William Hong wrote:

>Certainly just listening to so many of Copland's works makes me feel
>completely "American," even with my heritage coming from a very distant
>place ...   While I can thrill to and feel the sense of pride that people
>from other lands must get from their "national" music ...

As a Brit of British parentage I had various prejudices and preconceptions
about America and Americans, and how wrong I was was brought home to me
very rapidly the first time I visited the States. There is still, however,
a residual 'image' of that country and I too feel that Copland's music is
quintessentially American, though redolent mostly of a bygone era rather
than of the present.

One candidate for the English correlative of Copland and Smetana must be
Elgar, who certainly wrote much of his music as from England's woods and
fields, as well as writing the nationalistic Pomp And Circumstance marches,
the unjustly neglected Caractacus (a King of Britain at the time of the
Roman occupation), and so on. Reputedly one of his finest works is 'The
Dream of Gerontius', but with this I have had great problems over many
years, finding it stiflingly heavy, sanctimonious, religiose, slavishly
doctrinal, often turgid, and with attempts at orchestral effects which
never seemed quite to come off. Until, that is, a few years ago in London
I heard the interpretation of a conductor who was giving Gerontius for the
very first time, and though I had heard the work many times before this was
as if I were hearing it completely afresh.

That conductor was Leonard Slatkin, and it struck me after the concert,
as I was mentally comparing his masterly reading with all the others I had
heard over the years, that of course he has two important advantages over
many of the best-known of that work's exponents. Apart from being a great
conductor anyway, he comes from a background that is a) non-British and b)
non-Christian. That he had seen right through to the kernel of the work
became apparent after about two minutes, maybe less.

So when Mr Hong says he feels completely American "even" though his
heritage is very different, I would suggest that it may be "because" of
that different heritage that he can relish the American-ness of Copland's
ballet scores all the more keenly. You might also think that it is, at
least in part, because of (what I assume is) the non-American heritage of
Copland that he was able to write in that way. After all, even Handel, not
only a great composer but also probably Britain's most popular classical
composer ever, was adopted from another country.

Alan Moss