Aaron Copland: A New York Composer

Extract

Copland recognized the year 1939 as concluding an epoch of experiment in modern music. This was initiated, he asserts, at the end of the nineteenth century, and passed by way of Mussorgskian realism, French impressionism, embracing, to a certain extent, the traditionalism imposed by Strauss, Scriabine, Sibelius and others. The period includes the expressionist audacity of a Schönberg and a Satie, the dynamism of an early Strawinsky, the politonality of a Bartók (prior to 1908), and flows finally into the complexities of the post-(1914–18) war world. It is precisely during this epilogue that the young Copland himself emerges as a personality, at the disadvantage, on the one hand, of not having taken part in the first acts of the drama, and enjoying, on the other, all the advantages of not having been a protagonist in so involved a historical process. Moreover, his own country, from the time of his birth in a grey Brooklyn street, had followed a scarcely less complicated course.