The Benign American Exceptionalism of Copland’s <i>Fanfare for the Common Man</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A pounding on the bass drum and a crash on the tam-tam. An upward rising triad in the trumpets. Then, a straightforwardly arpeggiaic, yet metrically irregular and emotionally rousing fanfare-like melody. A gradual accumulation of instrumental forces, harmonizing the melody over an ever-increasing range, ending with an unexpected cadence in a bright but distant key. These are the musical features of Aaron Copland’s brief yet utterly iconic Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), a work written for wartime uplift that has become a musical symbol of Americanism. Despite containing no overt musical or titular reference to the United States, the Fanfare is today a mainstay of nationalist celebration. On July 4, 2018, for example, it was heard at Independence Day concerts in locales as diverse as Houston, Miami, Batesville (Indiana), Reading (Pennsylvania), San Francisco, Green Bay, Pittsburgh, and Wichita Falls. American TV sports broadcasts use it frequently to rouse their audiences. Its stately, patriotic feel ennobles the funerals of prominent Americans. In the soundtracks of movies, advertisements, and TV series, meanwhile, its easily recognizable musical features have functioned for decades as a musical signifier of the United States and everything it stands for.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".