behind the Common Man, the Colonizing Man

a decolonial response to Fanfare for the Common Man

Colin Tucker (settler, occupied Turtle Island), July 4, 2025

content note: verbal discussion and images of relations and tactics of colonization

Much discussion between US settlers about Fanfare for the Common Man (Aaron Copland) is limited to the piece’s location on the (settler) political spectrum and in terms of (modern Western binary) gender. Yet the piece’s performance history in proximity to militarism, imperialism, and colonialism, from Turtle Island to Palestine* and beyond, reveals the significant limitations of that discussion (which in turn can be understood as being shaped by and reproducing a settler colonial whitewashing of Indigenous sovereignty and of ongoing colonial relations). Until the colonial-imperial orientation of pieces like this are marked and reckoned with, they will continue to reiterate, naturalize, and sanitize the ongoing US colonization of Turtle Island and US imperialism globally.

My piece excavates specific embodied-emplaced positions in the Fanfare’s opening passage. If this passage is the paradigmatic example of Copland’s semiotics of (sovereign Indigenous Turtle Island lands inscribed as) “wide open spaces”**—canonical to a US national art music style and hugely influential in Hollywood soundtracks—then the present piece traces the Body that is conjured as the beholder-enacter of the Fanfare’s wide open spaces, specifically through the long-standing Western music theory vernacular of mapping narrow and wide pitch changes onto steps and leaps, respectively. As I argued in more depth elsewhere, this Body is a violent, dispossessive actor who inscribes sovereign Indigenous lands as open (i.e. unsovereign), space (i.e. abstracted and homogenized), and wide (i.e. miniaturized and manipulable). From this standpoint, the colonial-imperial complicities of the piece’s performance history, and the literal colonialism of the piece’s engraving onto sovereign Mohican and Schaghticoke territory occupied illegally by the Tanglewood Music Center, are hardly extrinsic to its musical content.

My piece aims to defuse the Fanfare’s rhetoric and unearth its subtexts, by silencing the work and collapsing it into visual traces of its notation and performance. Through these strategies, I hope to point towards broader decolonial possibilities inherent in the to date highly neglected intersection of musical notation, visual collage, critical visualization studies, and critical appropriation art.

The work presented here is a portion of a longer artist book in progress.

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*As incorporated into the Symphony no. 3, the Fanfare was performed nine times during the Nakba, in lands newly occupied by the Zionist entity by Leonard Bernstein and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra), almost exactly contemporaneously with the Zionist atrocities of October-November 1948

**Matthew Riley and Anthony D. Smith write that, of modernist fashionings of Turtle Island as US “homeland,” “the purest example is perhaps the opening of Fanfare for the Common Man.”

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Proceeds from the project will be donated to the Red Nation.

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