Copland: Statements for orchestra

Introduction

Copland began work on the Statements for orchestra in response to a commission by the League of Composers in the spring of 1932 at the artists' colony in Yaddo, NY. He continued to work on it intermittently over the next three years in various places, including Mexico City, northern Minnesota, New York state, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The orchestration was completed in New York City in June 1935, and the work, dedicated to Mary Senior Churchill, was given its first complete performance on January 7, 1942, at Carnegie Hall, New York, by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos.

The Statements belong to what has been termed Copland's abstract phase of the middle 1920s and early-to-middle 1930s, which also includes works like the Symphonic Ode (1927 - 1929), the Piano Variations (1930), and the Short Symphony (1932 - 1933). Copland had not yet quite adopted the more populist style of the works of the later 1930s, such as El salón México (1933 - 1936) or the ballet Billy the Kid (1938), so the musical language of Statements is more akin to the hard-edged, sometimes dissonant sound of those earlier compositions.

In Copland's words "The word 'statement' was chosen to indicate a short, terse orchestral movement of a well-defined character, lasting about three minutes." This "well-defined character" was specified in the one-word titles the composer gave each of the work's six movements. The purposeful stride of Militant opens the piece; it has been suggested by composer David Diamond that this movement may be a kind of portrait of the Group Theatre or some other left-wing organization (Copland was quite strongly involved with the political left at about this time). The slow and dramatic Cryptic, scored almost entirely for solo flute and the orchestra's brass section, leads into the more lively Dogmatic. This movement quotes the theme of Copland's Piano Variations. The mellow, lyrical fourth movement, Subjective, features only violins, violas, and cellos. The full orchestra is featured in the witty and satirical Jingo, which makes several allusions to the once-popular song "The Sidewalks of New York" (also heard in Copland's Music for the Theatre of 1925). The imposing final movement, Prophetic, features a slow-moving fanfare-like melody for solo trumpet. As forceful as most of this movement is, it ends quietly and ambivalently with a single quiet tam-tam stroke.  

Parts/Movements

1. Militant
2. Cryptic
3. Dogmatic
4. Subjective
5. Jingo
6. Prophetic