Last year I spoke about my Pride in Jacksonville as a progressive city. Although we haven’t changed since then, today it seems almost impossible to feel optimistic about anything political in the wake of the election, and the seemingly endless assaults on the personal liberty of anyone who is not a native-born, rich, white Anglo-Saxon cis heterosexual male.
Amidst this depressing political landscape, at the Jacksonville Symphony we launched our most ambitious season ever in celebration of our 75th anniversary. Without stretching musical metaphors too far, we pulled out all the stops and presented a series of concerts, each of which would have been the highlight of any other season. Mahler’s Second Symphony, Mozart’s Requiem, Strauss’s massive tone poem Ein Heldenleben and Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto sat beside four world premieres from living composers, not one of whom was an Anglo-Saxon, white, cis heterosexual male. We ended a few weeks ago with an enormous concert celebrating American music that culminated in Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. We were so happy our Mayor was there at the season’s first and last concerts.
Written in 1945, Copland’s Third is a post-war victory ode to the best American values. It’s a piece that sounds like America at its finest: as enormous and optimistic as the architecture of Chicago, as noble as Yosemite’s Half-Dome, generous, wholesome, international, powerful but benevolent, welcoming. It’s often referred to as “the greatest American Symphony”, and yet it was written by a diffident, gay, second-generation Jewish immigrant from Brooklyn, who had recently been dragged in front of the McCarthy Senate hearings because of his socialist beliefs.
The finale of Copland 3 reuses one of his most famous compositions, already well-known at the symphony’s premiere – The Fanfare for the Common Man. By using it as the basis for the symphony’s triumphant end, Copland proclaims one his central beliefs – that the greatness of America lies in its inclusion of everyone; that diversity is its greatest strength.
But towards the end of the finale something very unsettling happens – the piece grows more and more boisterous, full of hubris, kind of drunk on its own success and prowess. The Fanfare for the Common Man is trampled down amidst a barrage of aggressive, noisy confidence and chauvinism. The music crashes to a garish halt, and everything stops dead in its tracks.
I didn’t understand what was happening in this passage until performing the piece for the first time a few weeks ago – in fact before the first concert I really hated this part – it felt cheap and hokey and didn’t seem to make any sense amidst the surrounding optimism. But once I’d lived through it in concert, I suddenly realized that Copland was making a prescient point. Amidst the atmosphere of glory the country was experiencing having won the Second World, he wrote a musical warning to the America of the future: if you get too pleased with yourself, if you cut yourself off from others and forget that your founding values are about ordinary people, you’ll lose your way, and disaster will strike.
After this warning, a terrified, whispering piccolo begins a plaintive solo – perhaps a musical picture of a citizen who doesn’t know who is going to help them. But the Fanfare for the Common Man returns very quietly, hidden under a series of woodwind calls. The Fanfare regrounds the music, and gradually brings the symphony back to its original message: the very best music for ordinary people, of all kinds, creeds and colours.
We’re in the disaster moment right now. We’ve lost our way. Everywhere we turn we hear hatred, hubris, strong-arming and ignorant aggression, and celebrations of mean-spirited provincialism. Our country needs the correction of Copland’s Fanfare – a clarion call to remind to us what we’re all about. I’m reminded of some of the most inspiring words ever written in our country. Also writing in a time of rising autocracy, Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg sought to reaffirm and reset the central idea behind American democracy: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
So what’s all this got to do with Pride, I hear you ask. Well, I think all of us in this room now have a special opportunity to lead. We have experience dealing with oppression. We know how to fight the system. We know how to persevere, and we know how to triumph over adversity. There are many people in America today without our experience, who are feeling scared, disenfranchised and “Othered”. But just as we know over 70% of Americans support marriage equality, we know that the vast majority do not support the illegal actions of the current administration in its deportation practices, its willful disregard for the Judiciary and its cruel axing of the programs that help the neediest in our society. Adversity breeds Unity. We can use our experience to build new bridges and find new allies in our fight against discrimination and oppression. We can lead. We’re a progressive city, after all. I have Pride in Jacksonville. I was proud of city and especially our Mayor this week when she vetoed Ordinance 025-0138. Her words could have been written by Aaron Copland himself: “this bill is not rooted in the common good”.
So as we celebrate our achievements this month and plan our fights to preserve and expand our freedoms as LGBTQ people, let’s share our hard-won skills with others experiencing political persecution in our city, let’s lead the opposition and help to start healing our country. Sometimes it takes the immigrants, of which I am one, the people who’ve chosen to be here, to remind us of what is fundamentally good and unique about the American Experiment, even in times like this. This year, let’s not dwell on how terrible everything is. Instead, let’s bring the Pride we have won in ourselves to others and fight for the America we believe in. Happy Pride!
Given as a speech on Friday, June 27, 2025, during Pride celebrations at Jacksonville City Hall, at the invitation of Mayor Donna Deegan
Watch the speech here: