572
PARTISAN REVIEW
benign in the Roosevelt era, were now being frowned upon.
It
is not cer–
tain what made him return to his earlier manner; perhaps he never
intended to abandon it altogether. But cause and effect are almost never
a simple matter of tracing one thing to the other as a unique source.
IN
1941
COPLAND'S REVERSION
to
his abstract and tougher style of the
early thirties took the form of a piano sonata. I was delighted when I saw
the score and immediately dispatched an article discussing it to
Partisan
Review:
About nine years ago, Aaron Copland added to an "austere,"
somewhat uncompromising style of 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, but some of us were apprehensive of
the effect on the future of the remarkable idiom expressed by the
Piano Variations and the
Short Symphony,
both of which indicated
so many possibilities as yet but partially fulfilled . The Piano Sonata
(1941),
which has finally been presented in New York, is, however,
reassurance of the fact that the other Copland not only continues
to function, but assumes further significance.
If
anything is to be
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 be altered .
An
obliging forecaster of his musical intentions, Copland now advo–
cates a musical language that would realize the implications of
radio and phonograph by addressing a larger audience without
"writing down" and after the manner of Shostakovich when his
"obvious weaknesses" have been discounted, without sacrificing
seriousness. The Sonata may thus be a step towards concentrating
in one form what Copland has been accomplishing separately in
two fairly discrete series of efforts
(to
the actual exclusion of one
of them). For while the allegedly "very severe" style of the Varia–
tions is much in evidence to discourage many listeners on their first
acquaintance, there is also an admixture of the wholesome atmos–
phere of the music for the movie
Our Town
to soften the effect.
The exaggerated determinism of a certain glib school of "sociolog–
ical" criticism is recalled when Copland insists: "More and more
we shall have to find a style 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
