Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

The commission for a new Clarinet Concerto from the great American composer Aaron Copland came from a rather unlikely source: Benny Goodman, the man known as the King of Swing. Goodman was one of the most famous and important jazz musicians of all time, but in the late 1940s, swing music was on the decline, and bebop had taken over. Goodman experimented with bebop for a time but never fully took to it in the way that he had so mastered swing. Goodman then turned towards the classical repertoire, commissioning music from many of the great composers of the time, such as Bela Bartok, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, Francis Poulenc, and of course, Aaron Copland. Copland eagerly agreed to the commission, and spent the next year carefully crafting the concerto, which is full of influences from Jazz as well as from Latin American music, perhaps inspired by the four months Copland spent in Latin America while writing the piece. What resulted from all this was a short and compact piece in one continuous movement split