“As your Communist Party record is extremely long, I think counsel [i.e., Roy Cohn] will want to ask you some questions. . . . Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a Grand Jury.”
–Senator Joseph McCarthy, addressing Aaron Copland (May 26, 1953)
This chilling audio re-enactment, with Edward Gero as McCarthy, is an excerpt from “Aaron Copland: American Populist,” a 45-minute NPR documentary to be broadcast as a Labor Day Special this Monday at 10 am ET via the newsmagazine “1A.”
The show derives from a Copland documentary I produced for PostClassical Ensemble – one of six documentary films exploring topics in American music, all of which Naxos will release this Fall in tandem with the publication of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.
Pressed by McCarthy, Copland denied ever attending “a Communist meeting.” But in fact he was deeply engaged by the Popular Front in the 1930s, even addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota. His excruciating encounter with the Red Scare broaches topics urgently pertinent today: the suppression of free expression and open-minded dialogue (both on the left and the right); the marginalization of the arts in American culture and society.
My own mantra (as expressed at the end of the Copland broadcast) is that “Americans must claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance – or we are in trouble as a nation.”
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