ARTHUR BERGER
Copland and the Audience of the Thirties
I
T IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE
that Aaron Copland was once considered
a formidably advanced, percussive, austere, and inaccessible com–
poser. The distance between what was considered his very austere
manner of the early thirties and the accessible manner he would shortly
afterward assume was a long one indeed, and it is remarkable that he
negotiated it so quickly. Even within the more enlightened artistic ambi–
ence of Germany, when the masterly pianist Walter Gieseking looked at
the Piano Variations with the idea of programming it on his recitals, he
decided that his audiences would not tolerate a work of such "crude dis–
sonances."
Two more works in the category of Copland's "tougher" music were
to follow in the next few years,
Statements
and
Short Symphony,
the lat–
ter and earlier of the two (I9 33), a work so far beyond the capacities of
the orchestras of the time that both Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold
Stokowski were obliged to shelve it when they came face to face with its
technical difficulties, especially its jagged lines and rhythmical demands.
(Copland arranged it for sextet because of the problems he had over it
with orchestras, and the result has been a truly powerful chamber
work.) Koussevitzky could not even start to consider it, owing to his
limited technique, though he was otherwise dedicated to bringing all of
Copland's orchestral music to light. Stokowski made some attempt to
study it, but was discouraged by its demands, returning to it, however,
a decade later to give its USA premiere with his NBC Symphony. (The
players, he reported, still found it very difficult.) The first performance
anywhere actually took place in Mexico in I934 under the direction of
Copland's friend, the composer Carlos Chavez, with his Orquesta Sin–
f6nica, over which he had sufficient authority to exact the unusual num–
ber of ten rehearsals in contrast to the three or so that orchestras
normally have.
Like many of us in the arts in the thirties, Copland felt pressured by
leftist sympathies to communicate to the masses, and one of his first
responses was to write a song for the picket line, "Into the Streets May
First."
It
is surprising indeed that a composer who, as everyone knows,
very soon afterwards developed an approach that was so wide in its
