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Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by Carol A. Hess (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919046

1534-150X

Jennifer L. Campbell,

Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

Reviewed by: Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by Carol A. Hess Jennifer L. Campbell Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics. By Carol A. Hess. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. [xi, 317 p., ISBN 9780252044854 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9780252086953 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780252054006 (ebook), $14.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Supplemental material at https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086953. In her book Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics, musicologist Carol A. Hess tenaciously seeks to answer the ever-lingering, periodically revisited question, "Who was Copland?" (p. 9) The composer (and his music) certainly received considerable attention from journalists, biographers, and academics during his lifetime; in 1999, however, Howard Pollack arguably broke open the floodgates of posthumous Copland scholarship with his magnum opus, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Holt, 1999). Since then, music historians and theorists have explored Copland's life, music, and prose from multitudinous points of inquiry, desiring to comprehend the man whose compositional style now epitomizes the sound of the US American West, and whose stature and influence led him to be called the "Dean of American Music" (Beth E. Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012], and John Rockwell, "Copland, Dean of American Music, Dies at 90," New York Times, 3 December 1990). Hess, too, takes up the biographical mantle but narrows the scope of investigation: as her vantage point, Hess concentrates on Cop-land's diplomatic service as a cultural emissary to Latin America on behalf of the US government during the Good Neighbor Period and the Cold War, specifically examining the four US state-sponsored tours to the region that he completed between 1941 and 1963. She also broadly traces Copland's shifting musical priorities from the 1920s to the 1970s by closely reading the lectures, radio broadcasts, and comments he gave to the Latin American public and composers during his tours, as well as the formal government reports he filed upon returning from the field. Additionally, his writings and interviews that reflected his thoughts on Latin American music found their way to the US public via journals articles, [End Page 517] newspapers, radio, and even television, revealing a composer who sometimes contradicted his earlier self at later points in his life. The seemingly tightly circumscribed breadth of Hess's inquiry belies the nearly overwhelming wealth of available source material. Hess sifts through daunting amounts of documents available in the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, as well as other repositories, and she skillfully weaves the archival sources of committee minutes, government memos, press clippings, and personal diaries together with published articles and newspaper reviews. She integrates secondary-source materials from the vast bibliography of Cop land scholarship, and she adroitly navigates the interdisciplinarity of her topic, drawing upon relevant works from the fields of history, diplomacy, Latin American studies, and beyond. She also relies on her own publications to inform the historical narrative, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Hess has spent over a decade thinking and writing about Copland as composer, advocate, and diplomat and explicating his role in supporting North–South music migration between the Americas. Hess reworks portions of material from both her 2013 journal article "Copland in Argentina: Pan Americanist Politics, Folklore, and the Crisis in Modern Music" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 191–250) and book Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), which she admittedly repackages into chapters 3, 5, 9, 10 and 11 of Aaron Copland in Latin America (see title page verso for this acknowledgement). To a less seasoned author, this bounty of textual riches might have seemed unwieldy, even impossible to navigate, but Hess expertly weaves together a cohesive exposition that allows the diverse texts to intermingle and inform one another throughout the entire book. A masterful assimilator, Hess constructs an impressively researched and engagingly written contribution to Cop-land biography vis-à-vis historical narrative and reception history that holds appeal for...