ARTHUR BERGER
571
appeal and of such fine workmanship at the same time should so mis–
calculate the musical capacities of a worker on an actual picket line. The
precipitous modulations-one of them when we have barely settled into
the main key-as well as a vocal range of almost two octaves could give
your worker quite a bit of trouble on a picket line, where there would
be no accompanying instrument(s) to provide the pitches.
It
was not
Copland's finest hour (but the good intentions were there).
By the middle of the decade the more "popular" Copland that most
audiences now know emerged virtually without any transition-the
composer of
Lincoln Portrait, Billy the Kid,
and the like. Indeed those
audiences to this day usually are quite unaware that he has written any
other kind of music, and some listeners who know this other music have
never quite forgiven him for the periods when he abandoned his less
accessible approach for a highly accessible one. They even tend to view
his more solid achievements with a certain suspicion, wondering
whether the composer of the more popular works could really have
been up to meeting the demands.
NOT
UNTIL 1941
did Copland return to the compositional approach
that most discriminating composers admired in him. We had attended
numerous debates at the leftist cultural groups on the subject of what
Proletarian music should be, without being in any way convinced that
his workaday music was any solution to the problem. The naughty "E–
word," we were told at those meetings, was "escapism," which had to
be avoided at all costs. Even the businessman poet Wallace Stevens, who
you would think would be beyond such things, felt he had to come to
grips with the problem when he gave a lecture (something he rarely did)
at Harvard, "The Irrational Nature of Poetry," to which my friend and
fellow graduate student Delmore Schwartz urged me to accompany him:
" ...the greater the pressure of the contemporaneous," Stevens preached
in the staid voice of a minister, "the greater the resistance. Resistance is
the opposite of escape."
When Copland returned to his more exacting music, he did not aban–
don the practice he had cultivated to win the attention and admiration
of a wider audience, but pursued the two approaches for a while in tan–
dem. Looking back in the forties he defended his appeal to a wider audi–
ence by pointing out that "an entirely new public for music had grown
up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them
and continue writing as if they did not exist." In the forties one no
longer spoke of a political motivation to reach the "masses."
It
was
pretty obvious by then that Marxist sympathies, that were considered
