What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland

This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance - not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed. The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation.

I suppose there exist at all times some few men * who have that much magic in them, but words at best will always seem to a composer a poor substitute for tones… Later… I came gradually to see that beyond the music of both arts there is an essence that joins them - an area where the meanings behind the notes and the meaning beyond the words spring from some common source… The poetry of music… signifies the largest part of our emotive life - the part that sings. I used to harbor a secret feeling of commiseration for poets… trying to make music with nothing but words at their command. Library of Congress Archives.)Ĭopland begins by considering the surface contrasts and deeper resonances between poetry and music: Aaron Copland on his way to a concert in Paris, early 1920s. More than a decade before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for capturing the human experience in music, Copland brought to his six lectures, later published as Music and Imagination ( public library), not only the mind of an extraordinary musician but the central concern of his life - the artist’s role in the human family and the vital mutual nourishment between those who make art and those whose lives art touches, with a particular focus on the most commonly underappreciated agent in the musical universe: the gifted listener. Months after Millay’s death, Harvard offered its prestigious Charles Edward Norton Professorship of Poetry for the 1951–1952 academic year to the composer Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900–December 2, 1990) - the first non-poet to hold the post since its inception a quarter century earlier. Vincent Millay wrote to a friend, adding the requisite flamboyance of a 1920s radical: “Without music I should wish to die.”

“Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is,” the poet Edna St.

What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland