Copland‘s music is – for good or ill – forever associated with rural Appalachia and the Wild West. His output is, in actual fact, quite varied, starting with European influenced music (he studied for three years in Paris with Nadia Boulanger) such as the Dance Symphony:
0:00 – Introduction: Lento
6:37 – Andante Moderato
11:53 – Allegro Vivo
After his return to America, he took up the (Dvořák) challenge of attempting to forge a distinctive American musical voice and, this being the 1920s, the obvious source of uniquely American music was jazz:
0:00 Prologue
6:27 Dance
9:55 Interlude
15:43 Burlesque
19:21 Epilogue
Dissatisfied with his venture into jazz influence (and acknowledging that composers like Gershwin did it better), in his Piano Variations (1930), Copland turned back to abstraction and complexity; this is music for musicians…
Variations:
1. 0:55 2. 1:33 3. 2:07 4-5. 2:28 6-7. 3:14 8-9. 3:46 10. 4:21 11. 4:52 12-15. 5:54 16-17. 7:12 18. 7:50 19-21. 8:13 coda. 9:01
But, with the arrival of the Great Depression and a potential new mass audience via radio and the recording studio, the composer made a conscious decision to espouse what he called an ‘imposed simplicity’. The result was the works for which he’s most famous, the cowboy ballets, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, and the simple, homespun world of Appalachian Spring…
0:00 Prologue
3:10 Eden Valley
18:01 Interlude (Simple Gifts)
21:15 The Lord’s Day
… the two patriotic works of World War II, Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, were also written in a similar populist style…
… it came, then, as no surprise to anyone when it was Copland who was commissioned to write a work for the opening of New York’s Lincoln Centre. What was a surprise, for those who expected another Appalachian Spring, was the music’s return to uncompromising complexity and dissonance!
00:00 Intenso – Drammatico
07:59 Allegro
12:40 Moderato, liberamente
14:13 Allegro
16:36 A tempo come primo
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Pantygwydr!
The Art of Listening 