Copland

[ardcarp]

Enjoying this week's CotW so far. I don't know if this is a repeat...does anyone know?

[vinteuil]

.

... no.

But it's grand country.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Copeland+District/@54.3872704,-3.6575569,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x487cca7f51807ffb:0x40cf99eed6cb700!8m2!3d54.4305545!4d-3.389242

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[Sir Velo]

Enjoying this week's CotW so far. I don't know if this is a repeat...does anyone know?

Stewart presumably?

[cloughie]

Stewart presumably?

e no! You didn't get the bottled message then! Get on your Red Pony and ride!

[Serial_Apologist]

e no! You didn't get the bottled message then! Get on your Red Pony and ride!

I can't Cope with this! Someone call The Police!

[BBMmk2]

Great to hear Copland on the radio again!

[ardcarp]

Agreed BBM! As for the other posts.....

[Serial_Apologist]

Agreed BBM! As for the other posts.....

It all depends on how much you like Copland's music. I enjoyed the Stravinsky/Milhaud influences in the early Organ Symphony we heard yesterday, albeit applied with sledghammer. After that period it's all right, I suppose, if you go for certain harmonic devices that quickly become clichés, though I always think that this composer was rather full of himself - attaching himself to the avant garde at a time when there were composers living in America who were far more genuinely avant-garde than he, including Varèse, Ruggles, Riegger and of course the refugees from Nazi Germany. It says something about the state of then-considered "new" American music of the 1930s that it allegedly had the Young Elliot Carter slavering over the Piano Variations we heard today - a work any one of us could have composed using that tempting but creative trap the diminished scale ad nauseam and mostly in one position. We seldom tut-tut the C-words "socialist realism" in connection with Copland's most broadcast bleeding chunks, thinking of him as an antipode to Asavievism and the kind hearted supporter of others younger and often more radical than himself - which, to be fair, he was, boulstering his kudos before the Establishment - and as the most American of American composers, when others including Ives, Gershwin, Cowell, Harris, Cage or Zappa were arguably more qualified. I would put Copland on a par with Britten.

[ardcarp]

Copeland belongs to the 'greats' for me because he can structure a composition...as Britten can....in a way that many can't. One accepts that his post-War harmonic language is a sort of easy listening, but so what? Good for him. A piece I'm extremely fond of is his choral work 'In the beginning' for mezzo and unaccompanied choir. Apparently he wrote it extremely quickly (using text from Genesis...the Bible, that is!) and yet it has an inherent 'architecture'. Popular with the choirs that sing it and the audiences that hear it.

I would add that Mrs A, music teacher extraordinaire (ret'd), found Copeland's popular stuff (Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, etc) a great way to get youngsters interested in 'classical' music.

[Sir Velo]

Copeland belongs to the 'greats' for me

Can I just clarify: we are talking about Stewart and not his brother Miles?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Just to clarify -

Aaron Copland (like a large retirement village for ex-Police officers: no "e" in [either] name) is this week's CotW

Stewart Copeland (with the "e") was a member of popular beat combo of the late '70s/early '80s ThePolice - and hasn't featured (unless I've missed something on Breakfast/Essential Classics) on R3 recently.

[Serial_Apologist]

One accepts that his post-War harmonic language is a sort of easy listening, but so what? Good for him.

Fair enough: you're quite right, of course; in the end it comes down to a matter of whether or not one enjoys the Copland idiom; I shall always associate it with Margaret Thatcher's reading of the Gettysburg Address, thinking that she must have thought it as the "upright", pontifical sort of musical accompaniment worthy of her delivery - which is more my loss than Copland's! And of course we do have the more "radical" works of the 1960s mentioned in Radio Times to look forward to on Friday, which may help change my views!

[Serial_Apologist]

Just to clarify -

Aaron Copland (like a large retirement village for ex-Police officers: no "e" in [either] name) is this week's CotW

Stewart Copeland (with the "e") was a member of popular beat combo of the late '70s/early '80s ThePolice - and hasn't featured (unless I've missed something on Breakfast/Essential Classics) on R3 recently.

[Lat-Literal]

While born over 18 years apart, I tend to think Copland and Salinger. Each born in New York and of conservative Jewish Lithuanian heritage. Each with a few little known Scottish links in their early background as well as being capable of absorbing broader European influence. Each fairly undistinguished early on in life, albeit in different ways - Copland wasn't athletic and Salinger was considered academically "mediocre". Each negotiating around the changes in Austria/Germany from the mid 1930s - Salinger not wanting to be at a meat packing company in Vienna and later tackling the concentration camps before signing up for denazification and Copland thinking in terms of an American Gebrauchsmusik before becoming involved in US propaganda during WW2. Each, perhaps, slightly underachieving in terms of volume of substance and each now understood for all time as being "what America is about".

There is also in each discussion of "the outsider" with Copland choosing to be embraced by "the Establishment" and Salinger becoming reclusive and also discussion of expansiveness. It is the non athlete of the two who attempts to produce the great swaths of America and beyond it while the other writes of stopping children running off a cliff into phony convention. That cliff could easily have been a running into America across its boundary. Some sidestep by inverting it (Ives), universalising it (Ruggles), "ethnicitizing" it (Cowell), serializing it (Riegger) or turning inwardness almost into the clubbable (2nd New England School). But this conflicting theme of limitless opportunity and/or insularity is central to the American arts.

[cloughie]

Just to clarify -

Aaron Copland (like a large retirement village for ex-Police officers: no "e" in [either] name) is this week's CotW

Stewart Copeland (with the "e") was a member of popular beat combo of the late '70s/early '80s ThePolice - and hasn't featured (unless I've missed something on Breakfast/Essential Classics) on R3 recently.

Is there a Sting to this tale?