never condensed as a concert suite) his “highest achievement” as a film composer. Horowitz also notes: “At a time when the recession and a crisis in housing have focused attention on the New Deal, The City is suddently remarkably timely. The greenbelt towns it espouses were a quintessential New Deal experiment, federally planned and subsidized by Rexford Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration.”
About the film
Made for the 1939 World’s Fair (”The World of Tomorrow”), The City is a classic documentary film distinguished for its organic integration of narration (scripted by Lewis Mumford), cinematography (by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), and music (by Copland). The resulting tapestry is astonishing for its vibrance and originality. Because filming outdoors with sound was so difficult and expensive, the story is told without dialogue, relying solely on its imagery, narration, and music. It is the absence of dialogue that makes it possible to create a new soundtrack – and for the first time do justice to the symphonic detail and depth of Copland’s score.
Depicting in sequence a New England village, a milltown, a “city,” and a “new town,” The City illustrates how the frantic pace of city and milltown living destroyed the quality of life formerly found in rural America-but which could be recaptured in “planned communities of modest size.” In the opening sequence, Mumford (an early critic of “urban sprawl,” whose seminal 1961 book, The City in History, explored the development of urban civilization) has the narrator rhapsodize: “The town was us, and we were part of it.” The culminating “new town” sequence was filmed in Greenbelt, Maryland, site of the first federal experiment using Mumford’s model of a small, planned community that provided Americans with jobs they could walk to, along with social services, schools, and shops-in short, a self-sustaining community. This historic city exists today and appears in the bonus film Which Playground for Your Child: Greenbelt or Gutter?, which features its original inhabitants (including those in The City), as well its next generation of residents.
Aaron Copland as Film Composer
Aaron Copland’s desire to broaden his audience in the 1930s and ‘40s attracted him to film; The City was his first soundtrack. His works were the antitheses of the lush, Romantic scores by his Hollywood contemporaries Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, leading famed composer, conductor, and pianist André Previn to comment that “what Copland represented in Hollywood was ‘fewer notes.’ ” Copland followed the example of Virgil Thomson, who, in The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), created a new style of film music Copland considered “fresher, more simple, and more personal” than most Hollywood movie music-”a lesson in how to treat Americana.”
The City’s structure permitted Copland to explore a gamut of iconic American locales. Sounds such as sirens, a taped emergency call, and typewriters become part of the musical score, evoking Varèse’s Amériques and Ionisation.
The City was Copland’s ticket to Hollywood, where he later composed the soundtracks to Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), The North Star (1943), The Red Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1949), among others. He won an Academy Award for The Heiress, but director William Wyler’s insistence on bringing in another composer to soften his score soured him on working in Hollywood.
DVD Extras:
The City with the original soundtrack (43:40)
Featuring Morris Carnovsky (narrator) and an orchestra conducted by Max Goberman.
Which Playground for Your Child: Greenbelt or Gutter? (15:09)
A film produced in 2000 by Video Art Productions for the Greenbelt Museum. These interviews with three “pioneers” who lived in Greenbelt, Maryland, beginning in 1937 and 1938, include the reminiscences of Bob Sommers, who recalls the filming of The City and is the boy with the flat tire in the film.
George Stoney in Conversation with Joseph Horowitz (29:15)
This conversation with the legendary documentary filmmaker, who is also a historian of the genre (and, at age 91, an eyewitness to the New Deal and the 1939 World’s Fair), begins with a discussion of why 1930s documentaries such as The City eschewed dialogue-and the artistic consequences.
The DVD is produced with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland and is distributed in the United States by Naxos of America.
The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains brilliantly illuminate the ideology of the New Deal. They are also masterpieces of the documentary film genre and a treasured part of America’s cultural patrimony. I salute Naxos for reissuing these two great films. The Post-Classical Ensemble’s new recording of Virgil Thomson’s soundtrack and the fascinating supplementary materials all enhance the historic value of this wonderful DVD.
-Paul S. Boyer, Editor-in Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History
SCREENINGS AND OTHER EVENTS FOR THE CITY:
Saturday, January 24 at 1 PM;
Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse
5015 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20008
A screening, with Angel Gil-Ordóñez, Benjamin Pasternack, and Joseph McCartin.
Saturday, Jan 31 7:00 PM;
The Post Classical Ensemble: Copland And The Cold War
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Davis Performing Arts Center Gonda Theatre
37th and O Streets
Washington, DC 20057
For further information: www.post-classicalensemble.org
Post-Classical Production features Benjamin Pasternack, pianist; Georgetown University Concert Choir and Chamber Singers, actors from Georgetown’s Theater & Performance Studies Program, and Joseph Horowitz. Program includes Aaron Copland’s Cat and Mouse; Piano Variations; Scherzo (from Piano Sonata); Piano Fantasy Copland:” Into the Streets May First” (audience sing-along). Plus a re-enactment of Copland’s testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Special Investigations; and excerpts from the classic 1939 documentary film The City, with music by Aaron Copland.
Wednesday, February 11 at 6 PM;
New York Public Library, Main Branch,
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
Room: South Court Auditorium
This screening will be followed by a conversation between Joseph Horowitz, Angel Gil-Ordóñez, and documentary filmmaker/scholar George Stoney.
Friday, February 13, 2:30 PM;
Library for the Performing Arts
Bruno Walter Auditorium
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10023-7498
The City (screening only; no program)
Tuesday, May 19, time TBA
The Greenbelt Museum
Greenbelt, MD
A screening, with Angel Gil-Ordóñez, Joseph Horowitz.
3rd Parties’ Reviews:
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For generations Americans from all walks of life have been inspired by Abraham Lincoln. This includes generations of American composers who have written a long list of works dedicated to or inspired by the history and words of the 16th President of the United States.
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