Life > February 27, 2003

By Valerie Paschall

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

Well, I truly saw a first on Feb. 22 in Wait Chapel. The Eos Orchestra concert began before the orchestra themselves actually took the stage. Rather, the stage was set for their performances from their Grammy-nominated CD, Celluloid Copland, by dimming the lights and showing a short film of Aaron Copland himself walking around New York City in 1939.

Directly following the cinematic presentation, the Eos Orchestra came onstage to brilliantly showcase the composer’s pieces.

Conductor Jonathan Sheffner started out on the light side in more than one way. He opened by commenting what a beautiful campus we have, although admitting that, “It was dark so I couldn’t see it.”

He explained that this was the first tour that the orchestra has ever done and set up the concert’s performances, saying that they would be taking the circuitous route through Copland to his famous ballet “Appalachian Spring.”

The orchestra, primarily composed of stringed instruments, began with a piece called “Music for Movies.” This piece was a hodgepodge of his collected works in the world of film soundtracks, tracks that most people are unaware Copland created.

Included in “Music for Movies” were parts of the soundtracks to such well-known movies as Our Town and Of Mice and Men, as well as part of his first soundtrack to a documentary called The City.

Sheffner mentioned after “Music” that most soundtracks don’t make good concert music, but Copland’s works manage to complement art but stand beautifully alone as well. He had that right.

Copland’s music is very visual, allowing listeners to see how it would have complemented the movies — how the hurried music and fanfare was a sort of welcoming home, how a drooping horn note signified a car accident and how the quick strings backed up a threshing machine.

After “Music for Movies,” the orchestra took a break from Copland, playing music by his friend and student Paul Bowles.

Yet for someone so closely affiliated with Copland, he could not have been a more dissimilar composer. Sheffner commented on this discrepancy too.

Eos played Bowles’ “Suite for Small Orchestra,” a three-movement piece.

The music was indeed obviously not Copland’s, with more use of the clarinet, more percussion and more general dissonance that contrasted with Copland’s inherent smoothness of sound.

You could still see Copland’s influence in the quick pizzicato of the stringed instruments, as well as the influence of his other occupation, writing Broadway scores.

Bowles’ composition was highlighted by some very original percussion.

In particular, one player was beating on his instrument with what looked like his fingernails and it came off sounding like maracas.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Copland-appreciative audience enjoyed his student Bowles’ unique composition quite as much.

The last composition before the intermission proved to be a real treat for the audience, mixing both visual and aural aesthetics.

The orchestra played music from seven different scenes of Copland’s first foray into Hollywood, the documentary film The City.

The film first premiered at the 1939 World’s Fair, and was, according to Sheffner, quite possibly Copland’s best work in a soundtrack because the artist was so eager to break into Hollywood.

The clips of the pieces performed represented 20 minutes of the 45-minute film that documented life in the country and the suburbs of New York City, where the Fair was held that year.

The film itself seemed to have an obvious bias toward the country and the suburbs, and the soundtrack reflected that as well.

After the intermission, the Orchestra treated the audience to something special.

Usually when orchestras perform Copland’s renowned ballet “Appalachian Spring” they perform it as a suite.

However, the ensemble performed the entire ballet just as Copland had written it for dancer Martha Graham in the spring of 1945.

Again, the music was very pictorial, showing through sound the adventures and hardships that a young couple coming to Pennsylvania would have experienced moving into the frontier.

The orchestra’s performance here was an incredibly powerful and moving display of the classic work in its most natural form.

During the show, Sheffner described Copland as the foremost composer to really put an American voice into music.

Although the Eos Orchestra put out its first disc featuring Copland works in 1998, they felt that it was especially pertinent that they perform the works on Celluloid Copland.

In light of recent political events, Copland’s intensely patriotic odes serve to buttress the nationalism engendered in the United States.

I don’t think the historical context of the music was lost on the members of the audience.

Not a single person of the many who I saw leaving Wait Chapel that night seemed unaffected by the performance.