Quiet City

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This article is about the Irwin Shaw play. For the 2007 independent film see Quiet City (film).

Quiet City is a play by Irwin Shaw and a well-known composition for trumpet, cor anglais, and string orchestra by Aaron Copland.

1 Dramatic play
2 Musical composition
3 Note
4 References

[edit] Dramatic play

The play had been commissioned for the Group Theatre by Harold Clurman and was directed by Elia Kazan. The play was dropped after only two Sunday performances, most likely due to internal dissension.^[1]

[edit] Musical composition

In 1940, Copland knitted together the ten-minute piece from the incidental music he had written the previous year to accompany the play. Copland's decision to replace the original instrumentation, a chamber quartet of clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, and piano, with a larger ensemble of strings, trumpet, and cor anglais, has tended to deepen rather than sacrifice the intimacy and poignancy of the music. The piece was premiered on January 28, 1941, by conductor Daniel Saidenberg and his Saidenberg Little Symphony in New York City.

Quiet City evokes the nocturnal introspections of the dwellers of a great city, beginning in stillness before slowly building up to a climax and then receding into silence again. The voice of the lone trumpeter, joined by that of the dark-toned cor anglais, rises and falls against the clear sound of the strings, in a cathartic release of the nostalgia, melancholy, regrets, and anxieties that distressed individuals in an urban society feel most acutely at night. According to Copland, the piece was "an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of Irwin Shaw's play," who had abandoned his Jewishness and his poetic aspirations in order to pursue material success by Anglicizing his name, marrying a rich socialite, and becoming the president of a department store. The man, however, was continually recalled to his conscience by the haunting sound of his brother's trumpet playing. Continuing the assessment in his own autobiography, Copland observed that "Quiet City seems to have become a musical entity, superseding the original reasons for its composition," owing much of its success to its escape from the details of its dramatic context.