Aspects of Copland's Development

Extract

With Aaron Copland's maturity as a composer, American music gained a conscious identity, a persona, a style. Large claims, admittedly, but historically justified, even if it may be argued that they tell us little about the intrinsic quality of his work. About one thing, however, there can be no doubt: when Copland returned from his Parisian studies with Nadia Boulanger (1924), there was no style which could readily be accepted as quintessentially American—as a distillation of experience which belonged to that continent and to no other. There had been a number of brave attempts—composers who had seen the need to swing away from traditional European polarities—but no single figure had bridged the gap between his internal imagination and the responses of the outside world. This didacticism is necessary because of the extraordinary figure of Charles Ives—that enormous image that will loom over American music as long as it is played. Ives, an intrinsically richer personality, more copiously gifted, failed where Copland succeeded. The contrast between their personalities tells us more about the America they both idealised than any separate survey of their works could do. They are, in fact, the antitheses of American music. Both had the rare courage to bring their initially unwelcome attitudes into the full glare of public light, so that their impact could be openly assessed—a fact which would certainly not have been applicable to the many composers who were still vacillating between the accepted quasi-European language, and a kind of regressive provincialism.