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Date: | Mon, 2 Aug 2004 16:59:22 -0400 |
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Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]> wrote about Copland:
>So popular - indeed, so ingrained - has this music become, we have
>difficulty imagining a time when people ran from this music as Ugly and
>Modern. Here's an excerpt from Lazare Saminsky's Living Music of the
>Americas (1949):
>
> A feeble score is the Appalachian Spring: music anemic and
> insignificant. ... Copland cannot forget the coachmen's and
> wet nurses' dances, Petrushka's liveliest. His Appalachian
> peasants sound more like Appalachian Cossacks. ... Now to the
> magnum opus, the loudly trumpeted Lincoln Portrait. ... After
> a short-lived attempt at the grand line, the petit maitre
> appears in all his nakedness. We see pitifully clearly what
> the new dress of the king is. It is the dress of a compiler
> whose loud trumpets try to herald an imposing creator; the
> dress of a master of small deeds who has the audacity to trade
> in things sacred.
>
>The opinion may not be familiar, but the rhetoric surely is -
>the classic whine and metaphor of listeners up against the new.
I'm not familiar with Lazare Saminsky, but I wouldn't necessarily
classify this review as "running from ... Ugly and Modern" music. Quite
the opposite, perhaps. In less charitable moods I can imagine dismissing
Copland's more well-known works as tending toward the triumphalistic and
overstated, with an overreliance on the stratagem of dissonant diatonicity.
Perhaps the formula, so characteristically American in its clear-eyed
optimism and devoutness, has worn too well with countless lesser imitators.
It would be instructive to know what composers Saminsky enthused about.
- seb
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