On april 16, 1939, Irwin Shaw’s Quiet City opened in New York City at the Group Theatre. Thanks to Harold Clurman, the director, it had incidental music by his friend Aron Copland. The play, according to Copland, was “a realistic fantasy concerning the night thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city.” It centered on a lonely Jewish boy, David Mellnikoff, who expressed his sorrow and isolation on his jazz trumpet and whose playing, says the composer, “helped to arouse the conscience of his fellow players and of the audience.” Using only clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and piano, the music aimed at expressing “the emotions of the characters, the nostalgia and inner distress of a society profoundly aware of its own insecurity.”
In 1940, at the urging of friends. Copland composed the concert piece Quiet City, for trumpet, English horn and string orchestra. This score, he told the annotator recently, is based entirely on the thematic materials of the music to the play” :
There wasn’t much continuous music with the play, just short sections, so that the orchestral piece bears little resemblance to the incidental music, which I never published.
The idea of contrasting trumpet with English horn was a travaille, a “find,” giving, I think, a certain freshness and variety of instrumental color. A practical reason for the English horn was to let the trumpeter have a breathing space, so that he wasn’t made to play continuously.
There are not many quiet trumpet-solo works in the repertory, and I doubt whether there are many English horn solo-pieces of any sort. Quiet City is challenging music for the soloists, with a comparatively straight forward orchestral accompaniment.
Copland’s atmospheric Quiet City is brooding and elegiac, with declamatory trumpet and English horn prominent against the commentary of the strings. (British critic Wilfrid Mellers has described the trumpet solo as “both Negroid in its blue notes and Jewish in its incantatory repetitions.”) In the final climax, the strings play an integral part. Copland views Quiet City as “a rather unusual showpiece for the two sololists—unusual because one seldom hears trumpet and English horn in roles as contrasting instruments in a soloistic yet quiet setting.”
Quiet City was given its premiere in New York, on January 28, 1941, by the Saisenberg Little Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Sardenberg.
Phillip Ramey
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