Aspects of Aaron Copland's Music

Extract

Contemporary æsthetic theory is inevitably becoming involved in half-truths. There is a constant bifurcation of concepts, with one aspect often emerging as a unique value while the other is eliminated. Thus, many insist that music achieves its loftiest aims by suppressing form and concentrating on feeling. Within the category of feeling it is further insisted that only the loftiest feelings are admissible into the loftiest music. Or there are those who deny feeling; and those, like Satie and Weill who, legitimately fed up with the nineteenth-century ‘sérieux a tout prix,’ have gone to the other extreme of music with only the most ignoble content.