Appalachian Autumn.(Aaron Copland's Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, Appalachian Spring)

On May 8, 1945, the streets of American cities filled with throngs celebrating the Allied victory over fascism in Europe. That week, Aaron Copland, a forty-four-year-old Brooklyn-born composer of Russian-Jewish descent, received a Pulitzer Prize for his ballet score "Appalachian Spring." It was a symbolic ceremony of arrival for an artist who had long labored to bring American composition out of obscurity and into the cultural mainstream. In Copland's youth, most American concert halls and opera houses were essentially shrines to Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner; few native-born talents could win admittance without imitating the European masters. By the time Copland reached the peak of his career, in the late thirties and the early forties, he and other members of his generation, among them Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, had gained a foothold. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, three weeks before V-E Day, the luxurious lamentation of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" unfurled on the radio.

Copland seized the nation's attention by forging a universally recognizable national sound. Works such as "Billy the Kid," "Rodeo," "Lincoln Portrait," "Fanfare for the Common Man," and "Appalachian Spring" became synonymous with the "open prairie," as Copland titled the opening section of "Billy the Kid"; the texture and soul of the heartland seemed implicit in their sparse, open-ended contours, their lonely but happy melodies, their tangy tonal harmonies, their climactic tableaux of sounding brass and drums. At the same time, the music matched the collectivist ethos of the New Deal and Second World War period--the spirit of "common discipline," as Roosevelt put it in his first inaugural address. Beneath the patriotic surface, these scores bore traces of the international leftist politics that preoccupied so many artists and intellectuals in the Roosevelt era. "Billy the Kid" evokes a frontier Eden threatened with urbanization and industrialization. "Lincoln Portrait" arranges quotations from Lincoln into a vaguely socialistic narrative ("As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master"). "Fanfare for the Common Man" takes its title from a speech that Vice-President Henry Wallace delivered in 1942, in which that most militantly leftist of New Dealers thundered, "The people's revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it."

The political subtext of Copland's music from the thirties and forties is often overlooked today. Countless films, television commercials, news broadcasts, and campaign ads have employed Coplandesque open-interval melodies to suggest the innate goodness of small-town and rural life--elderly couples sitting on porches, newsboys on bicycles, farmers leaning on fences. A diluted version of the "open prairie" manner was heard in Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign ads. The peroration of "Appalachian Spring," with its grand and gritty harmonization of the Shaker tune "Simple Gifts," has evolved into something like national theme music--the leitmotif of feel-good news.

At the height of the Cold War, however, political watchdogs did not fail to notice Copland's leftward leanings. Investigators in Congress and at the Federal Bureau of Investigation catalogued his multifarious links to progressive, radical, and fellow-traveller groups, notably the semi-Communist cadre of the Group Theatre. Between 1949 and 1953, Copland endured a gruelling test: media vilification after his appearance at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, in New York; denunciations from anti-Communists in Congress; and a chilling session before Senator Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Copland emerged from the ordeal apparently unscathed, and retained his iconic status. Yet he was never quite the same afterward. Coincidentally or not, "Appalachian Spring" turned out to be the last triumph of his all-American, music-for-the-masses period, the words of the Shaker hymn spelling out its elusive dream: "When true simplicity is gained / To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed."

As the war ended, prospects seemed bright for the populist style that Copland had helped engineer. In 1946, Thomson, who doubled as the most acerbically perceptive critic of the day, crowed in the New York Herald Tribune, "We are producing very nearly the best music in the world." As evidence, he offered a long list of names, including the boy wonder Leonard Bernstein, who had made a sensational conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic, in 1943, and had established his compositional credentials with the oracular "Jeremiah" Symphony and the joyously hip musical "On the Town."

Yet, even as the confetti was being swept from Times Square, V-E exuberance faded into a darker, more volatile state of mind. ...