Euphonic Studio Recording's video: Fanfare for the Common Man

Aaron Copeland wrote this work in 1942 as part of a group of 18 Fanfares requested by Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. Here it is recorded by Bill Niemi along with Bill's photo essay. Copeland got the idea for his Fanfare from a speech by Vice President Henry Wallace, who declared in 1942 that humanity was entering the "Century of the Common Man" while reiterating FDR's "four freedoms". Ironically, the great majority of the 85 million people who lost their lives and the untold millions who lost family, friends, limbs, and life as they knew it were all common men, women, and children. That is the overriding point of my photo essay. The suffering of war works its way up, beginning by inflicting the most damage on the poor and powerless. The other point I am making is that the specter of white supremacy, racism, genocide, and division has been reborn in our time; in fact, a major source of this misguided and deadly appeal to our worst instincts is coming from the Oval Office and the Twitter account of the criminal who occupies it. We are seeing an alarming rise in racial, cultural, and religious hate crimes right here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Such cowardice! We have lost our way, we have lost our historical perspective, we pay no attention to the great thinkers past and present who could guide us through this difficult time. Instead we simply tune in the propaganda media that validates our point of view and let reason and facts be displaced by tribalism and grievance politics. Can we recover from this? Copeland would have believed we could. But we need to understand our commonalities, not obsess on our differences.