Word: copland
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Celebrating his 60th birthday, Composer Copland last week mounted the podium at Carnegie Hall to lead the New York Philharmonic in two compositions-Symphonic Ode (1929) and El Salón México (1936)- that illustrated the range of his own creative career...
...Usable Past. From the time he finished his Paris studies with Nadia Boulanger in the mid-1920s, Brooklyn born Aaron Copland was known as a restive talent. Looking for "a usable past," he experimented first with jazz in the wiry, jaunty Music for the Theater (1925), later wove it into the strident and monumental style of the Ode, which to his mind marks "the end of the first period of my work." A later period was inspired by Cop land's feeling that the American composer was losing touch with his public. In the late 1930s he began...
...most successful work in the style, the stately and luminous Appalachian Spring won a Pulitzer Prize and provided an answer to critics who felt he had sold out to popular taste. It was in this period also that Copland made another, highly engaging effort to bring music closer to the people; he wrote several works for amateur performance, including The Second Hurricane, a short opera designed for high school singers. Now recorded for the first time (Columbia), Hurricane is a simple, melodic, resolutely folksy work with an exuberant rhythmic drive. Copland abandoned the role of "people's composer" when...
...Gift from Above. Now living near Peekskill, N.Y., in a home overlooking the Hudson, Copland still devotes some of his time to "diagnosing" scores submitted to him by young composers. His fourth book of thoughtful musical commentary, Copland on Music, is being published by Doubleday this week. A fairly consistent concertgoer, Copland rarely listens to recordings because he finds it discouraging that a record always sounds the same. "It would never occur to me," says he, "to sit down and listen to a Beethoven symphony. Recordings are really for people who live in Timbuktu...
During the last year, Copland was almost steadily on the go, conducting his works in Russia, Japan, the Philippines, Australia. England and the U.S. Now he would like to settle down for a period of solid composing, drawing his inspiration from a notebook in which he jots down the snatches of rhythm, the chords and series of chords that occur to him in random moments. (His friend Darius Milhaud strenuously disapproves of this method of preserving materials: "If a theme isn't good enough to remember," says Milhaud, "I wouldn't dream of using...