Copland’s Cummington

This isn’t a summer camp story. I just want to make that clear right up front, because I’ve written a few times before about the camp I’ve been going to since I was ten years old, and yes, this story is also going to partially take place there, and yes, I know that no one likes stories about someone else’s stupid summer camp that you never went to. But, as I said, this is not a summer camp story. Really. Promise.

…everybody still reading? Okay, good. As it happens, this is a story about Aaron Copland, arguably the preeminent American composer of the 20th century, and certainly of the century’s first half. And it happens to take place in the tiny town of Cummington, Massachusetts, which happens to be home to Greenwood Music Camp. These happenings will all intersect later.

The story begins with Copland, already a successful composer of concert music in the late 1930s, looking to break into the lucrative business of film scoring. Hollywood was well into its golden age at this point, and composers who could capture the drama of a cinematic epic without overwhelming the narrative were in high demand in Los Angeles. But Copland had yet to compose either his iconic Fanfare for the Common Man, or the ballet score we know as Appalachian Spring – the two works which, more than any others, would establish his signature sound as America’s sound. And Hollywood, for its part, was still in the thrall of Euro-style neo-romanticism. Film scores in this age were lush, richly orchestrated things, more redolent of composers like Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss than the spare, wide-open scores Copland was becoming known for.

Eventually, a score Copland wrote to accompany a documentary to be screened at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York caught the attention of the film industry, and he began to be tapped to score films with distinctly rural themes. (The music he wrote for Thornton Wilder’s omnipresent Our Town still has a home in 21st century concert halls.) But still, the pickings were slim, and as World War II drew to a close, Copland found himself with an offer to score what amounted to a propaganda film for the US government.

The film, which is actually awfully sweet and uncontroversial as propaganda films go, was called The Cummington Story.

It was set in a very real hamlet in an area of Western Massachusetts known (when it’s known at all, which is seldom) as the Berkshire Hilltowns. I don’t know how many people lived in Cummington in 1945, but I know that there were still only 978 souls living there at the 2000 census. (This is a town I’ve known like the back of my hand since I was a 5th grader, and that population figure seems shockingly high to me.) It’s a dot on the map, with a one-block Main Street, a hardware store, a ridiculously outsized annual fair, two churches (though one burned down a few months back – the one with the lovable pastor who works at the Old Creamery Grocery out on Rt. 9,) and, like I said, this music camp.

What made Cummington special, back when the government decided to make this film, was that it had been selected as one of the places that refugees from the war in Europe would be sent to begin their new lives. And in the wake of the horrific violence that had engulfed the world over the previous decade, it’s understandable that the feds wanted to showcase American generosity of spirit, etc. And what could be more American than relocating refugees not to some bustling, impersonal metropolis where they would blend into the background, but to a small, agrarian town in the middle of nowhere, where they would literally reenact the struggles of the pioneers as they attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life?

In the end, the film depicts a small triumph of the American “melting pot” ideal, and I have no idea whether it even remotely resembles what actually occurred in Cummington in the post-war era. I do know that the film garnered relatively little attention, and that Copland’s score never made it into the list of his works that still get regular hearings today. But a few years back, the director of Greenwood Music Camp, which sits on a hill overlooking “downtown” Cummington, happened across some mention of it, and began to look into the film and its musical history. She placed a call to the camp’s orchestra conductor, Ken Freed (who just happens to be a violist in the Minnesota Orchestra) to ask whether he thought a collection of 10-13-year-olds would be capable of playing the score.

It was a dicey proposition, to be honest. Copland’s music is full of leaping intervals and complex rhythms, not at all the sort of thing you hand to a young child and expect him to master in less than two weeks. But Ken agreed to try, and that next summer, the Greenwood kids spent an hour every morning scraping and squawking through The Cummington Story before trotting off to rehearse the Haydn and Mozart string quartets that were so much more in their comfort zone. About a week after camp started, they all gathered in the camp’s big performance barn to watch the movie. I would describe their reaction as something between bored and perplexed.

But word got around about what was being prepared up on the hill, and the camp’s director made a point of inviting everyone in town up for the concert. So on the day of the performance, a considerable number of Cummington residents squeezed into the barn next to the usual collection of parents, siblings, and friends that attends the camp’s weekly musical marathons. I’ll admit, I was nervous – like I said, Copland is not something you would ordinarily give to 10-year-olds, and Ken had been looking decidedly stressed all week.

I shouldn’t have worried:

Film credit: David Tartakoff

I doubt that The Cummington Story is what most of the kids who were at Greenwood that summer will remember about their time at camp. Most of them tend to remember their friends, or a particularly great piece of chamber music they played. Orchestra is something to be gotten through at that age – it’s only later that you come to appreciate the musical equivalent of a team sport.

But when they finished the Copland, and the audience erupted, I saw more than a few tears in the audience. I saw a look of immense pride (mingled with relief) on Ken’s face. And I watched, after the concert, as the townsfolk made a point of seeking out the director and thanking her for reviving this musical portrait of their home.

It’s a powerful thing, music. And it’s at its best in moments like that, when it reminds people of why we do what we do, why we live where we live, and why we value the things we value. I’ll never know whether Copland had these things in mind when he wrote The Cummington Story. But I know what it meant to me, and to the folks in Cummington, on that August night.