Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Stirling Newberry:
>
>>Copland felt enormous pressure in his late career towards avant-gardism,
>>in a way which he described as stiffling in a way that he did not feel as
>>a young avant-gardist.
>
>I've never read this.  Where did you find this?

Through out the last 2 decades of his life Copland had an ambivelant
relationship to 12 tone methods - he composed numerous pieces in the
idiom both as a young man and an old one - but at the in his later years
he stated that he felt that the European influence had "come in and
taken over".  He predicted a return to musical nationalism and an end to
"international style" composition.  He remembered how in the earlier years
Schoenberg's style had been considered "Viennese" and he was trying to be
an American.

So on the one hand, new contemporary - in the genuine sense - music was
always important to him, and particularly American music.  He was, after
all, one of the moving forces behind the creation of a Pulitzer Prize for
musical composition.  If one is looking for a clear cut answer on where
Copland stands on the issue, pro or con, one won't find it.  He was far to
canny a politician, and far to broad an artists to become rigid.  He chided
Bernstien for being so against the avant-garde at the same time he chided
younger composers for not being Americans.  He championed his older works,
and pressed for new music festivals of the most radical music, played all
at once.

The turning point was, I think, 1960 when he published his
previous criticisms on music.  One section ruminates darkly on the
internationalisation of composition, and it effects on American arts as
recognisable.  Soon there afterward he began work on Connotations.  He
studied works by Davidovsky and other younger serial composers.  But when
the time came to vote on a Pulitzer, he was firmly behind Del Tredici's
neo-romanticism - which can hardly be called any more "American" than any
serial piece.

That is the best lens to view Copland's statements through - he saw himself
as trying to establish an American school of composition - and everything,
whether 12 tone music, Stravinski or Prokofiev was judged on its usefulness
to being an American composer - and very specifically towards making
serious music pay and be respectable in American terms - which means money.
He stated this in the early 1930's, and I don't see him ever wavering from
the conviction that musical was a communal enterprise, and that composers
needed to shape their work to the prevailing sentiment to get played -
"That's what I could never understand, how he (Ives) could write music
that no one would play."

Stirling Newberry
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