Thinking of Lincoln
We are at an unusual point in the American calendar this week, with three days of significance. Yesterday, February 12th, was the Abraham Lincoln's birthday, which was once celebrated as a national holiday in the USA. Friday, today, is Friday the 13th, a day devoted to superstitions surrounding the unlucky number 13. Tomorrow, of course, is St. Valentine's Day, a day of love. Admittedly, the only thing that's weird or unusual is the appearance of Friday the 13th in the middle of two other, long-established dates that have been on our calendar for a long time. To celebrate, I'm doing what I hope is an interesting take on Lincoln, a president who has fascinated me since childhood. Today, at SleuthSayers, the mystery blog, I have an article about Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, which is a music and spoken-word piece first composed in 1942.
The post is entitled:
Here is part of what I am saying:
My father, the Big Band man, had a record in his collection that I heard quite a bit growing up. His 1971 album featured three pieces by the composer Aaron Copland, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra: Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln Portrait.
Lincoln Portrait is a fifteen-minute, music and spoken-word piece that is, as of this writing, eighty-four years old. Tradition calls for actors and other individuals of prominence to read the 400-word text. The recording I heard was performed by the actor Henry Fonda, who played the president in Young Mr. Lincoln and who subsequently ruined all other narrators for me. When I recently queued up Lincoln Portrait read by Darth Vader James Earl Jones on my phone, I expected great things. But no—Jones was too over the top. I think I caught him enunciating a comma.
Copland's sort of a acquired taste, I guess. Some people love him, some people absolutely hate him. He devoted himself to American themes and American music.
Probably the most famous piece that everyone has heard, even if they don't know that he composed it, is Fanfare for the Common Man, which is played at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. Another is Appalachian Spring, which is just a beautiful piece that incorporates a Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts, in the middle of it. I have heard people play just that section on the bagpipes, and it’s wonderful.
From a publishing perspective, you can’t go wrong with Lincoln. Book editors love him because there’s a built-in market of people who will buy almost anything published about the sixteenth U.S. president. There have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of books about Lincoln written in recent years.
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Two of the most recent ones that I've enjoyed are Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, (affiliate links) which was the basis for Lincoln, the movie by Steven Spielberg starring Daniel Day-Lewis. I still have occasion to think about the way that that movie was plotted and constructed. The portrayal of Lincoln and Spielberg’s understanding of the men who made up Lincoln’s cabinet came from Goodwin's book.
Another one that I have occasion to read and reread is Harold Holzer's Lincoln at Cooper Union. Cooper Union was and is a school in New York City. Lincoln was invited to give a speech there in 1860, which pretty much clinched his nomination to head the Republican ticket, leading to the presidency.
I might also mention the author Carl Sandburg, whose Lincoln writings I discovered as a child due to the miniseries Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, which appeared on TV in the 1970s. When we moved to North Carolina, I was delighted to find that we had moved about 40 minutes away from the home of Carl Sandburg, which is now a National Historic Site. I’ve enjoyed visiting the home, which is exactly the way his family left it. The descendants of the prize-winning goats his wife bred still prance in a pen on the property. I have talked with Civil War reenactors on the grounds, and even once watched a Lincoln performance by a off-brand impersonator presenting to a group of visitors.
Anyway, I hope you’ll check out the SleuthSayers article, and enjoy this trifecta of unusual days.
