Deryk Barker wrote:

>Steve Schwartz ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
>
>>...  Besides, Stravinsky didn't change because he wanted to be
>>"progressive." Or at least that wasn't the main reason.  He changed
>>because he felt he had worn out the style he was using.  He felt written
>>out.  The adaptation of the serial technique in my opinion renewed him.
>
>One might make similar remarks about late Copland.

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.  Copland's career is a good example of three of the
phases of modernism - an exhuberant experimental phase, a solidifying and
classicising phase, and an entrenching phase.

For Copland the first turning point was the American Depression, he joined
the swathe of artists who felt that accessiblity of high art - to counter
act the banality of the mass production, including mass produced art - was
an essential part of a larger social program which included the New Deal.
The post war world came to be dominated by different forces, ones which
eventually alienated many of the earlier generation.

The conversations surrounding Coplands time on the Pulitzer prize
committee are instructive on this point.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn