Music: The Brooklyn Eagle

Next year, Aaron Copland will be seventy. Oh, dear. He has been a national monument for so long that it is hard to think of him as growing old. More than that, his manner and his interests are those of a younger man. Throughout his career, he has been driven by an insatiable curiosity about what is going on in his profession. He is always growing—trying new techniques, flirting with new styles. You would think that, with his lifework this far advanced, he would be developing a final “mature” idiom. Not at all. In his most recent pieces, he is as eclectic as ever. In Connotations, for orchestra, he is unyielding and seems to be openly hostile to the listener; but Emblems, for large symphonic band, is a noble sounding piece, full of the hymn tunes and bits of fake Americana that have endeared Copland to the unenterprising listener. Most recently, in an orchestra piece called Inscape, he uses a pair of twelve-tone rows in music that, for its wide-open harmonies and simple tunes, sounds like the Copland of thirty years ago.

In a recent interview, Copland said:

When you look back over a period of years and judge your own work, you can recognize changes of style which had come about from your feeling that the style you had used previously had been completely explored. But the deliberate attempt to change just because you like to change is too arbitrary and doesn’t work.

Pregnant words. Nobody knows more than Copland about changing styles, and some of his changes do seem to be pretty arbitrary. However, as a general rule, they work. Copland gives the impression of being able to write any kind of music he pleases, and every major trend, from the end of the impressionistic period until now, is reflected in his catalogue.

Like Stravinsky, Copland tends to look at the musical surface as if it were an entity quite independent of the creator—almost as if it were an object that could be picked up, examined, and played with. He will take on a style—evidently almost any style—just to see what he can make it do.

His slumming expeditions have fetched up some marvelous oddities. Very early on, in 1925, he wrote his Music for the Theater, not under the influence of jazz itself, but rather of jazz by way of Gershwin. Today, it wheezes around like a rebuilt Pierce Arrow sedan at a classic car parade.

Even more outrageous are his Chiquita Banana pieces, El Salon Mexico and Danzón Cubano, little anthologies of clichés from LatinAmerican popular music. They are expert, superbly made deadpan putons; frightful fun—much more than the parallel works of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov—because there is no attempt whatever to suppress or apologize for the innate vulgarity of the materials.

At the other extreme are his austere works, pieces aimed at the gut and as brutal as anything in the modern canon. In 1957, when he was at work on the Piano Fantasy, he remarked that it was “hard to write, hard to play, and hard to listen to.” This description would apply equally well to the Piano Variations, which were written in 1930 when Copland was a young man and not very far into his career.

Superficially, there is a gulf separating his serious music from his entertainments. This distinction is treacherous and deceptive. A piece like Appalachian Spring, for instance, would have to fall with the lighter works; yet it is carefully contrived, and it contains some of the most genuinely affecting music that Copland has written. The Vitebsk Trio, with its jagged rhythms and heavy saturation of dissonances, would have to be classified as serious Copland. But the melodic material is as folksy as anything in the ballets.

In either category, the composer’s problem is the same: to explore a style with a view to exhausting it. The listener’s problem is not so much one of finding meaning behind the design of the music and its rhetoric as it is to admire all the fancy work and the skill that went into it.

Since about 1950 Copland has played around with serial composition a lot, but his affair with Viennese atonality has always stopped far short of total commitment. That it happened at all is extremely strange.

Copland was a devoted pupil of Nadia Boulanger, and Boulanger taught that the school of Schoenberg was heretical. Copland has never been given to dogma, and has always been generous to musicians whose styles and attitudes are alien to his own. But since he reached the age of fifty without finding a need for note-rows, it is curious that he suddenly found himself using them.

Actually, the note-rows contribute very little to the musical surface. Copland generally reserves them for works of considerable solemnity. But the pieces keep sounding like the old Copland in Ids austere mood. The melodies are angular and the harmonies abrasive, as they always have been.

Throughout most of his career Copland has been a commanding figure in American musical politics, using his influence for awarding scholarships, fellowships, and commissions to the needy and deserving. And others. His record for generosity is impressive. And he has, for the most part, been prudent.

He realizes of course that his influence is waning. When he resigned his post as director of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, he gave up a tremendous amount of power. Then, too, most of the younger composers, boys in their twenties, are not much interested in the kinds of music Copland has written. Copland, for his part, has not yet shown any interest in exploring the current crop of advanced styles, though if past performance is an indication, he will get around to them in his own time.

He is, I suspect, at a watershed in his career. On the basis of his work until now—and most of the results are in—it would be easy to dismiss him as a glamorous but rather frivolous figure: the American Chabrier, as someone once called him, or the best composer ever born in Brooklyn, but not a man of the stature of Ravel, say, or Prokofiev— both figures who invite comparison with him. Whether this judgment is fair or not will be determined by the music he writes in his old age.

SOME COPLAND RECORDINGS: