Concerto for clarinet, strings, harp and percussion (1947–48)

Slowly and expressively – Cadenza – Rather fast

The Copland Clarinet Concerto is one of several scores commissioned from classical composers – including also Bartók, Hindemith, Milhaud and Malcolm Arnold –    by the jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman, who was ambitious to expand his repertoire far beyond that associated with him as the “King of Swing.” Having had a classical training to begin with and having been coached more recently by Reginald Kell, he was confident he could cope with whatever his chosen composers might present him with. Even so, although, as he said, he “made no demands on what Copland should write,” it must have been fairly obvious that a composer as adept in the jazz idiom as Copland writing a concerto for a jazz musician as brilliant as Benny Goodman would indulge his soloist in the kind of music knew best.

At the beginning of the work it seems that    Copland’s stylistic orientation has less to do with New York in the 1940s than Paris in the 1880s. The initial entry of harp and strings in slow waltz time immediately calls Satie’s Gymnopédies to mind. It is only gradually, as the clarinet line poised high above the orchestra “slowly and expressively” expands in an inspired passage of spontaneous melodic development, that the composer’s own personality emerges. The Copland identity is unmistakably confirmed in the central episode of this first main section of the work, where the hymn-like theme introduced by the strings clearly relates to his latest ballet Appalachian Spring. Throughout this opening section there is scarcely a hint of the jazz style that it is to prevail in the second half of the work. Cast in what the composer called “languid song form,” it depends, above all, on the soloist’s ability to sustain a line    floating effortlessly high in the upper register.

The transition to the jazz-inspired second half of the work is made by way of a long cadenza which not only gives the soloist an opportunity for a display of virtuoso heroics but also allows the composer to introduce, in fragmentary form, the various themes that will motivate the “Rather faster” closing section. Copland described this material as "an unconscious fusion of elements obviously related to North and South American popular music (for example, a phrase from a currently popular Brazilian tune, heard by me in Rio)." He works it into a kind of rondo form, an intricately kaleidoscopic pattern of themes where the most distinctive of them, the popular Brazilian tune definitively introduced by clarinet and piano in unison, jostles with jazz dance idioms like Charleston and boogie woogie. Beginning with the “delicate, wraith-like” first entry of the piano, Copland’s embrace of the jazz idiom is at first comparatively restrained. As he, explained, "the instrumentation being clarinet with strings, harp, and piano, I did not have a large battery of percussion to achieve jazzy effects.” Half-way through, however, he ingeniously simulates those effects with what he calls “slapping basses and whacking harp sounds.” And so he sets in motion the impulse towards a long    coda elaborately engineered to end with the most liberated solo activity and, in the last bar, a huge clarinet glissando – or “smear” as it is called in the trade.

Although he got the composer to moderate some of the technical difficulties in the score, not least the notes pitched at the highest extremes, Goodman failed to programme the work within the two years of exclusivity granted to him in the contract. It was only when Copland made arrangements for Ralph McLane to introduce the Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra that Goodman was at last moved to perform the work himself – in an NBC broadcast with Fritz Reiner and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on 2 November 1950 – just three weeks before the scheduled McLane performance.