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Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War.

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Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War. By Elizabeth B. Crist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [x, 253 p. ISBN 0-19-515157-7. $35.] Index, bibliographical references, music examples, illustrations.

I met Aaron Copland only once, at Tanglewood, 4 July 1974. He had flown in to conduct his "Appalachian Spring," on the first half of a Koussevitsky memorial program on which Leonard Bernstein had been told by his doctor he should conduct "only"(!) the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, on the second half. The previous December I had completed Idiots First, an opera begun and left unfinished by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964), and needed--and obtained--Copland's permission to proceed with it, having already obtained Bernstein's, they being the two musical advisors to Blitz-stein's estate.

Copland was very friendly and cordial, though a bit distant and even foggy when I tried to bring up the period of the 1930s when he and Blitzstein (and Elie Sieg-meister, and several others) had set the same Alfred Hayes text to music: "Into the Streets May First." This book helps illuminate why.

Its very first music example is page 1 of that very song, in Copland's setting, which won the first New Masses/Composers Collective competition for a May Day song in 1934. The first verse was published in...

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