The pleasures of music

e Pleasures of Music

By Aaron Copland

An address at the University of New Hampshire
April 16, 1959

■SI.7TBP a "l

The Pleasures of Music

By Aaron Copland

An address at the University of New Hampshire
April 16, 1959

This address was one of a Distinguished Lec-
ture Series, established in 1957 at the University
of New Hampshire to bring to the campus the most
distinguished men of letters, arts, sciences, and
public affairs. The lecturers were asked to prepare
a special address for the occasion, and in addition
to remain on the campus for two days to meet with
classes in their own fields and to talk informally
with faculty and students.

Since the series was established the following
have lectured: Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mum-
ford, Willard F. Libby, Aldous Huxley, Erich
Fromm, Hermann J. Muller, Clarence B. Randall,
Dean Acheson, Margaret Mead, Aaron Copland,
and Oliver C. Carmichael.

MUSIC LIBRARY.

f

Published by the University of New Hampshire
July, 1959

The Pleasures of Music

By Aaron Copland

JL ERHAPS I had better begin by explaining that I think of
myself as a composer of music and not as a writer about
music. This distinction may not seem important to you,
especially when I admit to having published several books
on the subject. But to me the distinction is paramount be-
cause I know that if I were a writer I would be bubbling
over with word-ideas about the art I practice, instead of
which my mind — and not my mind only but my whole physi-
cal being — vibrates to the stimulus of sound waves pro-
duced by instruments sounding alone or together. Why this
is so I cannot tell you, but I can assure you it is so. Re-
membering then that I am primarily a composer and not a
writer, I shall examine my subject mostly from the com-
poser's standpoint in order to share with others, insofar as
that is possible, the varied pleasures to be derived from ex-
periencing music as an art.

That music gives pleasure is axiomatic. Because that is
so, the pleasures of music as a subject for discussion may
seem to some of you a rather elementary dish to place be-
fore so knowing an audience. But I think you will agree
that the source of that pleasure, our musical instinct, is not
at all elementary; it is, in fact, one of the prime puzzles
of consciousness. Why is it that sound waves, when they
strike the ear, cause "volleys of nerve impulses to flow up
into the brain", resulting in a pleasurable sensation? More
than that, why is it that we are able to make sense out of
these "volleys of nerve signals" so that we emerge from
engulfment in the orderly presentation of sound stimuli
as if we had lived through a simulacrum of life, the in-
stinctive life of the emotions? And why, when safely seated
and merely listening, should our hearts beat faster, our
temperature rise, our toes start tapping, our minds start
racing after the music, hoping it will go one way and watch-
ing it go another, deceived and disgruntled when we are
unconvinced, elated and grateful when we acquiesce?

We have a part answer, I suppose, in that the physical
nature of sound has been thoroughly explored; but the phe-
nomenon of music as an expressive, communicative agency
remains as inexplicable as ever it was. We musicians don't
ask for much. All we want is to have one investigator tell
us why this young fellow seated in row A is firmly held
by the musical sounds he hears while his girl friend gets
little or nothing out of them, or vice versa. Think how many
millions of useless practice hours might have been saved
if some alert professor of genetics had developed a test
for musical sensibility. The fascination of music for some
human beings was curiously illustrated for me once during
a visit I made to the showrooms of a manufacturer of elec-
tronic organs. As part of my tour I was taken to see the
practice room. There, to my surprise, I found not one but
eight aspiring organists, all busily practicing simultaneous-

2

ly on eight organs. More surprising still was the fact that
not a sound was audible, for all eight performers were listen-
ing through earphones to their individual instrument. It
was an uncanny sight, even for a fellow musician, to watch
these grown men mesmerized, as it were, by a silent and in-
visible genie. On that day I fully realized how mesmerized
we ear-minded creatures must seem to our less musically-
inclined friends.

If music has impact for the mere listener, it follows that
it will have much greater impact for those who sing it or
play it themselves with some degree of proficiency. Any
educated person in Elizabethan times was expected to be
able to read musical notation and take his or her part in
a madrigal-sing. Passive listeners, numbered in the millions,
are a comparatively recent innovation. Even in my own
youth, loving music meant that you either made it your-
self, or you were forced out of the house to go hear it where
it was being made, at considerable cost and some incon-
venience. Nowadays all that has changed. Music has be-
come so very accessible that it is almost impossible to
avoid it. Perhaps you don't mind cashing a check at the
local bank to the strains of a Brahms symphony, but I do.
Actually, I think I spend as much time avoiding great works
as others spend in seeking them out. The reason is simple:
meaningful music demands one's undivided attention, and
I can give it that only when I am in a receptive mood, and
feel the need for it. The use of music as a kind of am-
brosia to titillate the aural senses while one's conscious mind
is otherwise occupied is the abomination of every composer
who takes his work seriously.

Thus, the music I have reference to in this talk is de-
signed for your undistracted attention. It is, in fact, usual-
ly labelled "serious" music in contradistinction to light or
popular music. How this term "serious" came into being
no one seems to know, but all of us are agreed as to its

3

inadequacy. It just doesn't cover enough cases. Very often
our "serious" music is serious, sometimes deadly serious,
but it can also be witty, humorous, sarcastic, sardonic, gro-
tesque, and a great many other things besides. It is, indeed,
the emotional range covered which makes it "serious" and,
in part, influences our judgement as to the artistic stature
of any extended composition.

Everyone is aware that so-called serious music has made
great strides in general public acceptance in recent years,
but the term itself still connotes something forbidding and
hermetic to the mass audience. They attribute to the profes-
sional musician a kind of masonic initiation into secrets
that are forever hidden from the outsider. Nothing could be
more misleading. We all listen to music, professionals and
non-professionals alike, in the same sort of way — in a
dumb sort of way, really, because simple or sophisticated
music attracts all of us, in the first instance, on the primor-
dial level of sheer rhythmic and sonic appeal. Musicians
are flattered, no doubt, by the deferential attitude of the
layman in regard to what he imagines to be our secret un-
derstanding of music. But in all honesty we musicians know
that in the main we listen basically as others do, because
music hits us with an immediacy that we recognize in the
reactions of the most simple-minded of music listeners.

It is part of my thesis that music, unlike the other arts,
with the possible exception of dancing, gives pleasure si-
multaneously on the lowest and highest levels of apprehen-
sion. All of us, for example, can understand and feel the
joy of being carried forward by the flow of music. Our love
of music is bound up with its forward motion; nonetheless
it is precisely the creation of that sense of flow, its inter-
relation with and resultant effect upon formal structure,
that calls forth high intellectual capacities of a composer,
and offers keen pleasures for listening minds. Music's in-
cessant movement forward exerts a double and contradic-

4

tory fascination: on the one hand it appears to be immo-
bilizing time itself by filling out a specific temporal space,
while generating at the same moment the sensation of flow-
ing past us with all the pressure and sparkle of a great
river. To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping
of time itself, incredible and inconceivable. Only a catas-
trophe of some sort produces such a break in the musical
discourse during a public performance. Musicians are, of
course, hardened to such interruptions during rehearsal peri-
ods, but they don't relish them. The public, at such times,
look on, unbelieving. I have seen this demonstrated each
summer at Tanglewood during the open rehearsals of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra. Large audiences gather each
week, I am convinced, for the sole pleasure of living through
that awe-full moment when the conductor abruptly stops the
music. Something went wrong; no one seems to know what
or why, but it stopped the music's flow, and a shock of recog-
nition runs through the entire crowd. That is what they came
for, though they may not realize it — that, and the pleas-
ure of hearing the music's flow resumed, which lights up
the public countenance with a kind of all's-right-with-the-
world assurance. Clearly, audience enjoyment is inherent
in the magnetic forward pull of the music; but to the more
enlightened listener this time-filling forward drive has full-
est meaning only when accompanied by some conception
as to where it is heading, what musico-psychological ele-
ments are helping to move it to its destination, and what
formal architectural satisfactions will have been achieved
on its arriving there.

Musical flow is largely the result of musical rhythm, and
the rhythmic factor in music is certainly a key element that
has simultaneous attraction on more than one level. To
some African tribes rhythm is music; they have little
more. But what rhythm it is! Listening to it casually, one
might never get beyond the ear-splitting poundings, but act-

5

ually a trained musician's ear is needed to disengage its
polyrhythmic intricacies. Minds that conceive such rhythms
have their own sophistication; it seems inexact and even
unfair to call them primitive. By comparison our own in-
stinct for rhythmic play seems only mild in interest, need-
ing reinvigoration from time to time.

It was because the ebb of rhythmic invention was com-
paratively low in late nineteenth century European music
that Stravinsky was able to apply what I once termed "a
rhythmic hypodermic" to Western music. His shocker of
1913, "The Rite of Spring," a veritable rhythmic mon-
strosity to its first hearers, has now become a standard item
of the concert repertory. This indicates the progress that
has been made in the comprehension and enjoyment of
rhythmic complexities that nonplussed our grandfathers.
And the end is by no means in sight. Younger composers
have taken us to the very limit of what the human hand can
perform and have gone even beyond what the human ear
can grasp in rhythmic differentiation. Sad to say, there is
a limit, dictated by what nature has supplied us with in
the way of listening equipment. But within those limits
there are large areas of rhythmic life still to be explored,
rhythmic forms never dreamt of by composers of the march
or the mazurka.

In so saying I do not mean to minimize the rhythmic in-
genuities of past eras. The wonderfully subtle rhythms of
the anonymous composers of the late fourteenth century,
only recently deciphered; the delicate shadings of oriental
rhythms; the carefully contrived speech-based rhythms of
the composers of Tudor England; and bringing things closer
to home, the improvised wildness of jazz-inspired rhythms
— all these and many more must be rated, certainly, as
prime musical pleasures.

Tone color is another basic element in music that may
be enjoyed on various levels of perception from the most

6

naive to the most cultivated. Even children have no diffi-
culty in recognizing the difference between the tonal profile
of a flute and a trombone. The color of certain instruments
holds an especial attraction for certain people. I myself
have always had a weakness for the sound of eight French
horns playing in unison. Their rich, golden, legendary son-
ority transports me. Some present-day European composers
seem to be having a belated love affair with the vibraphone.
An infinitude of possible color combinations are available
when instruments are mixed, especially when combined in
that wonderful contraption, the orchestra of symphonic pro-
portions. The art of orchestration, needless to say, holds end-
less fascination for the practicing composer, being part sci-
ence and part inspired guess-work.

As a composer I get great pleasure from cooking up
tonal combinations. Over the years I have noted that no
element of the composer's art mystifies the layman more
than this ability to conceive mixed instrumental colors. But
remember that before we mix them we hear them in terms
of their component parts. If you examine an orchestral score
you will note that composers place their instruments on the
page in family groups: reading from top to bottom it is
customary to list the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion,
and the strings, in that order. Modern orchestral practice
often juxtaposes these families one against the other so that
their personalities, as families, remain recognizable and
distinct. This principle may also be applied to the voice
of the single instrument, whose pure color sonority thereby
remains clearly identifiable as such. Orchestral know-how
consists in keeping the instruments out of each other's way,
so spacing them that they avoid repeating what some other
instrument is already doing, at least in the same register,
thereby exploiting to the fullest extent the specific color
value contributed by each separate instrument or grouped
instrumental family.

In modern orchestration clarity and definition of sonor-
ous image is usually the goal. There exists, however, an-
other kind of orchestral magic dependent on a certain am-
biguity of effect. Not to be able to identify immediately
how a particular color combination is arrived at adds to its
attractiveness. I like to be intrigued by unusual sounds which
force me to exclaim: Now I wonder how the composer does
that?

From what I have said about the art of orchestration,
you may have gained the notion that it is nothing more than
a delightful game, played for the amusement of the com-
poser. That is, of course, not true. Color in music, as in
painting, is meaningful only when it serves the expressive
idea; it is the expressive idea that dictates to the composer
the choice of his orchestral scheme.

Part of the pleasure in being sensitive to the use of color
in music is to note in what way a composer's personality
traits are revealed through his tonal color schemes. Dur-
ing the period of French impressionism, for example, the
composers Debussy and Ravel were thought to be very simi-
lar in personality. An examination of their orchestral scores
would have shown that Debussy, at his most characteristic,
sought for a spray-like irridescence, a delicate and sensuous
sonority such as had never before been heard, while Ravel,
using a similar palette, sought a refinement and precision,
a gem-like brilliance that reflects the more objective nature
of his musical personality.

Color ideals change for composers as their personalities
change. A striking example is again that of Igor Stravinsky
who, beginning with the stabbing reds and purples of his
early ballet scores, has in the past decade arrived at an
ascetic greyness of tone that positively chills the listener
by its austerity. For contrast we may turn to a Richard
Strauss orchestral score, masterfully handled in its own
way, but over-rich in the piling-on of sonorities, like a

8

German meal that is too filling for comfort. The natural and
easy handling of orchestral forces by a whole school of
contemporary American composers would indicate some in-
born affinity between American personality traits and sym-
phonic language. No layman can hope to penetrate all the
subtleties that go into an orchestral page of any complexity,
but here again it is not necessary to be able to analyze the
color spectrum of a score in order to bask in its effulgence.

Thus far I have been dealing with the generalities of
musical pleasure. Now I wish to concentrate on the music
of a few composers in order to show how musical values
are differentiated. The late Serge Koussevitzky, conductor
of the Boston Symphony, never tired of telling performers
that if it weren't for composers they would literally have
nothing to play or sing. He was stressing what is too often
taken for granted and, therefore, lost sight of, namely, that
in our Western world music speaks with a composer's voice
and half the pleasure we get comes from the fact that we
are listening to a particular voice making an individual
statement at a specific moment in history. Unless you take
off from there you are certain to miss one of the principal
attractions of musical art, namely, contact with a strong
and absorbing personality.

It matters greatly therefore, who it is we are about to
listen to in the concert hall or opera house. And yet I get
the impression that to the lay music-lover music is music
and musical events are attended with little or no concern
as to what musical fare is to be offered. Not so with the
professional, to whom it matters a great deal whether he
is about to listen to the music of Monteverdi or Massenet,
to J. S. or to J. C. Bach. Isn't it true that everything we,
as listeners, know about a particular composer and his music
prepares us in some measure to empathize with his special
mentality. To me Chopin is one thing, Scarlatti quite an-
other. I could never confuse them, could you? Well, whether

you could or not, my point remains the same: there are as
many ways for music to be enjoyable as there are com-
posers.

One can even get a certain perverse pleasure out of hat-
ing the work of a particular composer. I, for instance, hap-
pen to be rubbed the wrong way by one of today's com-
poser-idols, Serge Rachmaninoff. The prospect of having to
sit through one of his extended symphonies or piano con-
certos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes,
think I, and to what end? To me, Rachmaninoff 's character-
istic tone is one of self-pity and self-indulgence tinged with
a definite melancholia. As a fellow human being I can
sympathize with an artist whose distempers produced such
music, but as a listener my stomach won't take it. I grant
you his technical adroitness, but even here the technique
adopted by the composer was old-fashioned in his own day.
I also grant his ability to write long and singing melodic
lines, but when these are embroidered with figuration, the
musical substance is watered down, emptied of significance.
Well, as Andre Gide used to say, I didn't have to tell you
this, and I know it will not make you happy to hear it.
Actually it should be of little concern to you whether I
find Rachmaninoff digestible or not. All I am trying to say
is that music strikes us in as many different ways as there
are composers, and anything less than a strong reaction, pro
or con, is not worth bothering about.

By contrast, let me point to that perennially popular fav-
orite among composers, Guiseppe Verdi. Quite apart from
his music, I get pleasure merely thinking about the man
himself. If honesty and forthrightness ever sparked an art-
ist, then Verdi is a prime example. What a pleasure it is
to make contact with him through his letters, to knock against
the hard core of his peasant personality. One comes away
refreshed, and with renewed confidence in the sturdy, non-
neurotic character of at least one musical master.

10

When I was a student it was considered not good form
to mention Verdi's name in symphonic company, and quite
out of the question to name Verdi in the same sentence with
that formidable dragon of the opera house, Richard Wagner.
What the musical elite found difficult to forgive in Verdi's
case was his triteness, his ordinariness. Yes, Verdi is trite
and ordinary at times, just as Wagner is long-winded and
boring at times. There is a lesson to be learned here: the
way in which we are gradually able to accommodate our
minds to the obvious weaknesses in a creative artist's out-
put. Musical history teaches us that at first contact the
academicisms of Brahms, the longeurs of Schubert, the por-
tentousness of Mahler were considered insupportable by
their early listeners, but in all such cases later generations
have managed to put up with the failings of men of genius
for the sake of other qualities that outweigh them.

Verdi can be commonplace at times, as everyone knows,
but his saving grace is a burning sincerity that carries all
before it. There is no bluff here, no guile. On whatever level
he composed, a no-nonsense quality comes across; all is
directly stated, cleanly written with no notes wasted, and
marvelously effective. In the end we willingly concede that
Verdi's musical materials need not be especially choice in
order to be acceptable. And, naturally enough, when the
musical materials are choice and inspired, they profit doub-
ly from being set-off against the homely virtues of his more
workaday pages.

Verdi's creative life lasted for more than half a century,
advancing steadily in musical interest and sophistication.
So prolonged a capacity for development has few parallels
in musical annals. There is a special joy in following the
milestones of a career that began so modestly and obscurely,
leading gradually to the world renown of "Traviata" and
"Aida," and then, to the general astonishment of the musi-

11

cal community, continuing on in the eighth decade of his
life to the crowning achievements of "Otello" and "Falstaff".

If one were asked to name one musician who came clos-
est to composing without human flaw, I suppose general
consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach. Only a few
musical giants have earned the universal admiration that
surrounds the figure of this eighteenth century German mas-
ter. America should love Bach, for he is the greatest, as
we would say, or, if not the greatest, he has few rivals and
no peers. What is it, then, that makes his finest scores so
profoundly moving? I have puzzled over that question for
a very long time, but have come to doubt whether it is
possible for anyone to reach a completely satisfactory an-
swer. One thing is certain; we will never explain Bach's
supremacy by the singling out of any one element in his
work. Rather it was a combination of perfections, each of
which was applied to the common practice of his day; added
together they produced the mature perfection of the com-
pleted oeuvre.

Bach's genius cannot possibly be deduced from the cir-
cumstances of his routine musical existence. All his life he
wrote music for the requirements of the jobs he held. His
melodies were often borrowed from liturgical sources, his
orchestral textures limited by the forces at his disposal, and
his forms, in the main., were similar to those of other com-
posers of his time, whose works, incidentally, he had closely
studied. To his more up-to-date composer sons Father Bach
was, first of all, a famous instrumental performer, and only
secondarily a solid craftsman-creator of the old school,
whose compositions were little known abroad for the simple
reason that few of them were published in his lifetime.
None of these oft-repeated facts explain the universal hold
his best music has come to have on later generations.

What strikes me most markedly about Bach's work is
the marvelous rightness of it. It is the rightness not merely

12

of a single individual but of a whole musical epoch. Bach
came at the peak point of a long historical development;
his was the heritage of many generations of composing
artisans. Never since that time has music so successfully
fused contrapuntal skill with harmonic logic. This amalgam
of melodies and chords, of independent lines conceived
linear-fashion within a mold of basic harmonies conceived
vertically, provided Bach with the necessary framework for
his massive edifice. Within that edifice is the summation of an
entire period, with all the grandeur, nobility, and inner
depth that one creative soul could bring to it. It is hope-
less, I fear, to attempt to probe further into why his music
creates the impression of spiritual wholeness, the sense of
his communing with the deepest vision. We would only find
ourselves groping for words, words that can never hope to
encompass the intangible greatness of music, least of all the
intangible in Bach's greatness.

Those who are interested in studying the inter-relation-
ship between a composer and his work would do better to
turn to the century that followed Bach's, and especially to
the life and work of Ludwig von Beethoven. The English
critic, Wilfred Mellers, had this to say about Beethoven re-
cently: "It is the essence of the personality of Beethoven,
both as man and as artist, that he should invite discussion
in other than musical terms." Mellers meant that such a
discussion would involve us, with no trouble at all, in a
consideration of the rights of man, free will, Napoleon and
the French Revolution, and other allied subjects. We shall
never know in exactly what way the ferment of historical
events affected Beethoven's thinking, but it is certain that
music such as his would have been inconceivable in the
early nineteenth century without serious concern for the
revolutionary temper of his time and the ability to translate
that concern into the original and unprecedented musical

thought of his own work.

13

Beethoven brought three startling innovations to music.
First, he altered our very conception of the art by emphasiz-
ing the psychological element implicit in the language of
sounds. Because of him, music lost a certain innocence but
gained instead a new dimension in psychological depth. Sec-
ondly, his own stormy and explosive temperament was, in
part, responsible for a "dramatization of the whole art of
music." The rumbling bass tremolandos, the sudden accents
in unexpected places, the hitherto unheard-of rhythmic in-
sistence and sharp dynamic contrasts — all these were ex-
ternalizations of an inner drama that gave his music thea-
trical impact. Both these elements — the psychological ori-
entation and the instinct for drama — are inextricably linked
in my mind with his third and possibly most original achieve-
ment: the creation of musical forms dynamically conceived
on a scale never before attempted and of an inevitability
that is irresistible. Especially the sense of inevitability is
remarkable in Beethoven. Notes are not words, they are not
under the control of verifiable logic, and because of that
composers in every age have struggled to overcome that
handicap by producing a directional effect convincing to
the listener. No composer has ever solved the problem more
brilliantly than Beethoven; nothing quite so inevitable had
ever before been created in the language of sounds.

One doesn't need much historical perspective to realize
what a shocking experience Beethoven's music must have
been for his first listeners. Even today, given the nature of
his music, there are times when I simply do not understand
how this man's art was "sold" to the big musical public.
Obviously he must be saying something that everyone wants
to hear. And yet if one listens freshly and closely the odds
against acceptance are equally obvious. As sheer sound there
is little that is luscious about his music — it gives off a
comparatively "dry" sonority. He never seems to flatter an
audience, never to know or care what they might like. His

14

themes are not particularly lovely or memorable; they are
more likely to be expressively apt than beautifully con-
toured. His general manner is gruff and unceremonious, as
if the matter under discussion were much too important
to be broached in urbane or diplomatic terms. He adopts
a peremptory and hortatory tone, the assumption being, es-
pecially in his most forceful work, that you have no choice
but to listen. And that is precisely what happens: you listen.
Above and beyond every other consideration Beethoven has
one quality to a remarkable degree: he is enormously com-
pelling.

What is it he is so compelling about? How can one not
be compelled and not be moved by the moral fervor and
conviction of such a man. His finest works are the enact-
ment of a triumph — a triumph of affirmation in the face
of the human condition. Beethoven is one of the great yea-
sayers among creative artists; it is exhilarating to share his
clear-eyed contemplation of the tragic sum of life. His music
summons forth our better nature; in purely musical terms
Beethoven seems to be exhorting us to Be Noble, Be Strong,
Be Great in Heart, yes, and Be Compassionate. These ethi-
cal precepts we subsume from the music, but it is the music
itself — the nine symphonies, the sixteen string quartets,
the thirty-two piano sonatas — that holds us, and holds us
in much the same way each time we return to it. The core
of Beethoven's music seems indestructible; the ephemera
of sound seem to have little to do with its strangely immut-
able substance.

What a contrast it is to turn from the starkness of Bee-
thoven to the very different world of a composer like Pales-
trina. Palestrina's music is heard more rarely than that of
the German master; possibly because of that it seems more
special and remote. In Palestrina's time it was choral music
that held the center of the stage, and many composers lived
their lives, as did Palestrina, attached to the service of the

15

Church. Without knowing the details of his life story, and
from the evidence of the music alone, it is clear that the
purity and serenity of his work reflects a profound inner
peace. Whatever the stress and strain of daily living in six-
teenth century Rome may have been, his music breathes
quietly in some place apart. Everything about it conduces
to the contemplative life: the sweetness of the modal har-
monies, the step-wise motion of the melodic phrases, the
consummate ease in the handling of vocal polyphony. His
music looks white upon the page and sounds "white" in the
voices. Its homogeneity of style, composed, as much of it
was, for ecclesiastical devotions, gives it a pervading mood
of impassivity and other-worldliness. Such music, when it
is merely routine, can be pale and dull. But at its best, Pal-
estrina's masses and motets create an ethereal loveliness
that only the world of tones can embody.

My concern here with composers of the first rank like
Bach and Beethoven and Palestrina is not meant to suggest
that only the greatest names and the greatest masterpieces
are worth your attention. Musical art, as we hear it in our
day, suffers if anything from an over-dose of masterworks,
an obsessive fixation on the glories of the past. This nar-
rows the range of our musical experience and tends to suf-
focate interest in the present. It blots out many an excellent
composer whose work was less than perfect. I cannot agree,
for instance, with Albert Schweitzer who once remarked that
"of all arts music is that in which perfection is a sine qua
non, and that predecessors of Bach were foredoomed to com-
parative oblivion because their works were not mature." It
may be carping to say so, but the fact is that we tire of
everything, even of perfection. It would be truer to point
out, it seems to me, that the forerunners of Bach have an
awkward charm and simple grace that not even he could
match, just because of his mature perfection. Delacroix had
something of my idea when he complained in his Journal

16

about Racine being too perfect: "that perfection and the
absence of breaks and incongruities deprive him of the spice
one finds in works full of beauties and defects at the same
time."

Our musical pleasures have been largely extended in re-
cent years by familiarity (often through recordings) with
a period of musical history, "full of beauties and defects",
that long antedates the era of Bach. Musicologists, some-
times reproached for their pedanticism, have in this case
put before us musicial delicacies revived out of what ap-
peared to be an unrecoverable past. Pioneering groups in
more than one musical center have revivified a whole musi-
cal epoch by deciphering early manuscripts of anonymous
composers, reconstructing obsolete instruments, imagining,
as best they can, what may have been the characteristic
vocal sound in that far-off time. Out of scholarly research
and a fair amount of plain conjecture they have made it
possible for us to hear music of an extraordinary sadness
and loneliness, with a textural bareness that reminds us at
times of the work of some present-day composers. This is
contrasted with dance-like pieces that are touching in their
innocence. The naivete of this music — or what seems to
us naive — has encouraged a polite approach to the prob-
lems of actual performance that I find hard to connect with
the more rugged aspects of the Middle Ages. But no mat-
ter; notions as to interpretation will change and in the mean-
time we have learned to stretch the conventional limits of
usable musical history and draw upon a further storehouse
of musical treasures.

A young American poet wrote recently: "We cannot know
anything about the past unless we know about the present."
Part of the pleasure of involving oneself with the arts is
in the excitement of venturing out among its contemporary
manifestations. But a strange thing happens in this con-
nection in the field of music. The same people who find it

17

quite natural that modern books, plays, or paintings are
likely to be controversial seem to want to escape being
challenged and troubled when they turn to music. In our
field there appears to be a never-ending thirst for the fa-
miliar, and very little curiosity as to what the newer com-
posers are up to. Such music-lovers, as I see it, simply
don't love music enough, for if they did their minds would
not be closed to an area that holds the promise of fresh
and unusual musical experience. Charles Ives used to say
that people who couldn't put up with dissonance in music
had "sissy ears". Fortunately, there are in all countries to-
day some braver souls who mind not at all having to dig
a bit for their musical pleasure, who actually enjoy being
confronted with the creative artist who is problematical.

Paul Valery tells us that in France it was Stephane Mall-
arme who became identified in the public mind as the pro-
totype of difficult author. It was his poetry, according to
Valery, that engendered a new species of reader, who, as
Valery puts it, "couldn't conceive of plaisir sans peine
(pleasure without trouble), who didn't like to enjoy him-
self without paying for it, and who even couldn't feel happy
unless his joy was in some measure the result of his own
work, wishing to feel what his own effort cost him. . ."
This passage is exactly applicable to certain lovers of con-
temporary music. They refuse to be frightened off too easily.
I myself, when I encounter a piece of music whose import
escapes me immediately, think: "I'm not getting this, I shall
have to come back to it for a second or third try." I don't
at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music,
but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously under-
stand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as
unfinished business.

This doesn't resolve the problem of the music-lover of
good will who says: "I'd like to like this modern stuff, but
what do I do?" Well, the unvarnished truth is that there

18

are no magic formulas, no short-cuts for making the unfa-
miliar seem comfortably familiar. There is no advice one
can give other than to say: relax — that's of first import-
ance, and then listen to the same pieces enough times to
really matter. Fortunately not all new music must be rated
as difficult to comprehend. I once had occasion to divide
contemporary composers into categories of relative difficulty
from very easy to very tough, and a surprising number of
composers fitted into the first group. Of the problematical
composers it is the practicioners of twelve-tone music who
are the hardest to comprehend because their abandonment
of tonality constitutes a body blow to age-old listening habits.
No other phase of the new in music, not the violence of
expression, nor the dissonant counterpoint, nor the unusual
forms, have offered the stumbling block of the loss of a
centered tonality. What Arnold Schonberg began in the first
decade of this century, moving from his tonally liberated
early pieces to his fully integrated twelve-tone compositions,
has shaken the very foundations of musical art. No wonder
it is still in the process of being gradually absorbed and
digested.

The question that wants answering is whether Schonberg's
twelve-tone music is the way to the future or whether it is
merely a passing phase. Unfortunately it must remain an
open question for there are no guaranteed prognostications
in the arts. All we know is that so-called difficult composers
have sometimes been the subject of remarkable revisions of
opinion. One recent example is the case of Bela Bartok.
None of us who knew his music at the time of his death
in 1945 could have predicted the sudden upsurge of inter-
est in his work and its present world-wide dissemination.
One would have thought his musical speech too dour, too
insistent, too brittle and uncompromising to hold the atten-
tion of the widest audience. And yet we were proved wrong.
Conductors and performers seized upon his work at what

19

must have been the right moment, a moment when the big
public was ready for his kind of rhythmic vitality, his
passionate and despairing lyricism, his superb organiza-
tional gift that rounds out the over-all shape of a movement
while keeping every smallest detail relevant to the main dis-
course. Whatever the reasons, the Bartok case proves that
there is an unconscious evolutionary process at work, re-
sponsible for sudden awareness and understanding in our
listening habits.

One of the attractions of concerning oneself with the new
in music is the possible discovery of important work by the
younger generation of composers. Certain patrons of music,
certain publishers and conductors, and more rarely some
older composers have shown a special penchant for what
the younger generation is up to. Franz Liszt, for instance,
was especially perceptive in sensing the mature composer
while still in the embryonic stage. In his own day he was in
touch with and encouraged the nationalist strivings of young
composers like Grieg, Smetana, Borodine, Albeniz, and our
own Edward MacDowell. The French critic, Sainte-Beuve,
writing at about that period, had this to say about discover-
ing young talent: "I know of no pleasure more satisfying
for the critic than to understand and describe a young talent
in all its freshness, its open and primitive quality, before
it is glossed over later by whatever is acquired and perhaps
manufactured."

Today's typical young men appeared on the scene in the
postwar years. They upset their elders in the traditional
way by positing a new ideal for music. This time they called
for a music that was to be thoroughly controlled in its
every particular. As hero they chose a pupil and disciple
of Schonberg, Anton Webern, whose later music was in
many ways a more logical and less romantic application
of Schonbergian twelve-tone principles. Inspired by Webern's
curiously original and seldom performed music, every ele-

20

ment of musical composition was now to be put under rig-
orous control. Not only the tone rows and their resultant
harmonies, but even rhythms and dynamics were to be given
the dodecaphonic treatment. The music they produced, ad-
mirably logical on paper, makes a rather haphazard im-
pression in actual performance. I very well remember my
first reactions on hearing examples of the latest music of
these young men, because I noted them at the time. Let me
read you a brief excerpt: "One gets the notion that these
boys are starting again from the beginning, with the separ-
ate tone and the separate sonority. Notes are strewn about
like disjecta membra; there is an end to continuity in the
old sense and an end of thematic relationships. In this music
one waits to hear what will happen next without the slight-
est idea what will happen, or why what happened did hap-
pen once it has happened. Perhaps one can say modern
painting of the Paul Klee school has invaded the new music.
The so-to-speak disrelation of unrelated tones is the way I
might describe it. No one really knows where it will go, and
neither do I. One thing is sure, however. Whatever the lis-
tener may think of it, it is without doubt the most frustrating
music ever put on a performer's music-stand."

Since making those notations some of the younger Euro-
pean composers have branched off into the first tentative
experiments with electronically produced music. No per-
formers, no musical instruments, no microphones are needed.
But one must be able to record on tape and be able to feed
into it electromagnetic vibrations. Those of you who have
heard recordings of recent electronic compositions will agree,
I feel sure, that in this case we shall have to broaden our
conception of what is to be included under the heading of
musical pleasure. It will have to take into account areas of
sound hitherto excluded from the musical scheme of things.
And why not? With so many other of man's assumptions
subject to review, how could one expect music to remain

21

the same? Whatever we may think of their efforts, these
young experimenters obviously need more time; it is point-
less to attempt evaluations before they have more fully ex-
plored the new terrain. A few names have come to the fore:
in Germany, Karlheinz Stockhausen; in France, Pierre
Boulez; in Italy, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio. What they
have composed has produced polemics, publication, radio
sponsorship abroad, annual conclaves — but no riots. The
violent reaction of the 'teens and twenties to the then
new music of Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Schonberg
is, apparently, not to be repeated so soon again. We have
all learned a thing or two about taking shocks, musical and
otherwise. The shock may be gone but the challenge is still
there and if our love for music is as all-embracing as it
should be, we ought to want to meet it head on.

It hardly seems possible to conclude a talk on musical
pleasures at an American university without mentioning that
ritualistic word, jazz. But, someone is sure to ask, is jazz
serious? I'm afraid that it is too late to bother with the
question, since jazz, serious or not, is very much here, and
it obviously provides pleasure. The confusion comes, I be-
lieve, from attempting to make the jazz idiom cover broader
expressive areas than naturally belong to it. Jazz does not
do what serious music does either in its range of emotional
expressivity nor in its depth of feeling, nor in its universality
of language. (It does have universality of appeal, which is
not the same thing.) On the other hand, jazz does do what
serious music cannot do, namely, suggest a colloquialism
of musical speech that is indigenously delightful, a kind of
here-and-now feeling, less enduring than classical music,
perhaps, but with an immediacy and vibrancy that audi-
ences throughout the world find exhilarating.

Personally I like my jazz free and untramelled, as far
removed from the regular commercial product as possible.
Fortunately, the more progressive jazz men seem to be less

22

and less restrained by the conventionalities of their idiom,
so little restrained that they appear in fact to be headed
our way. By that I mean that harmonic and structural free-
doms of recent serious music have had so considerable an
influence on the younger jazz composers that it becomes
increasingly difficult to keep the categories of jazz and non-
jazz clearly divided. A new kind of cross-fertilization of our
two worlds is developing that promises an unusual synthesis
for the future. We on the serious side greatly envy the virt-
uosity of the jazz instrumentalist, particularly his ability to
improvise freely, and sometimes spectacularly apropos of
a given theme. The jazz men, on their side, seem to be
taking themselves with a new seriousness; to be exploring
new instrumental combinations, daring harmonic patterns —
going so far occasionally as to give up the famous jazz
beat that keeps all its disparate elements together, and tak-
ing on formal problems far removed from the symmetrical
regularities imposed on an earlier jazz. Altogether the scene
is lively, very lively, and a very full half-century away
from the time when Debussy was inspired to write Golli-
wog's Cakewalk.

By now I hope to have said enough to have persuaded
you of the largesse of musical pleasure that awaits the
gifted listener. The art of music, without specific subject
matter and little specific meaning, is nonetheless a balm for
the human spirit; not a refuge or escape from the realities
of existence, but a haven wherein one makes contact with
the essence of human experience. I myself take sustenance
from music as one would from a spring. I invite you all
to partake of that pleasure.

23

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York,
November 14, 1900. After his graduation from high
school, he took private lessons in piano and composition
and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in
1925-26. The following year he began lecturing on music
at the New School for Social Research in New York
and remained there until 1937. He has been on the fac-
ulty of the Berkshire Music Center and of Harvard,
serving the latter not only as a lecturer in music but as
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry during 1951-
52. In 1956 he received an honorary Doctor of Music
degree from Princeton.

--&J

Since his start as a composer in 1920, Mr. Copland
has received a number of awards for his contributions
to the field of music. The Pulitzer Prize in 1944 high-
lights a list of honors which include the RCA Victor
Award (1930) and the 1956 presentation of a gold
medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
An honorary member of Accademia Santa Cecilia in
Rome, he has been a director of several organizations
including the International Society of Contemporary
Music.

Mr. Copland's compositions range from orchestral
works such as his "First Symphony" in 1925 to the
Oscar-winning film score from "The Heiress". "Appa-
lachian Spring", a ballet he created in 1944, received
the New York Music Critics Circle Award. He has also
written a number of books devoted to the appreciation
of music and its status in our lives.

WELLESLEY COLLEGE LIBRARY

3 5002 03353 4426

Music ML 60 . C825 P5

Copland, Aaron, 1900-1990,

The pleasures of music.

WELLESLEY COLLEGE LIBRARY