<<  -- 5 --  Peter Dickinson    GOLDEN AGE

Pollack organises his study by blending biography with discussion of works in a more-or-less chronological pattern. Copland's ancestry remains a gap since nothing has been discovered about his father, who came from Lithuania and spent time working in Britain saving up for his passage to New York. But both sides of Copland's family were Jewish immigrants and Pollack provides more detail about Copland's upbringing than has previously been available. His parents ran a small department store in Brooklyn and his father, especially, could not understand why he wanted to go in for music. But he supported his son, who wrote dutiful letters back from Paris, and he lived to see Aaron's success.

When Copland returned to New York from Paris in 1924 he benefited from the new music scene which Carol Oja has described in Making Music Modern. Patrons and friends enabled Copland to survive even though he composed at a slow pace. He developed a parallel career when he began to lecture at the New School for Social Reseach, which led to his first book, What to Listen for in Music. His discussion here and in later books, such as Music and Imagination, the 1952 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, show all the lucidity of Copland's best music.

What is different about Pollack's book is that Copland's romantic friendships are included, largely in a chapter called Personal Affairs. These were often intellectual companions but it was noted early on that Copland was completely at home with his homosexuality. After Copland's death, Paul Moor wrote:

'Aaron's beak-nosed, buck-toothed, somehow thoroughly endearing homeliness, his Jewish origins, his lifelong exclusive homosexuality -- these factors combined into a background tailor-made to engender a seething mass of neuroses, exacerbated with social complications which came, inevitably, with fame. Yet by some miracle, Aaron remained as free of neurosis as anyone I've ever known.'

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