The Common Thread: Aaron Copland and Dave Frishberg
A fanfare and fan fare
VAN LINGLE MUNGO/Dave Frishberg (1969)
FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN/Aaron Copland (1943)
In baseball’s baggy pants and handshakes-at-home-plate era, otherwise known as the game’s Golden Age, the men on the field were both regular guys and singular gods. Adoration of these ballplayers would endure for decades. There’s that scrap of verse teasing a now-departed breed of American baseball fanatic:
Please, old codger, spare us
Your tales of Roger Maris
And not another treatise
On Ken Boyer’s brother Cletus
The old boys who solemnized the big leaguers of the Forties and Fifties had an anthem, “Van Lingle Mungo,” a fan-fare for the common player written and performed by jazz pianist Dave Frishberg, who died last fall.
His 1969 song was a dream sequence of names called from the catacombs. Frishberg rhapsodized his heroes with a lyric that consisted entirely of the names of old players. Not the greatest names either, just rhythmic and resonant ones that evoked a time, place and state of mind, a song straight out of the cultural attic.
Yes, it was a novelty number, but few novelty songs ever achieved this kind of beauty. You need the right version, though, the slower one with Frishberg accompanied only by his piano and a stick of percussion, not the sped-up “let’s try to turn this into a hit” rendition included on his Oklahoma Toad album.
The record is perhaps an awkward fit in pop history, but beautiful melodies make their own rules. You hear in “Van Lingle Mungo” the tender, tinkly, textural sophistication of Duke Ellington.
In the early 1950s, Frishberg was a journalism major at the University of Minnesota and part-time jazz player in Twin Cities nightclubs. To broaden his horizons, he enrolled in an orchestration class taught by the revered James Aliferis, who had studied conducting with Leonard Bernstein under Serge Koussevitsky at the Berkshire Music Center. The class threw Frishberg for a loop
“I was distressed when I found out that we wouldn’t hear our orchestrations played,” Frishberg wrote in his autobiography. “We handed in our scores, and Dr. Aliferis would examine them on paper … and inform us that certain doublings or registers would not sound good when played. I said, ‘It would be great if we could hear what we’ve written.’”
Aliferis replied that “composers and arrangers don’t have that luxury.”
For his first assignment, Frishberg orchestrated the jazz piece “Four and One Moore” by Al Cohn, arranging it for five saxophones. Dr. Aliferis handed it back marked “F”.
“Saxophones?” the distinguished professor said. “We’re not writing for a dance band here.”
Frishberg tried orchestrating Bela Bartok’s Mikrokosmos.
“I arbitrarily decided to make them two trumpets, two trombones and two French horns. At a certain spot, just for the hell of it, I specified mutes for one trumpet and one trombone, and other than that, I gave no thought to register, breathing or phrasing.”
Aliferis gave him an A-plus and asked members of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra to play the orchestration in class. After the performance, Aliferis pulled Frishberg aside and introduced him to the man standing next to him, Aaron Copland. The regal visitor was due to speak that afternoon — January 27, 1953 — at the Student Hour in Scott Hall. Copland told Frishberg: “I love your Bartok transcription.”
Copland was being feted that year for the 10th anniversary of “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which debuted March 12, 1943 in Cincinnati, also the birthplace of professional baseball. The composer had been inspired by Vice President Henry Wallace’s speech proclaiming the next century the “century of the common man.”
In the fall of 1942, Copland submitted his four-minute flourish to the Cincinnati Symphony, whose conductor, Eugene Goossens, had commissioned music to support the North American forces.
No matter how many times you hear “Fanfare for the Common Man” performed you are struck, always, by the unexpected blessedness of its cool beginning. There is a sudden throb of affection, the certain strangeness that is an element in all true works of art. The notes carry the pulse and will of men.
After drums, gong, and timpani, and then three trumpets soar, French horns, trombones and tuba kick in. It is a Wall of Sound, twenty years before “Be My Baby.”
Alex Ross’ savory new book “The Rest Is Noise” calls “Fanfare for the Common Man” a “muscular utterance” with an “adamantine trumpet line” and cites its enduring influence. Ross points out that Queen incorporated part of the main melody and the stamping rhythm into its 1977 stadium anthem “We Will Rock You.”
Of course, Keith Emerson picked up on it and others did, too. And hints of its power and lift and staggering sweetness can be heard in numerous movie soundtracks.
In terms of eminence, what Copland and Frishberg composed can’t be compared. But as soul-stroking veneration of a generation distorted by world war both are shiver inducing.
Copland once recalled, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”
Goossens told Copland that his fanfare’s title was as original as its music, which is the sort of remark often made about “Van Lingle Mungo.”
Van Mungo was a Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant fireballer with a beautiful name. But he was just another player, another one of us: a career overpromiser and underachiever. During spring training in the year that Copland debuted his masterpiece he was the subject of a hopeful newspaper story under the headline: “Giants Believe Van Lingle Mungo’s Story This Spring.”
Copland and Frishberg each wrote for the common good. But what else do their tunes have in common? “Van Lingle Mungo” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” are both either sad — a hopeless, rayless sorrow — or poignant, take your pick. Copland’s is the canonical work, but Frishberg’s hymn to remembered baseball also perseveres.