Aaron Copland and his World (review)

As Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick suggest in their joint introduction to this volume—the latest in an annual series published in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival—there has been a minor explosion in Copland studies over the last decade. Indeed, given Copland's pre-eminence among American composers of the twentieth century, it is surprising how little had been written about him prior to the appearance in the 1980s of the two volumes of quasi-autobiography, co-written with Vivian Perlis (Boston, 1984; New York, 1989), and The Music of Aaron Copland by Neil Butterworth (London, 1985). Since the late 1990s, however—no doubt due in part to the easy availability of primary sources through the Library of Congress's American Memory Project—we have been treated to a steady stream of articles in such journals as American Music and JAMS, as well as Howard Pollack's comprehensive Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York and London, 1999), Judith Tick and Gail Levin's Aaron Copland's America: A Cultural Perspective (New York, 2000), Elizabeth B. Crist's Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York, 2005), and Peter Dickinson's edited collection of Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2002). The volume under review attempts to complement these other publications in offering a substantial sequence of self-contained contributions—some biographical, some cultural, others analytical—that aim to help readers in making some overall sense of 'Aaron Copland and his world'. However, given the sheer volume of scholarship that has emerged of late, there was the nagging suspicion, even before opening this book, that it might contain not the choicest handpicked fruit but, rather, the late season windfalls.

As is perhaps inevitable, the sheer quantity of material included here leads to some noticeable variability in quality. At the top of the barrel are the final essay, 'Copland Reconfigured', by Leon Botstein (Bard's President), along with the earlier essays by Larry Starr—a brilliant analytical study of the Piano Sonata—Elizabeth B. Crist, who writes perceptively and intelligently on 'Copland and the Politics of Americanism, and Beth E. Levy, who provides a fascinating and well-argued account of Copland's 'Sagas of the Prairie' that has the little-known 1937 work Music for Radio at its centre. While Botstein's inspired and wide-ranging essay—which features extended and insightful ruminations on Copland's uniqueness, sexuality, politics, and Jewish identity, among other topics—eschews music examples, Starr, Crist, and Levy all supply generous numbers of notes in support of their arguments. Starr in particular does an exemplary job in incorporating these examples into the substance of his analysis; all the more pity, then, that at least two of his examples include minor typographic errors. (Parenthetically, one might note that despite Oja and Tick's praise for the 'extraordinary editorial and production staff' with whom they worked (p. xi), their fruit is bruised, albeit very slightly and only occasionally, by some minor but rather obvious slips: such are the perils of working with a large team of contributors.)

At the bottom of the barrel, though by no means scraping it—there are no rotten apples here—are several contributions that, whatever their worth as primary sources, make for somewhat unpalatable consumption. Despite its editor Wayne D. Shirley's best efforts to the contrary, the collected correspondence between Copland and Arthur Berger does little to enhance my previous estimation of the latter. Similarly, two transcriptions—by Emily Abrams of a 1959 television special, Aaron Copland Meets the Soviet Composers, and by Melissa de Graaf of a 1937 post-concert discussion at a Composers' Forum-Laboratory event—cannot, however well introduced and edited they may be, conceal the fact that their basic material is indigestible. Between these two extremes lies the remainder of the harvest, which is for the main part edible but...