Aaron Copland Never Visited Cummington, MA (You should -- here's why.)

For some composers, travel has inspired great works – consider Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland (Hebrides Overture), Holst’s travels in the far east (Beni Mora Suite), or Elgar’s Italian vacation (In the South: Alassio). But apart from his early study in Paris and his conducting tours later in life, Aaron Copland, the composer who most successfully captured the spirit of the “Great American Frontier,” never really left New York.

Hailed as the creator of a “warm rural sound,” he lived a comfortable urban lifestyle. Seminal works like El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring didn’t arise out of visits to rural America; they came from his fertile imagination alone. So it should come as no surprise that when commissioned to write the score for a US government documentary about little Cummington, MA, Copland happily wrote the masterful score to The Cummington Story from his suite at the Hotel Empire in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The “Little Red House” - a refugee hostel in Cummington, MA

The Cummington Story was one of over two dozen documentary films created by the US Office of War Information (OWI) to counter the prevailing Hollywood image of America as a violent, gangster-ruled land. The OWI hired well-respected Hollywood director Robert Riskin to oversee the entire project, which included films such as The Cowboys, Autobiography of a Jeep, Swedes in America (starring Ingrid Bergman), and The Window Cleaner. These films were shown around the world at the end of the war as a way to counter the image of America as a lawless and reckless society. Check out Connie Gentry’s insightful article about Riskin’s gentle propaganda film machine on the National WWII Museum (New Orleans) website.

U.S. Office of War Information Logo

 Copland’s 1945 score for The Cummington Story was written in his well-known “American” style, and it found new life in 1962. Always interested in young performers, Copland accepted a commission from Life magazine to compose a short piece for piano students to be published in the June 19, 1962 issue. He borrowed themes from his 1945 score to The Cummington Story and created a two-minute piece for piano students, naming it Down a Country Lane.

A few years after its publication in Life, Copland tenderly scored his little piano piece for a chamber orchestra of six woodwinds, four brass, and strings. This version, though unfortunately not performed often, beautifully captures the film’s original mood.

Texas band director and arranger Merlin Patterson published a sensitively-scored arrangement for wind band in 1991, and the musical themes which came to life in The Cummington Story made their way into the wind band repertoire, reaching a much wider audience. Here is the November 13, 2022 performance of “Down a Country Lane” by the Rhode Island Wind Ensemble.