The Sound of a Superpower by Ansari Emily Abrams;

Author:Ansari, Emily Abrams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Indeed, in both their strident dramatic intensity and engagement with “tragic reality” the Variations have much in common with Connotations: both works experiment with serialism, and Connotations even quotes the Variations, as does Emblems.46 Copland’s decision to reference this youthful piece in later compositions might even suggest an effort, either conscious or subconscious, to draw connections across the decades, effectively demonstrating that his aesthetic and political preoccupations remained largely unchanged.

Copland’s later descriptions of his reasons for adopting and then abandoning a self-conscious Americanism are also telling. By the 1970s, he seems to have been quite comfortable with the fact that the heyday of musical Americanism, from which he had benefited so greatly, was now firmly in the past. He did not present this situation as tragic. Two interviews from this decade give a glimpse of his unsentimental assessment of musical Americanism as simply one phase in his career—and in American music history. The first is a conversation with Donal Henahan of the New York Times in which Copland said that although he had initially had some misgivings about the widespread turn to serialism after World War II, he realized later that musical Americanism had simply run its course. Overt Americanism was no longer necessary, he explained, because he and others had achieved their goal of establishing the United States as an important contributor to Western art music composition. As a result, Copland said, he was no longer “American-music conscious”:

That’s a thing that doesn’t exist any more. It was a need we had, some of us, anyway, to assert America’s place in the arts, as Paul Rosenfeld was always saying, that’s just all gone up in smoke. We haven’t given up anything just because somebody else came in and took over. You couldn’t go back to that kind of American need, I don’t think. Times change.47

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