This is a bit of stretch for relevance but: It's Tax Day, and sometimes that's too busy a day to get anything else done. While composing Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland thought Tax Day was the most common sort of day for modern man, and that it would make a good day for a premiere. 

Which this isn't, but it's a decent look at the music that opens this podcast.

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Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, the music used for the introduction to this podcast, ties together two previous Fourth Turnings - commissioned after Pearl Harbor and including Civil War quotes from the 16th President -  in a way which makes it feel even more relevant as this current Crisis unfolds.

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A few relevant Wikipedia links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Portrait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Copland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Coral_Sea

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-water_mark_of_the_Confederacy

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein

This site has Kostelnetz commissioning it within 10 days - mid-December 1941- and that copland began writing in late February

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2007/julyaugust/feature/the-sound-freedom

 

 

The different excerpts are from

 

1) Address to congress 1862: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29503

2) Seventh and final Lincoln-Douglas debate October 15 1858 https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate7.htm

3) Collected works: https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/onslavery.htm

4) The Gettysburg Address 1863: 

https://www.npr.org/programs/specials/copland/coplandstory.html

 

The NPS site says his slavery quote is from August 1, 1858 - 110 years before this recording.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/onslavery.htm

This site says the date is pure conjecture, is from a scrap of paper that Mary Todd Lincoln passed to archivists later, and is signed with a different piece of paper from another document.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:547?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers, with the L.A. Philharmonic in 2017

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/14/see-vin-scully-narrate-the-words-of-abraham-lincoln-at-the-hollywood-bowl/

A direct link to a Youtube video of that performance https://youtu.be/6qpYwrla0GE

More on the quote about freedom and democracy

https://abrahamlincoln.quora.com/Close-Reading-2-Lincoln’s-Definition-of-Democracy-August-1-1858

The first item there is is a NYTimes piece from 1895 - that would be 30 years after the Civil War - that attributes it to Lincoln by the judge who ….attributes it to him. 

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1895/09/13/106068178.pdf

Last witness of the assassination of Lincoln, still alive in 1956, 14 years -after- the premiere of Lincoln Portrait

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4