He then starts casting about for something else, and the works of this time betray to some extent a lack of artistic direction, even as they show an increase in technical skill. However, he soon gives it up because he feels it emotionally "limited" to either blues or "snappy numbers." Never mind that his own example disproves this. In his first period during the 1920s, he tries out his own brand of symphonic jazz in such works as Music for the Theater and the massive Piano Concerto. Again, they weren't precisely the jazz of the time, but they would have fit right into be-bop. The rhythms in the faster sections gave some very well-known European conductors fits. As a young man in his 20s, he composes a ballet Grohg (later reworked as the Dance Symphony) to an Expressionist libretto by the theater critic Harold Clurman.
As Leonard Bernstein noted, they were the rhythms of someone who had grown up with jazz and American pop, although not necessarily jazz rhythms. Copland had not noticed them before, because they were part of him. His main teacher, Nadia Boulanger, encouraged him in this, usually pointing out (to her) odd rhythms in his work. In the first two, he concerns himself with, among other things, trying to find a serious style which sounds American, rather than European. As Igor Stravinsky once remarked, "Why call Copland a great American composer? He's a great composer."Ĭopland's music, after his juvenalia, falls into three large periods.
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He belongs to a generation of composers – along with Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, and Walter Piston – which not only raised our native music to a thoroughly professional level, but put it on an equal footing with contemporary developments in European modernism. As much as anyone, Aaron Copland established American concert music through his compositions, polemics, promotions, and just plain hard work.
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