SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal
SMT-V is the open-access, peer-reviewed video journal of the Society for Music Theory. Founded in 2014, SMT-V publishes video essays that showcase research in music theory in a dynamic, audiovisual format, presented so as to have the potential to engage both specialists within the field as well as interested viewers outside the music theory community. The journal features a supportive and collaborative production process, and publishes several videos each year. Read more about SMT-V here.
Latest Issue: 8.4 (June 2022)
“Appropriating Copland’s Fanfare”
Stanley V. Kleppinger (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
This video explores the stylistic and associative evolution of the emblematic sound Aaron Copland forged in his Fanfare for the Common Man (1942). This style, called here the triumphant exordium, consists of a constellation of specific musical features that has been imitated and troped by other composers—and by Copland himself—to carve out musical landscapes with evocative expressive qualities that include both clear and ambiguous connections with Americana. After summarizing the Fanfare’s original musical and extra-musical contexts, this video illuminates this legacy through three case studies.
Keywords: Aaron Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man, Americana, John Williams, James Horner