<<  -- 7 --  Peter Dickinson    GOLDEN AGE

In his later years there was some disappointment since he could no longer compose after the early 1970s. So he went on the road conducting and met audiences that way -- and they adored him. His final slow decay with dementia makes for sad reading and was distressing for his friends.

This is part of Pollack's final summary:

'Copland had perhaps the most distinctive and identifiable musical voice produced by this country so far, an individuality -- in some part fashioned by vaulting melodies, jazzy polyrhythms, bright colours, open textures, bluesy harmonies and collage-like structures -- that helped define for many what American concert music sounds like at its most characteristic and that exerted an enormous influence on multitudes of contemporaries and successors.'

Pollack's book neatly coincided with the Copland centenary last year. The music is discussed without music examples but the full apparatus of notes and a list of works is provided. The book is readable from cover to cover and is replete with fascinating detail about Copland's life and music at every turn. What was needed for the centenary was more information in an accessible form. This is exactly what Pollack has given us -- with a lucidity and generosity characteristic of his subject. At the start of this review I said that American music had moved closer to the centre of the stage as the twentieth century developed -- Copland has been one of the prime architects of that shift.

Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s by Carol J Oja is published by Oxford University Press (2000), ISBN 019-5058496, 493 pages.

Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of an Uncommon Man by Howard Pollack is published by Faber & Faber (2000), ISBN 0-571-20084-2, 690 pages.

Peter Dickinson is Head of Music at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London, which offers American Music as a component in the Institute's MA Course as well as the opportunity for individual research degrees. Dickinson is editing a book on Copland, with contributions from the leading British and American authorities as well as interviews between Copland and Dickinson himself, which will appear from Boydell & Brewer next year.
Professor Dickinson is giving the Annual T S Eliot Lecture at Washington University, St. Louis, on Thursday, 25 October at 4.30pm. His subject: From St Louis to London: the international influence of Scott Joplin's ragtime rhythms.