Copland: Innovation vs. Mediation

Aaron Copland: Piano Fantasy (1957) and Piano Variations (1930). William Masselos, piano. Columbia ML 5568 (monaural) and MS6168 (stereo).

Although the strong appreciation of innovation in music today is laudable, the results of this emphasis have not all been good. The great gap between the many techniques of composition today inflate the art's factional politics; the neoclassicists rail at the atonalists for their dehumanized experimentation and the latter hiss back at their opponents's "superfiuous," "reactionary" conservatism. If a composer finds no camp congenial, he must have great skill to select the elements from several schools, integrate them into a distinctly personal idiom, and still avoid the short-comings of a patchwork eclecticism.

While intrinsic quality and historical significance are obviously interrelated, they are not always the same. Musical values today resemble Hegel's fallacy that what is significant is necessarily best.

What's more, enlargement of the musical audience has further complicated the conflict between radical and conservative by superimposing upon it the polarization of the popular and the esoteric. Because this new audience has a sizable influence in what is played and recorded, music must lessen the gap between the listener and the innovating composer. But if a musicians wishes to devote even part of his time to this endeavor, he must either abandon extensive experimentation or else lead a schizophrenic musical life in pursuing two lines of composition, "functional" and "absolute."

The latter course demands over-whelming ability. Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein have tried it, but opinions vary on the quality and importance of their most serious works; Archibald Davison gave up composing entirely for education. Such men are often rewarded--and rightly so--with greater fame and financial security than their more esoteric colleagues, but in the process they may easily draw professional jealousy.

Aaron Copland has also chosen a dual course. The first recording of his 1957 Piano Fantasy, issued in honor of his 60th birthday last November, shows that his decision has done little violence to his integrity or significance as a composer of absolute music.

The 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.

This recording very aptly pairs the 1957 work with his Piano Variations of 1930, for they are 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.

One prominent side of the Fantasy resembles the dominant tone of the Variations: insistent, clangorous declamation. Since this percussiveness is always transparent and shrewdly manipulates the piano's tone colors, it avoids bombast or irritating din. Declamation forms the backbone of this far-ranging piece through two motives that recur with triumphant resonance, one a defiant, metallic rattle of repeated notes, the other a thunderously rhetorical passage, of two lines roaring together from the outskirts of the piano. The responsive ear will delight in the grating dissonances and, what's more, it will do so even more after repeated listening.

But the later work is, above all, a fantasy, and as such it ranges about much more than the 10-minute-long Variations. Leaving its stormy rhetoric, it becomes pensive, then playful, and sprints away into the upper registers to drift off into what is marked "no tone." At another point a glissando emerges from the rattle motive to dive upon the melody below, swoop up again pursued by a line of single notes, and exhaust itself in a final upward surge.

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 one section to another in a thoroughly natural sequence, the declamatory motives and the "row" providing unity. But his intentions aside, greater differentiation of these recapitulations might have given better climaxes. And at the end he parades down the piano with alternating registers in just that dulling fashion his critics complain of.

Copland's rhythms are especially infectious in this piece. His opposition of twos and threes is delightful, and his alternation of various triple meters gives a lively, invigorating style. His writing progresses with a natural is beautifully tuned to what man ear enjoys--a principle serialists such as Ernest suspect so highly.

Thus despite its dissona "row," the Fantasy is still conservative in that Coplan retained the traditional mo rhythmic and melodic con He once said that modern "shares with older music pression of basic human ent even though at times it may more painful, more hectic, mocastic. Whatever else it it is the voice of our own in that it needs no apology."

William Masselos contrib performance that masters the continual rhythmic and that has a keen sense f land's phrases and dynam his hands the work become vibrant, then poetic, and insight like his its britt be lost.

If Copland is not an innov then has a faculty much n the present chaos of modern As Arthur Berger puts it, he capacity to reconcile oppo shift gracefully between tremes." He has mediated the popular and the esoter "functional" works and the conservative and the ra the Fantasy--and has pul trick off.

When Masselos premier work in New York, several garde musicians were so by their partisan prejudic they hissed and booed it. Wh missed!

Thus despite its dissona "row," the Fantasy is still conservative in that Coplan retained the traditional mo rhythmic and melodic con He once said that modern "shares with older music pression of basic human ent even though at times it may more painful, more hectic, mocastic. Whatever else it it is the voice of our own in that it needs no apology."

William Masselos contrib performance that masters the continual rhythmic and that has a keen sense f land's phrases and dynam his hands the work become vibrant, then poetic, and insight like his its britt be lost.

If Copland is not an innov then has a faculty much n the present chaos of modern As Arthur Berger puts it, he capacity to reconcile oppo shift gracefully between tremes." He has mediated the popular and the esoter "functional" works and the conservative and the ra the Fantasy--and has pul trick off.

When Masselos premier work in New York, several garde musicians were so by their partisan prejudic they hissed and booed it. Wh missed!

William Masselos contrib performance that masters the continual rhythmic and that has a keen sense f land's phrases and dynam his hands the work become vibrant, then poetic, and insight like his its britt be lost.

If Copland is not an innov then has a faculty much n the present chaos of modern As Arthur Berger puts it, he capacity to reconcile oppo shift gracefully between tremes." He has mediated the popular and the esoter "functional" works and the conservative and the ra the Fantasy--and has pul trick off.

When Masselos premier work in New York, several garde musicians were so by their partisan prejudic they hissed and booed it. Wh missed!

If Copland is not an innov then has a faculty much n the present chaos of modern As Arthur Berger puts it, he capacity to reconcile oppo shift gracefully between tremes." He has mediated the popular and the esoter "functional" works and the conservative and the ra the Fantasy--and has pul trick off.

When Masselos premier work in New York, several garde musicians were so by their partisan prejudic they hissed and booed it. Wh missed!

When Masselos premier work in New York, several garde musicians were so by their partisan prejudic they hissed and booed it. Wh missed!