1. Copland's centenary

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The Two Pieces for string quartet, though always interesting, are not masterpieces; but another work, written in the same year of 1928, earns that status. Vitebsk, a one-movement trio for violin, cello, and piano, brings in Copland's ancestral white Russian Hebraic alienation, being based on a Russian folk-pop song that currently haunted New York since it featured in a play presented by a theatre-company from Moscow. This Russian infusion rounded off the basically white-black context of Copland's Americanism; and Vitebsk is crucial too in that it is closely allied to, almost a study for, the Piano Variations of 1930, a keywork not only in Copland's career, but also in the story of American music, and therefore in the story of the modern world. The sonorities of this music are so bare, gaunt, and hard as to be almost skeletonic; nothing could be further from the cosy domestic parlour in which the piano trios of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert (as distinct from those of the disturbingly innovative Beethoven) were performed. In its aggressively reiterated patterns, the lack of lyrical growth or harmonic progression makes for an a-religious, non-sentimental music apposite to a machine civilization. It's as though Copland felt he had no choice but to sacrifice the 'natural' principles of musical growth, to see whether anything of human worth might still be salvaged. So he starts from the broken bones of a broken culture: in particular from the ambiguous thirds, sixths, and sevenths of the Negro blues, and from the cantor's declamation in the Jewish synagogue: both Negro and Jew being dispossessed peoples who have become representative of modern man's uprootedness. Since the fragments cannot grow spontaneously, they must be reintegrated in a personal vision - such as that in which the cubist painters, in an earlier generation, had reintegrated the broken facets of the visible world. Copland's reintegration involved processes that are strictly serial, though not chromatic; indeed the 'row' of the Piano Variations embraces a mere five notes: yet although the metallic textures of the Variations - and anticipatorily those of Vitebsk - have the precision of a machine, and the lyrical heart, harmonic blood, and rhythmic pulse seem all to be stifled, the music is, in total effect, potently stimulating and even - in the way in which fragments of line and chord are 'shored against our ruins' - newly noble. Disintegration leads to liberation; and if the music has the hardness of the New York skyline, it also opens vistas, asking a question: Shall these bones live?

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