Homage to Aaron Copland

Extract

On 14 November last, Aaron Copland, born appropriately enough in the first year of a new century, celebrated his 70th birthday. If this makes him chronometrically an old man, it doesn't affect the ebullience of his spirit; nor indeed of his body, if we may judge from the bouncing elasticity with which he approaches the conductor's podium. The music's qualities are immediately manifest in the man, and they amount to a quintessence of America's positive virtues—which we need reminding of, at a time when America, in self-destructive turbulence, is bearing the brunt of the painful dis- or re-integration of our modern world's industrial technocracy.