How Aaron Copland came by that odd surname
Dec 1st, 2007 by Paul Moor
Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and returned to New York (where I’d previously spent a teen-age year at Juilliard until the money ran out) armed with a letter of introduction from another Aaron, the university’s Prof. Schaffer, Ph. D., chairman of the Department of Romance Languages, whom Copland identified to me as a lifelong friend and the first person to whom Copland as a mere boy had confided his ambition to become a composer.
My birthplace El Paso, Texas, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, afforded rather restricted access to “classical” music of any kind, but the indulgent staff of the Tri-State Music Company contributed to my musical development more than any of them could ever know by permitting me to spend hours and hours in one of their two listening rooms, where I subjected their 78-rpm recordings on the Victor Red Seal label - the only label with an El Paso outlet - to the punitive friction of that era’s steel needles. Those life-sustaining treats included a two-disc album containing Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony recording of El Salón México, a title that immediately found resonance in me since from El Paso you could go to Mexico by simply walking across the bridge over the pusillanimous trickle bearing the grandiose Spanish name for Great River.
Since I knew nothing about that piece’s composer except for a mention I’d read somewhere of one of his earliest piano pieces, “The Cat and the Mouse”, I looked at the two syllables of his surname and for some time after that thought of him as the man with the funny name that combined Cop and Land. After our friendship years later got off the ground, I asked him one day how come people didn’t at least pronounce it the way it looked. He said he had no idea how that had happened, especially in view of its original pronunciation in Russia before the arrival of his immigrant parents. He then told me that story - which I’ve never, anywhere, seen in print, so this little footnote on the most recognized of all American composers of “classical” music might well qualify as a modest world premiere.
Both his parents had come from their native Russia - and heaven alone knows how his father came by his American name Harris Morris Copland, but probably through the same primitive linguistic Americanization that gave birth to that odd surname Copland.
They arrived, conventionally for that day, at Ellis Island, bearing the only documentation they had - naturally in Kyrillic letters, which might as well have confronted the Immigration official who processed them with similar documentation in Arabic or Chinese. He got it across to them that he wanted to know their surname, then wrote down, for all time, what his American ears heard: cop + land. Only some time later did it transpire that by rights he ought to have given them American documents with the correct transliteration Kaplan. One can only speculate as to whether a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Aaron Kaplan would have had the exalted career Aaron Copland did.
At Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso, my beloved music teacher Miss Congdon had a small collection of rolls for the upright Duo Art player piano that included one that introduced me to the American pianist George Copeland (1882 - 1971), an early champion of Debussy and the rest of the French school; over and over and over I listened in fascination to the pathetically inadequate Duo Art roll of George Copeland’s playing a piano transcription of Debussy’s orchestrally opulent “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’”. Naturally I eventually asked Aaron Copland whether any kind of family tie connected him with the considerably more famous pianist, and that question yielded me another biographical footnote.
In Aaron Copland’s early thirties, he had become fascinated by Mexico and the other Latin-American countries, and had also acquired considerable fluency in Spanish. When Washington belatedly woke up to the practical strategic importance of its southern neighbors and initiated what it called the Good-Neighbor Policy, with Nelson Rockefeller in charge, the prominent American artists they sent down there understandably included Copland.
He said that in one of the South American countries he visited, he had found himself received with noticeable apprehension, and after a certain amount of discreet prying he found out why. The pianist George Copeland had preceded him there, on a concert tour, and had run afoul of the local fuzz on what those days’ terminology euphemized as a morals charge. Once Aaron Copland convinced them that the two surnames did not coincide even in their spelling, they eventually relaxed and that State Department assignment proved one of quite a number of valuable diplomatic successes.
I cannot conclude this mini-memoir without adding what Germans call a drop of (presumably dry) vermouth. During those hideous years when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pathological fear of communism held the entire country in thrall, Henry Luce’s second magazine “Life” published a two-page compendium of what it carefully called “Communist Dupes and Fellow Travellers”, punctiliously avoiding calling them flat-out communists, since New York state law made such unsubstantiated labelling punishable unless the accuser could prove actual Party membership. Those pages included tiny mugshots of such dangerous limbs of the red Soviet Satan as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, and . . . Aaron Copland.
The next time I saw Aaron after that, I asked him what effect he expected that to have for him in practical terms. With a rueful smile he said only that he hardly imagined the State Department would send him on any more of those wonderful junkets - and, as far as I know, it never did.
