Serial Copland—Program Notes

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serial copland—le poisson rouge, thursday january 19, 7 pm, doors @ 6

Petit Portrait (1921)

Petit Portrait represents the first piece Copland completed in Paris after beginning lessons with Nadia Boulanger, the influential French pedagogue who shaped Copland’s aesthetic principles and launched his career. I include it tonight because it demonstrates Copland, in one of his earliest pieces, already composing in cellular terms, with tightly organized material centering around a small gamut of pitches. More importantly and intriguingly, however, A-B-E also spelled the name of Copland’s violinist friend from Brooklyn, Abe Ginsburg, someone who the composer described as “rather moody and unhappy with himself.” Copland intended this work as a “supplement” to his Three Moods from the same year—in fact this “Portrait” would have served as the third movement of a projected Four Moods—however, it remained separate, and waited some sixty years before publication. Any deeper meaning to this short homage remains totally up to speculation. Musicologist Gayle Minetta Murchison points to song quotations from other movements in the Three Moods that may hint at a kind of romantic coding, arguing that in this context we might read more into the appearance of A-B-E, Copland’s friend from an ocean away, in the middle of a set that also included melodic quotations from “Makin” Whoopie" and “My Buddy.”


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Piano Variations (1930)

Copland once said, “I don’t compose, I assemble materials.” This seems particularly true with his Piano Variations, reduced from sixty-two pages of sketches, variations composed all out-of-order, to what he later called “a kind of ten-minute monster,” remarking that “one fine day when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place.” Less gracefully perhaps, the piece dropped on the American music scene like a boulder in a stream, dividing listeners, performers and audiences alike. The New York Herald Times wrote, “Copland, always a composer of radical tendencies, has in these variations sardonically thumbed his nose at all of those aesthetic attributes which have hitherto been considered essential to the creation of music.” Pianist Walter Gieseking, who Copland hoped would play the piece, declined. “I do not know an audience which would accept such crude dissonances without protesting,” he wrote. “A work of such severity of style is not possible among the normal type of concert-goers." 

Still, the piece represented a kind of watershed moment for Copland. ”…The Piano Variations had a ‘rightness.’ The piece flowed naturally and never seemed to get 'stuck’… I was utterly convinced about it, and I was not going to be upset by early unfavorable reactions. …I don’t think one composes to be practical. …I was absolutely sure that I had put down what I wanted to put down and that it was meaningful to me.“

While Copland had already built a body of work upon the foundation of new harmonic and rhythmic ideas (even microtones), the spare textures, restrained scope and use of serial technique marks the Piano Variations as one of his most important experiments to that point. "The Piano Variations [is] one of the few pieces in which I did make use to some extent, but in my own way, of the method invented by Arnold Schoenberg that came to be known as 'twelve tone’ and from which developed 'serialism.’ The Variations incorporates a four-note motive on which the entire piece is based. Almost every note and chord in the piece relates back to these four notes.” Copland embraced Schoenberg’s methodology only to the extent that it might help stretch his own harmonic language. “For me as a composer, the twelve-tone method was a way of thinking about music from a different perspective… It was an aid in freshening the way I wrote at a time when I felt the need to change…" 

Copland dedicated the Piano Variations to the philosophical writer Gerald Sykes, who he’d already known for five years and who lived with him during the time of its composition. Letters suggest an intimate friendship with signs of unrequited romantic attachment, and eventually a kind of cooling occurred between the two. Copland wrote a poet friend about the emotional landscape of the Variations at the time, noting that the piece essentially aims "to affirm the world is meaningless, unless one also affirms the tragic reality which is at the core of existence. To live on—to develop means, as I see it, to enter always more and more deeply into the very essence of tragic reality. …it is the reality of our own age and time…”


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Piano Quartet (1950)

Much has been said about Copland’s adaptation of serial techniques, particularly that he did so to catch up to current trends, attract younger audiences, stay relevant, and so on. Copland had actually defended and lectured about Schoenberg’s 12-tone method as early as 1928, and with the Piano Quartet actually adopted 12-tone composition (more explicitly than in the Piano Variations) to his own use before Igor Stravinsky and even Roger Sessions, often regarded as an American champion of 12-tone music and rarely if ever characterized as, say, jumping on any bandwagon, an accusation often leveled at Copland. “It never occurred to me that by adopting a method that so many other people were working with that I was… somehow betraying myself, my chosen path,” Copland writes. 

Beginning sketches in 1949 of an 11-note row and its possibilities, Copland took the Quartet to the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in New Hampshire, to start serious work on the piece. There he met Marian MacDowell, who founded the Colony at the turn of the century with her husband, Romantic composer Edward MacDowell. Copland recalled, “She was still sharp as a whistle at age ninety-two. The realization that she hadn’t started the Colony until she was fifty made me feel quite young and energetic about starting something new as I approached my fiftieth birthday." 

Listeners, critics and colleagues received the finished work coolly. "Most audiences find the work puzzling, some find it moving, others find it puzzling and moving. The audience for the premiere was of the puzzled variety.” Leonard Bernstein, who heard a recording, compared some of it to Hindemith—"Imagine, Hindemith? Who'da thunk it?“ he wrote—but did compliment Copland’s treatment of serial technique, saying, "I feel rather close to the tonal way in which you are handling tone-rows (I’ve done it too, here and there),” and ultimately deeming the work a “fine piece…because you want to hear it again and again (of course, with two or three mambos in between)…”  

Copland went on to perform the work frequently around the time of its completion, and even again decades later at the Library of Congress for an event in 1975. Even if he had a special place in his heart for this seldom-performed work, we may equally suppose that composing it felt like a true labor of love. A mere ten days before the Quartet’s premiere and with the work still unfinished, Copland wrote to a friend, “I should be done with the Piano Quartet tomorrow. Oy—what a relief!”

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Piano Fantasy (1955-57)

Such an air of event surrounded the 1957 premiere of Copland’s Piano Fantasy that the New York Times published a kind of program note written by Copland to introduce the piece. In it he explained the workings of the composition. “The musical framework of the entire Piano Fantasy derives from a sequence of ten different tones of the chromatic scale. To these are subsequently joined the unused two tones of the scale, treated throughout as a kind of cadential interval…” But most interestingly, he uses the article as an opportunity to clarify the breadth of twelve-tone music at that point in time. “As I see it, twelve-tonism is nothing more than an angle of vision. Like fugal treatment, it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking, especially when applied to a series of tones that lend themselves to that treatment. It is a method, not a style; and therefore it solves no problems of musical expressivity. As a method, it seems nowadays to be pointing in two opposite directions: toward the extreme of ‘total organization’… and toward a gradual absorption into what has become a very freely interpreted tonalism. But these are preoccupations of the musical kitchen; audiences have other things to think of…" 

Copland ultimately used the platform to defend his own creative freedom. ”[The Fantasy] belongs in the category of absolute music. It makes no use whatever of folk or popular musical materials. I stress this point because of a tendency in recent years to typecast me as primarily a purveyor of Americana in music. Commentators have remarked upon my ‘simplicity of style’ and my ‘audience appeal’ in such a way as to suggest that that is the whole story, and the best of the story. As a matter of fact a composer in our time is comparatively helpless as to the picture of himself that will be presented to the listening public. Commercial exploitation of serious music, even contemporary serious music, is by definition plugging the 'well-known.’ By and large, performances are restricted to a narrow list of one’s more accessible works… I do not mean to belittle the value of accessibility, nor the value for native music of a certain Americanism in our musical language. But neither do I wish to be limited to that frame of reference.“

Copland worked most intensely on the Piano Fantasy between 1955 and 1957, missing the deadline of the premiere, Juilliard’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, by a year. It didn’t come easy. "I was stuck,” he later remarked. In fact, six years had passed since the original commission, during which time the work, originally titled “The Music Within,” transformed from a piano concerto intended for the complex American virtuoso, William Kapell, who enthusiastically championed Copland’s music before his untimely death in a plane crash, to a solo homage dedicated to Kapell’s memory. Copland generally regarded his piano output in terms of three major works, the Piano Variations, Piano Sonata, and Piano Fantasy. He premiered and performed all but the Fantasy. In a letter to Benjamin Britten, he writes, “The Fantasy is quite beyond me.” The premiere, in which pianist William Masselos presented the work twice, separated by an intermission, attracted a crowd as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. The latter famously booed and entreated others to do the same, though he later apologized (“Not only have I stopped booing—but also find I have stopped being booed!”) even inviting Copland to speak to his composition class in 1977. Critics received it warmly, as did a few performers, but the work has long estranged listeners and remains one of Copland’s least-performed works, perhaps due to the commitment it requires of pianists and audiences alike.  

Bibliography

Copland, Aaron / Perlis, Vivian. Copland: 1900 Through 1942. New York: St. Martin’s / Marek, 1984. Print

Copland, Aaron / Perlis, Vivian, Copland: Since 1943. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Print

Copland, Aaron. “Fantasy for Piano.” The New York Times 20 Oct. 1957. Print 

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999. Print

Links to Spoken Interviews Featured in the Recital

NPR, 1980

PBS, 1973

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