Aaron Copland--A Reader.(Books)

Aaron Copland--A Reader

Selected Writings 1923-72

Edited by Richard Kostelanetz

Routledge, 368 pages, $30

Aaron Copland was a wonderful man as well as a fine composer. Humane, generous, intelligent, articulate, lovable, and wise, he was without arrogance despite his great success against long odds as a lower-middle-class Jewish homosexual--and no other musician in America has ever been as successful in so many different ways as Copland. He made many friends and no enemies, he never compromised his personal or artistic integrity, he never sullied his inherent grace or modesty, and he never ceased his tireless work for the cause of music. "I helped to make art possible in America" was his proudest boast. His legacy, the Copland Foundation, continues to support musicians today, as his accomplishment continues to inspire them.

Somehow Copland found time to be a prolific writer all through his long career. He had a wide-ranging and deeply cultivated mind, and in his writings he is interested in--and interesting on--everything to do with music. His prose is lucid, firmly anchored in particularities and practicalities, and direct--always a pleasure to read. (Indeed his writings are so prescient and encompassing that Copland would have been important in American musical history simply as a journalist even if he hadn't also been a composer, pianist, conductor, organizer of musical events, and cultural icon.)

Aaron Copland--A Reader presents an overview of Copland's writings--a collection of representative excerpts from his books, along with dozens of articles, speeches, letters, and other occasional pieces. as well as notes written for performances and recordings of his own works. On himself Copland is frank, clear-sighted, and endearing. On other composers--and he listened to and wrote about a surprising number of them--he displays admirable sympathy and sensitivity, championing Mahler, for instance, as far back as 1925, and writing with penetrating insight about Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Ives, Chavez, Britten, Carter, and many others. He examines the impulse behind neoclassicism and behind 12-tone music; he explains the rhythmic innovations of jazz and how they affected concert music; he gives details about the exact functions and process of writing film music.