Quiet City is a composition for trumpet, cor anglais or oboe, and string orchestra by Aaron Copland.
For a 1941 Boston Symphony performance, the composer wrote:[4]In the Spring of 1939 I was asked by my friend, Harold Clurman, director of the Group Theatre, to supply the incidental musical score for a new play by Irwin Shaw, author of 'Bury the Dead,' 'Gentle People,' and other dramas his new opus was entitled 'Quiet City,' and was a realistic fantasy concerning the night-thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city.
The addition of English horn and string orchestra (I was limited to clarinet, saxophone, piano, plus the trumpet of course, in the stage version), and the form of the piece as a whole, was the result of work in a barn-studio two miles down the road from Tanglewood.
The orchestration was completed in late September, and the score dedicated to Ralph Hawkes, junior member of the London firm of Boosey and Hawkes, who published the composition recently.According to Copland, the piece was "an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of Irwin Shaw's play",[5] who had abandoned his Jewishness and his poetic aspirations in order to pursue material success by anglicizing his name, marrying a rich socialite, and becoming the president of a department store.
Continuing the assessment in his own autobiography, Copland observed that "Quiet City seems to have become a musical entity, superseding the original reasons for its composition",[This quote needs a citation] owing much of its success to its escape from the details of its dramatic context.