Music: Copland at 60

“In those days,” Aaron Copland once said of his early studies, “music was like the inside of a great building that shut out the street noises.” Later Copland was to do more than any other composer of his generation to open the doors of the concert hall to the noises of American life. He is the most played of U.S.-born composers and the most eloquent advocate of modern American music.

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.

A 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 to write his often criticized “popular-style” music, typified by his raucously percussioned, slickly orchestrated El Salón México and by his scores for films (Of Mice and Men), radio (Saga of the Prairie) and ballet (Billy the Kid).

His 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 he “no longer felt the need of seeking out conscious Americanisms.” In his postwar work, starting with the fine Third Symphony of 1946, he feels that he has been rediscovering the “bigger gestures” of his youth.

A 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 it.”)

Copland finds that he does his best work after dinner, keeping at it until about 2 a.m. He has no plans for a new opera to follow The Tender Land, the rather limp work premiered in 1954. “Opera,” says Copland, “eats up three years of your time; then everything’s decided in one night.” His work in progress: a chamber piece for nine solo strings. The orchestration was obvious, says Copland, from the moment “I got the material”—and he points gravely to the ceiling, to show that it was a gift from above.