Word: copland
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...Fantasy harks back to a number of abstract chamber works written (with a few exceptions) before 1935 and after 1946. Most are far less easily approached than the lyrical ballets; music critic Paul Rosenfeld once said that Copland's works of the early '30's "resemble nothing so much as steel cranes, bridges and the frame of skyscrapers." But although direct quotation of jazz and folk songs find little place in these pieces, both influences are now assimilated into his style and occur in an indirect fashion...
...similar stylistically but different in scope. Both are excursions into the broad area of atonalism: the Variations are derived from four basic notes in a rigorously logical fashion, and the Fantasy opens with the starkly simple exposition of a ten note "row" covering most of the piano. But Copland ventures into atonalism only to procure useful new means for expression. Refusing to capitulate to the strictures of the technique (some of its adherents would call this sacrilege), he emerges from it often in the Fantasy with passages that have a strong sense of tonality...
These two elements blend together perfectly, for the "row" provides a framework for Copland's long-legged marches up and down the keyboard and the tonality draws the work back to a more placid, stable base. Because he has accomplished this integration within a distinctly personal style, it is a brilliant and welcome contribution to the modern piano literature, a field in serious decline...
Since the Variations, Copland's music has acquired a delicate, floating quality that appeared in his 1941 Piano Sonata and occurs frequently in this work. But it is interesting that to achieve this he uses several devices of his early period: grace notes, widely spaced registers, and bell-like tone...
Several critics have taken Copland to task for immobile writing that has no organic development, and such a long work as this (it lasts an uninterrupted 30 minutes) is extremely susceptible to this flaw. Copland himself admits to willful use of a similar structure; he once said that "the composer's purpose was to attempt a composition that would suggest the quality of fantasy, that is, a spontaneous and unpremeditated sequence of 'events' that would carry the listener (if possible) from the first note to the last..." And, indeed, he has done just that. The piece moves smoothly from...