Aaron Copland (1900-90)
Piano Quartet (1950)
Aaron Copland’s “conversion” from all-American Populist to hard-core Serialist in the 1950s wasn’t quite as dramatic as Stravinsky’s (Leonard Bernstein likened that one to “the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him”), but it was a big deal. After a string of jazz-influenced early works like Music for Theater and the Piano Concerto, Copland spent the better part of the ‘30s and ‘40s carving out a niche for himself as the composer of decidedly accessible (and often folk-driven) fare: ballets like Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring, Latin-inspired pieces like El Salón México and Danzón cubano, patriotic works like Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, and film scores (his music for The Heiress won him an Academy Award in 1948).
By mid-century, though, he found himself drawn to Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone (Serial) method, a choice that mirrored a trend among younger composers in the years just following the end of World War 2. But by then Copland was already an established composer and his embrace of the system was different than, say, Pierre Boulez’s: “The attraction of the method for me,” he later said, “was that I began to hear chords that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. This was a new way of moving tones about.” Thus Copland made Serialism his own. Like with Stravinsky’s Serial works, Copland’s singular voice shines through his late music much as it does the Populist scores or, even better, his earliest Modernist efforts (like Grogh or the Piano Variations); here’s Schoenberg’s method is truly applied as a means to an expressive end, not as an end in itself.
In his application of Serialism, Copland tended to treat his materials freely, and this approach is abundantly clear in the first movement of the Piano Quartet, his first Serial score. In fact, the music sounds a bit like something Bartók might have written had he lived in the American countryside and not been so battered by all the political and musical whims of early-20th-century Europe. Copland’s row (made up of 11 notes, not 12) provides nearly all of the material in it, and it sounds downright diatonic, especially the two melodic themes which are each stated (by the violin and cello, respectively) and offset with almost Classical transparency.
The second movement is a jaunty, spastic, scherzo. Marked “Allegro giusto,” it’s filled with short, peppy motives that bounce between the players in a sort of earnestly democratic dialogue. For the finale, Copland turns to quiet lyricism: the opening of the movement sounds like a cousin of the “Corral Nocturne” from Rodeo, only a little more dissonant. Again, the music’s structure is remarkably coherent – you always know where you are or are headed in this piece – and the sometimes noodling melodic writing is marked by a fair amount of repetition, including one prominent phrase that sounds like it was lifted from “Three Blind Mice.”
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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