Fanfare for the Common Man

Fanfare for the Common Man is music that’s instantly recognised by listeners all over the world, even by those who may never have heard of its composer. In 1942, Aaron Copland was approached by Eugene Goossens, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, to write an opening fanfare for a concert in the orchestra’s forthcoming season. Copland responded with a short work lasting about three and a half minutes, scored for a standard-size orchestral brass section (four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, tuba), plus timpani, bass drum and tam-tam (large gong). Goossens’ request was for music saluting the United States' entry in World War II, but Copland’s choice of title came from a recent speech by US Vice President Henry A. Wallace looking ahead to a postwar future for the "common man" and peacetime prosperity across the world. The Fanfare’s design is simple and striking: powerful drumbeats and gong strokes introduce and punctuate first the main theme on trumpets unaccompanied, then its repetition with horns added beneath, then again with trombones and tuba, with the other instruments joining in to build to a blazing climax. The music has been chosen to represent human aspiration in countless different contexts, from television broadcasts of the Apollo and shuttle space programmes to the dedication of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan; in 1977, it was arranged by rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Copland himself reused the Fanfare in the finale of his Symphony No. 3 (1944-46), the work widely regarded as his masterpiece.