Music Chro·nicle
COPLAND'S PIANO SONATA
About nine years ago, Aaron Copland added to an "austere," some–
what uncompromising style of musical composition, an alternate style
appropriate to "music for use"-music for cinema, radio, schools, and
the picket-line. This new preoccupation was not to exclude other "more
serious" work, hut some of us were apprehensive of the effect on the
future of the remarkable idiom expressed by the
Piano Variations
(
1930)
and the
Short Symphony
(1933) which indicated so many possibilities
as yet hut partially fulfilled. The
Piano Sonata
(1941), which has finally
been presented in New York,l is, however, reassurance of the fact that
the other Copland not only continues to function, hut assumes further
significance.
If
anything is to he deplored, it is that the demands for
"occasional" music stand in the way of the completion of more than
one work like the
Sonata
in the course of several years. But this condition
may he altered.
An
obliging forecaster of his musical intentions, Copland
now advocates
2
a musical language which would realize the implications
of radio and phonograph by addressing a larger audience without "writing
down" and, after the manner of Shostakovitch when his "obvious weak–
nesses" have been discounted, without sacrificing seriousness. The
Sonata
may thus he a step towards concentrating in one form what Copland has
been accomplishing separately in two fairly discrete series of efforts (to
the partial exclusion of one of them). For while the allegedly "very
severe" style of the
Variations
is much in evidence to discourage many
listeners on their first acquaintance, there is also an admixture of the
wholesome atmosphere of the music for the movie
Our Town
to soften
the effect.
The exaggerated determinism of a certain glib school of "socio–
logical" criticism is recalled when Copland insists: "More and more we
shall have to find a musical style and language which satisfies both us
and
them"-i.e.,
the composers who now constitute one another's audience,
and the radio-phonograph public. Nevertheless, it is interesting in this
regard to consider Mozart's confession (in one of his letters) that he
put certain effects into his music to please his patrons (and he expected
approval of these effects to he manifested in a way, moreover, that would
currently he considered barbaric anywhere hut at the hallet,-namely,
by applause
during
the
music
as each effect is heard, just as we now
applaud a pirouette). The merely ingratiating figures in j.\fozart's pro–
founder works do not, however, stand apart as superimposed elements
which aim at quick response.
If
we knew more about the music he might
1
The
Sonata
was performed by John Kirkpatrick at Town Hall in January and
by
Leonard BerD8tein at the concert given in February by the Town Hall Forum.
"'n
an article in the January-February issue of
Modern Music.
187
