Copland probably never lost sleep over the uses and misuses to which his music was put, although he might have relished the irony of a gay leftist of Russian-Jewish extraction supplying the soundtrack for the Republican Party platform. Pragmatic rather than radical at the core, he wanted to speak for the entire country, even at the expense of diluting his message. In this sense, he was the perfect musical counterpart of the thirty-second president of the United States.
