Old for new
MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN
A young English composer, asked to contribute a chapter on Schoenberg for a history of music, is said to have replied that he would rather continue to write half-truths in his own music than half-truths about the music of somebody else. No such objection seems to have deterred Aaron Copland, whose book Our New Music, first published in 1941, now appears refurbished under the title The Neu, Music 1900-1960 (Macdonald 21s).
Copland's career as a popularist, both as writer and as lecturer, is well known, though the mass-audience coverage of television has given Leonard Bernstein the upper hand in this sort of thing. Yet this amiable and not par- ticularly urgent canter through the 'seminal' composers, from Mussorgsky to the Computer, has surely been made redundant by many another book at once more explicit and de- tailed, and less naive on aesthetic issues. Any- one looking for the insights of one composer who is as old as the century on his peers will find small enlightenment—opinions are limited to prejudices which the reader prob- ably possesses anyway. The book reflects the depressingly low level of most writing on modern music, and I have no doubt that if a painter had written in this way about`modern painting,' for even the most lay audience, he would be laughed out of the gallery.
However, there is no denying Copland's con- tribution to the developthent of a native American music after the First World War, and the autobiographical chapter records how he set out to reject the Romantic musical tradition and the overpowering Germanness of music by writing in a spare, severe, uncom- promising style, variously described as 'isolated,' 'cubist,' the 'music of glass and steel girders.' To continue this last metaphor, Copland's Piano Variations of 1930 most nearly repre- sents the formal principle of a skyscraper in music, though it also shows his inability to translate a series of 'square' modular units into a living structure (that needs a Mies or a Messiaen). As a piano piece it is highly suc- cessful, its strength lying in the monochrome brutality of its piano writing—something like The Rite of Spring with the stuffing removed.
Yet the orchestral version that Copland made in 1957, and with which he opened his concert with the Lso at the Festival Hall last week, showed that, in replacing the physical strain and limitations of the piano by an orchestration, no matter how dynamic and violent, the steel is seen to be softer than we thought and the glass flawed. What is left sounded like a highly resourceful but unsophisticated piece of primi- tive serialism (a system Copland had, of course, not adopted at that time)—the successive and always recognisable manipulations of the short theme becoming tiresome rather than cumula- tive, for we are aware that the, music is pro- gressing in time yet even more aware that we never leave square one.
Copland has recently taken to the 'Schoen- berg method (not the aesthetic)' for reasons of his own 'it forces the tonal composer to unconventionalise his thinking with respect to choral structure, and it tends to freshen his melodic and figurational imagination' (As with Stravinsky, but less creatively so, Serialism as the Great Rejuvenator.) But his latest piece, lnscape (1967), included in the same concert,. makes it clear serialism has not changed Cop- land's personality. The chief difference is that today the material is totally undistinguished, presented as though he were still writing those variations, and were desperate for the coherence which a recognisable theme once provided— and which might have partly saved this drool- ing, note-spinning, shapeless piece, whose rhythmic simplicity was as unbelievable as it was blatant, making one long for the jazz rhythms of some of the works Copland wrote in the 'twenties.
If Copland finds a place in the history of music, it will be rather as the composer of 'popular' ballet music, such as Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring, marvellous works based on white American folk music, which have spawned quantities of 'big country' style film music, inspired much of West Side Story and painted a remarkable picture of rural America, a musical vision rapidly vanishing. Composers are not always the best judges of their own music and Copland says that 'those commentators who would like to split me down the middle into two opposing personalities will get no encouragement from me:' The only en- couragement one does, in fact, need is Cop- land himself conducting his Four Dance Epi- sodes from Rodeo, a superb piece which highlights the difference between Copland the
composer and Copland the constructor, be- tiieen the 'representational' and `abitrace use of the traditional concepts of harmony, counterpoint and tunes.
Copland drifted into conducting on the advice given him by 'an elderly and wise woman to engage in an activity that you didn't engage in when you were young so that you are not continually in competition with yourself as a yoting man.' As a conductor, he shows admir- able differences from other composer-conduc- tors—from Britten, for example, who conducts his own music and the work of composers with whom he has musical and temperamental affinities, or Boulez, who conducts mainly twentieth century works which he considers `seminal,' as an autobiographical gesture, so to speak. Copland, to his credit, has always en- couraged the music, of his fellow American composers, and his understanding preientation of the work of younger and, by his own stan- dards, 'way out' composers, such as Takemitsu and Xennakis, does greater service in bridging the musical comprehension gap than any amount of simplistic writing_ about that music.
Previous page
