A Tonal Revolution in Fifths and Semitones: Aaron Copland's Quiet City

[1] A number of pieces written in the first half of the twentieth century sound tonal while also containing decidedly modern elements. The label "neo-tonal" or "centric" is often applied to such works, which include music by Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky during his neoclassical period, and others. Zimmerman (2002) and Silberman (2006) point out that readings of neo-tonal music often combine techniques of both tonal and post-tonal analysis, an approach that opens the question of precisely which elements of the tonal idiom are applicable to the work under discussion.(1) Such readings also raise a related question of whether a single mode of analysis can apply to an entire composition, or whether we must jettison the assumption of stylistic unity and find the best possible method for each individual section.(2) Aaron Copland's Quiet City (1940) raises similar questions for analysts. The work has a consonant musical surface yet often strips away many markers of common-practice tonality. This paper offers a hearing of Quiet City that is oriented toward two of its most salient features: motives built from pentatonic subsets and semitonal shifts. An ic1/ic5 Tonnetz models the pitch-class collections that generate musical material in the work and motion between them. Completion of normative sets and salience conditions serve to define central pitches. In addition, motion within the Tonnetz shows a large-scale coherence within the work's pitch organization, and provides an example of Copland's expansion of tonal techniques.[2] Critics faced with the task of describing the pitch structure of Aaron Copland's compositions often resort to the explanation that it is tonally ambiguous. For example, Wilfrid Mellers (2000) states that many of Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson can be heard either as tonal or as in one of the diatonic modes. In his analysis of Copland's Sextet, Daniel Mathers (1989, 56-57) identifies a "tonal axis"-that is, a dichotomy between two competing tonal centers-between the lower tonic and upper dominant. Howard Pollack (1999, 384) states that the violin part in the second movement of Copland's Violin Sonata suggests different keys with each melodic turn, and suggests that Copland learned how to write such a melodic line in part by studying the music of Stravinsky. He also remarks that the ending of Copland's concert work Quiet City can be heard in either C major or F major. Copland wrote Quiet City for trumpet, English horn, and strings in 1940, a year after he wrote incidental music for a play called The Quiet City by Irwin Shaw.(3) The concert work recycles many themes from the incidental music, and Pollack (Pollack 1999) speculates that the close relationship allows a programmatic reading of the tonal ambiguity of the concert work's ending:Whether one considers the final pitch an unresolved dominant or a more restful tonic, the work ends on a hesitant note; like Shaw's play, the music raises more questions than it answers. (332)Figure 1. Quiet City, five measures after rehearsal 16 to ending (reduction)[3] The ending of Quiet City is reduced in Figure 1. A solo trumpet reprises the main theme of the work-Copland called it a portrait of David Mellnikoff, one of the characters from Shaw's play-against a C pedal (Copland and Perlis 1984, 287). If we were to assume a preference for hearing a diatonic collection as indicating either a major or minor scale, we would hear the passage in F major and conclude that the work ends on the dominant harmony.(4) The trumpet uses pitches from the F-major scale, save for one note. A Boccurs in the middle of the trumpet solo nine measures after rehearsal 16, as if the instrument were feinting toward the C-major scale, but in the following measure the trumpet reverts to using B. There is little other strong support for hearing the passage in F major; moreover, Copland's use of diatonic modes in other compositions renders tenuous the assumption that the tonic can be determined simply from the scale used in a passage. …