MUSIC CHRONICLE
189
were needed to balance Copland's idiom of the
Variations;
and the
impetus to acquire these attributes in a music to satisfy a more popular
demand may have transferred itself in a modified form to the separate
plane of his serious music where they are represented in quite a different
way. Thus, while the
J!
arialions
remains an admirable work, the
Sonata
surpasses it precisely in this new resonance and melodic warmth which
now offset the dark atmosphere of prophecy and the contrasting nervous
athleticism which are common to both works.
If,
like Stravinsky, Copland is capable of absorbing. so much of
what in literature would correspond to the colloquial, without the music
itself losing dignity or sophistication,
3
it is because of that early concern
with purification and structure which gave him the reputation for severity.
Platitude is not simply paraphrased (as in the Roy Harris
"Folk Soni'
Spnphony)
but recast to fit into a significant form (even in
El Salon
Mexico
and the new
Piece on
Cuban Themes) .
Whatever cliche he seizes
upon-a cowboy ditty, a Spanish turn, a New England hymn-is trans–
formed into an unmistakably Coplandesque configuration. The degree
to which his formal methods have crystallized is, indeed, sometimes as
.disturbing as it is admirable. They ought, rather, still to be in flux.
For, though his musical structure has advanced to a remarkable point
in
consideration of the tradition from which it departed, and though it
is
outstanding for its perfection as far as it ventures, it is capable of
further growth towards the inclusion of a greater number of elements.
A direction for this growth is pointed by some of the younger men
today, like David Diamond and Harold Shapero, who reflect the Copland
of the late 'twenties in their ardent preoccupation with form and refine–
ment of technique (while another of the younger men, William Schuman,
sways critics and audiences with a music of unquestionable power but
surprisingly naive structural conception).
Copland's and a still older generation had accomplished the levelling
off of the effusive remnants of Wagnerian hysteria and Impressionist
revery. But Diamond and Shapero (as represented in a
Concerto for
Two Solo Pianos
and a
Violin Sonata)
•
show an awareness of a necessity
for building up the thinned-out musical medium with more genuine
substance. Once Copland had ar.rived at a skeletonized music he remained
fairly faithful to
it
since it satisfied a certain romantic desire for a highly
personalized expression in which so many notes had to be excluded
because they were not completely his own--even the common stock of
'It
is, of course, to be admitted that Copland does, in rare instances, fail to go
beyond mere uncritical reproduction, as in the slow middle part of
El Salon Mexico
where one passage creates the illusion of listening to almost any competent Mexican
band-as
if
the composer were saving his ideas for the brilliant long line of the
fast closing section. This is not true of Stravinsky. Compare, for example,
leu de
Ctutes
where the only instance of almost exact repetition of the object alluded to
(a reference to Rossini) has an obviously ironic intent.
"The
Concerto
of Diamond was performed by Bartlett and Robertson at the
Kaufman Auditorium of the YMHA. The Shapero
Violin. Sonata
has not been given
in
New York up to the date of writing.
