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LA Philharmonic's 'Common Man' For Colbert

This election season there's been a lot of talk about who and what are American. On Tuesday's edition of Stephen Colbert's Late Show, music replaced rhetoric in the form of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Copland wrote the piece in 1942 as a patriotic gesture during World War II. It was part of a larger commissioning project by Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conductor Eugene Goosens, who asked a variety of American composers to write fanfares. Copland scored his for brass and percussion. The tune ended up as a part of the composer's Third Symphony, completed four years later.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic stopped in New York to play music by Copland and young American composer Andrew Norman, as well as Mahler's Third Symphony as a part of its 2016 tour, which now heads to Amsterdam, Paris, Luxembourg and London.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.