Shane and Aaron Copland

Dear Matthew Alice: I remember when I was young, about 30 years ago or so, I went to see the movie Shane. Aside from being a wonderful film, I was fascinated by the musical score, the first time that I had heard music by Aaron Copland. The original movie had music from the Billy the Kid suite or some other score by Copland. When you see the movie on TV nowadays, it is music that is entirely different. Why? Or is my gray matter becoming deficient with age? — Lee Karlsberg, Rancho Bernardo

Funny how the old dome plays tricks on us from time to time. Music, that wily manipulator of our psyches, is particularly subversive. Perhaps your first hearing of a bit of Aaron Copland Americana invoked the same Western mood of Victor Young’s score for Shane (“by no means a conventional giddyap oater,” raved Variety), and the erroneous connection was made. Young was for most of his Hollywood career a contract composer for Paramount who did a workmanlike job of scoring films and “fixing” others’ scores to suit a director but was not considered to be in the same league with contemporaries like Dimitri Tiomkin or Alfred Newman. Copland did compose movie scores in the 1930s, most notably Of Mice and Men and Our Town. His 1943 suite Music for Movies is based on his early Tinsel Town tunes, if you’d like to hear a handy sampling. As a side note, Copland was asked by William Wyler to do the music for The Heiress, the 1949 screen adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square, but apparently his main title theme was not up to Hollywood snuff, and another composer’s work was substituted. Copland is still credited with the score, though he disavowed any connection with the offending title song. He also wrote music for TV (and received an Emmy nomination), though he said he did it because it paid well and didn’t take very long, an idea at the philosophical heart of much tube fare these days.