GRMUS H692 — Gay Composers in the Age of Anxiety

In 2000, the Army Field Band issued a CD called The Legacy of Aaron Copland. The liner notes lavish praise on Copland, whose Russian immigrant parents, the notes claim, “instilled in young Aaron enduring values based on immigrant themes of independence, self-reliance, motivation, self-education, and an incessant striving for something better.” The notes fail to mention that Copland was a leftist homosexual, much of whose output coincided with one of the more repressive eras of modern American history. McCarthyism, the so-called Lavender Scare, and the threat of a global nuclear cataclysm coincided with Copland’s rise as the “dean of American composers.” Copland was in the company of other composers, many of them also gay—Barber, Bernstein, Rorem, Bowles, Thomson, Diamond—who composed works that we now associate with the enduring optimism of the American experiment. This course looks at the cultural context surrounding the composition of such works, and the composers who frequently held dual roles as renegades and cultural tastemakers.