Bill Moyers Journal; 309; Aaron Copland

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL: AARON COPLAND

Editor In Chief: Bill Moyers

March 14, 1976

BILL MOYERS: I am hopelessly a musician," Aaron Copland once wrote. He is also hopelessly American. Both music and America are richer today for a life that has spanned the whole of this century. Tonight: Aaron Copland at 75.

(MUSIC)

He has been called the Dean, the spiritual father, the patriarch, of American composers. All those titles for a fellow born in Brooklyn of a Texas mother and a Russian immigrant father. But they fit. Aaron Copland became here and abroad "the American composer." He set out fifty years ago to create a native sound that would express the torrents of the American experience.

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No frontier was off-limits. He was pioneer. Folk-songs and cowboy tunes, ragtime jazz and blues, the stark, plain tones of abstract sensations, all were his materials for creation.

Much of it was go to the moon,

Some of his music eluded understanding. cheered. He went on composing for reasons men to see what's there.. But he has also written just to please the yearning for a lovely tune. The music he created is American to the core. So is Aaron Copland.

My colleague, Wayne-Yuring, and I were with him recently when the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado celebrated his birthday and honored his work.

(MUSIC)

AARON COPLAND:

Try -- try and do it so that it seems to

be growing by itself. Don't make an effort to make the crescendo. It sort of grows naturally. I'd rather have less and more natural crescendo.

(MUSIC)

Watch the stick.

More pizzicato, please in Cellos.

We don't deal in messages. Music isn't that specific. Music is a world of the emotions, feelings, reactions. It can be very strong, it can be very heroic. It can reflect deep religious feeling. But it can't write out programs for the future. It's one of the great beauties of the world, which those lucky people who react to it and enjoy it well, they're privileged people.

I wish everybody were that privileged. I think my music, even when it sounds tragic, is a kind of affirmative of life and of the importance of life. And I would like to think also that it enlarges the listener's sphere of reference, that

--

just as when I listen to a great work by Bach or Palestrina, I have a sense larger of what it means to be alive than if I didn't hear that work.

That is one of the great things about art, of course, that it does enlarge your sense of who you are and where you are and what life is all about, without being too specific about it, you understand. This is an emotional thing we are talking about

now.

MOYERS: Is it possible to answer the question, why does a man compose?

COPLAND: I think it should be possible, yes. You mightn't get the same answer all the time. But I think basically you compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive. Life seems so transitory that it seems very attractive to be able to set down in either words or tones or or paint, or some way some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today. So that when it's -- when it's all gone, people will be able to go

to the art work of the time and get some sense of what it felt like to be alive in this year of 1975.

MOYERS: What does it feel like to be alive in 1975, at the age of 75, after 75 creative years in the field of music?

COPLAND: Well my answer is simple. Listen to my music.

I wouldn't want to translate it into so many words, you see, because then I'd be limiting it. It isn't that specific. The feelings are like feelings are. They are sometimes sort of vague If you try to translate them into words you can't find the words, but you know what the feeling is. And you limit it when you try to translate it into words. It shouldn't always be possible. If it were possible to say it in words, we wouldn't need toneș and paint and the theater, and all the things where people all the media, where people express themselves.

MOYERS: So if I wanted to know what Aaron Copland's life has meant to Aaron Copland, I should listen to your music.

COPLAND: You said a mouthful. Yes, that's absolutely true.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: The arts, in some curious way, essentialize the meaning of people's lives. It reflects in a permanent way the emotions that make up our lives each day. It summarizes the kind of feelings we have about life itself, about the world we live in. It reflects the whole atmosphere of our present time, just as we look to the 18th century works for a reflection of that time. And it seems to me that man's whole existence would be much the poorer without the arts.

COPLAND: Way back.

MOYERS: You once said that I Was that something that was born or "I'm hopelessly a musician."

COPLAND: Oh, I think that was born. You can cultivate musical taste up to a point. But I think some sort of basic feeling for music has to be there. Certainly if you are going to spend your life at it, it's absolutely necessary that it be a natural instinct for you to love music.

MOYERS: Your parents weren't musically inclined, were they?

.

COPLAND: I seem to remember that my mother talked

talked about times when she sang when she was

she was a girl a girl in Texas. But, other than that, it was great surprise to them when I announced I wanted to be a composer.

MOYERS: What did they say?

COPLAND: Well, my father said, "Where did you get such

a strange idea?" (Laughter) But they didn't discourage it. You see, I was the youngest of five. And so by the time I came along he was in a mood to, well, if Aaron wants to do it, let him do it.

MOYERS: You said your mother was from Texas. of background down there?

COPLAND: Well, just What kind.| think her father had a kind of department store of a small kind in a small town. I remember the town of Waxahatchie being mentioned as one of the places where they had a store. They moved around quite a bit took the store with them.

MOYERS: What did your father do?

COPLAND: My father was in business all his lifelong. you know, started as a in a small store in Brooklyn, and then gradually we were sort of the Macy's of the neighborhood.

MOYERS: You could have had a good career, with a father- in-law who was in the dry-goods business and a father who was in the department-store business...

COPLAND: Right, right.

MOYERS: ...you could have chosen a successful dry-goods

COPLAND': I know, I know. They thought it was real strange

that I wanted to be a composer of classical music, so called.

MOYERS: Was there any music in your home?

COPLAND: Yes. My oldest brother played the violin and was accompanied by my sister. And my first memories of music was sort of hanging around the piano while my sister was practicing her scales. And she'd say to me, "Why don't you go out and play with the other kids? Go out and let me alone. You're disturbing me."

MOYERS: Do you remember the first time you said to yourself, "| am going to compose"?

COPLAND: No, I don't. I remember sitting at the piano

and picking out little tunes that fascinated me, you know, and changing a note here and there. That's the first memory of composing. But of course it wasn't serious in any way. It was just sort of a natural instinct.

MOYERS: Why did you go to Paris, and when?

COPLAND: I had the idea of going to Paris around nineteen nineteen or twenty. So I went to Paris because that's where the new things was happening. You see, the old things was

was Brahms and Raeger. They were German composers. And Wagner, of course. But the new music was being written by Debussy and Ravel And that's where I wanted to be, where the new stuff was coming from.

MOYERS: So Paris really truly became your first laboratory.

COPLAND: Right.

MOYERS: What do you think it did to you?

COPLAND: I had sensed that in music we could reflect in some way the life that we had lived, that music needn't be so hifalutin that it becomes abstract and just pure notes, you know. And I was very anxious in some way to express the kind of life I knew in Brooklyn, or American life, you might say, in our serious music. You see, we had done it in the jazz field and ragtime. That was absolutely American. But we hadn't had any American composers --Gershwin wasn't known yet, don't forget reflected the kind of serious music I was interested in terms of our American experience.

MOYERS: What strikes me as paradoxical is that a boy from Brooklyn goes to Paris to Paris to deal with...

COPLAND: To become American.

MOYERS: To become American, yes.

COPLAND:

It’s odd. yes, right.

MOYERS: Did it happen there? Is that where...

COPLAND: Yes. Well, it happened in the sense that Ravel was terribly French. You couldn't imagine him - Pulank was enormously French. Debussy was the essence of France, you see: So I thought we ought to be able to do that for ourselves.

MOYERS: And while you were there you were thinking, I am going to do for my country what they have for theirs in music.

COPLAND: In retrospect it seems like that, but you're making it seem too simple, and so am I. I mean it was more gradual. But I certainly went to France with the idea of those fellows know how to get French music, you know, that is really alive and present and contemporary going. And I wanted to know how. they did it.

MOYERS: What was there in the Twenties that you wanted

to say about America in your music?

COPLAND: I can't say there was anything specific, you know. We were very aware of the fact that ragtime and jazz, early jazz, was pure Americana. And it just seemed possible to do that in terms of symphonies and operas.

COPLAND: Jazz is hopelessly American. And to use elements from jazz in a more what I thought of as a more serious context, was almost well, it was automatic that the music would sound American because there were jazz rhythms we always connected with America. They were were invented there..

COPLAND: You know, some people that we know have a sense of where they are in the world much better than others. They absorb it better. They sense it more than the ordinary guy in the street, perhaps. Something is inside them that wants that makes them want to reflect the important sense of the life that they live. And that I think creates works of art.

MOYERS: While you were in Paris, did you sharpen or change your conceptions of American life?

COPLAND: I suppose the distance created a clearer picture of what I had left. You know, you were three thousand miles away, and somehow America seemed more together with that far- off view than when you were right in the middle of it. it was more confusing. And of course we were very aware, we musicians, of the literary people, Dreiser and Whitman and Emerson, and the American quality in their work. So that was another aspect that seemed to make it possible to do the it possible to do the same thing in serious musical terms.

MOYERS: And you set out deliberately to write music that would be clearly recognized as American.

COPLAND: Well, you are simplifying a little bit now, and SO am I in talking about it. I set out, actually, to write music in an idiom that was 20th century.

SPEAKER: A rhythmic sense. He has a very, very strong inclination toward rhythmic complexity very often. He also, from a technical point of view, loved the. manipulation of harmony. But I mean these are all small points. What comes out of the whole situation is that, after 75 years and a whole collection of marvelous works, he is a necessity.

MOYERS: didn't you? And yet before too long you abandoned that idiom,

COPLAND: Well, I found that it was limiting, yes, that

I wanted to say things about America without the help of jazz idioms if I could -- give something of the sense of the largeness of the country and something of the simplicity of some of our people, and directness of expression -- -- something that I hoped

to kind of find in serious musical terms that would be the equivalent of what the jazz boys had been able to do.

MOYERS: And jazz you used just long enough to get your posture for the larger work?

COPLAND: I suppose so, I suppose so.

MOYERS: Did it trouble you that the music you did with

jazz just failed to find a larger public audience?

COPLAND: No, because I used harmonies that were not addressed to the big public. It was harmonies such as Stravinsky would have been using, or Prokofiev, or Bartok. They were more dissonant, the big public would say, but more not so acceptable, you It took a more sophisticated musical ear to hang onto it.

COPLAND: It wasn't so much the music but, you know, the

that..

COPLAND: ...jazz is all right in its place, but for heaven's

symphony...

COPLAND: ....in Boston. The temple of great music, Beethoven, Bach. What is this jazzy (Laughter) Koussevitzky defended me, you know. I was completely unknown. It's the first piece

ever had played.

COPLAND: And he was a hero. He stood up to the newspapers and the rest of them.

MAN: He didn't speak at the concert, though?

COPLAND: No, he didn't speak at the concert.

MAN: What was the reaction in the hall?

COPLAND: Sort of a shocked amusement, He was shocked.

I'd say.

MAN: That was for Koussevitzky, wasn't it?

COPLAND: Oh, yes, definitely. The darned thing is exactly

50 years old. I said it but I don't what happened in all those 50 years. When was the last time you heard it played?

COPLAND: It's a long time. I've conducted it myself, but not recently. But I can't remember sitting at a performance in a very long time. It isn't played much, I don't think.

MAN: Maybe it's recorded, so maybe over the air, you

know, via radio, it's heard.

COPLAND: Yes.

HÆR: But what The Theater"? what's the enigmatic title, "Music For

COPLAND: Well, I thought the whole thing had a sort of theatrical atmosphere. The idea of the burlesque and the ... and then a sort of sense of closing it all, ending it all on a kind of note that would seem to wind up the show. It had a theater atmosphere in my mind.

Nobody asked for it...

slow part,

Kind of an invisible scenario... \

COPLAND: Yes. Somebody could put a ballet to that someday. For all I know, somebody has. But I wasn't around

But I wasn't around when it was made.

COPLAND: Yes. It would make a little ballet.

I imagine it would be very danceable with those rhythms.

you ...have more to conduct, I really do.

to conduct, I really

Defallo WA: Thanks....

COPLAND: Thanks a million.

MAN: Right.

MOYERS: Aaron Copland's repertoire has something for everyone, from the controversial modern idiom of music for the theater to the poignant popular melodies of "Billy the Kid" and "Appalachian Spring," which won him a Pulitzer Prize, to the musical scores of movies such as "Our Town," "The Heiress," "Of Mice and Men."

But he has been more than composer, more even than the first American to make so sweeping a contribution to the art, more than a restless adventurer exploring sounds unformed. Teaching, speaking and writing, inspiring a generation of composers, Aaron Copland has been a missionary in behalf of America's own serious music.

Beyond his own studio, he says, there is nothing he preferred more to do than quicken someone else's interest in what music can mean.

COPLAND: You mustn't forget that a composer begins with musical ideas. And if you decide you want to to write something, you can't write it unless you get some musical ideas that fit the idea you have had.

Now, if you get a series of chords which seem lovely to you-- they're rather mellifluous, not challenging in any way, and you think you can make something out of them, that dictates the character of the piece you're going to write. If you get a series of rhythms, or whatever, that seem highly dissonant and exciting, and so forth, that dictates that kind of a piece.

You don't pick your pieces out of the air; they come sort of unasked, so to speak, if you are to Speak, if you are a composer, and you jot them down and save them, like gold, for the happy moment when you are going to make use of them.

Some composers are, I suppose, stuck with the style they adopt in the first place, and go writing in that style. I happen have been I think lucky to be able to lend myself to different occasions and the different kinds of musical materials that suggest themselves to me.

I had an interesting experience with the music I wrote for "The Heiress," There is a scene in which the heiress girl decides to elope, against the wishes of her parents, with her young man. And they decide at eleven o'clock at night he knows a minister who will come and marry them and he'll go and get them this is around 1905 on Washington Square in New York. And he'll come and he'll marry them there and then. And so off the young man goes to get the minister. And she's waiting. Now, that's a great scene for music because nobody is saying anything. And yet you can't have it silent. So the composer has a real chance to get his innings in.

She's waiting for the carriage to come by the house.. This is a brownstone house, very distinguished, on Washington Square. And each time she hears a carriage comes she rushes out to

to the stoop of the house and thinks that's him and it always turns out, you know, it isn't him. It happens three or four times. And nobody is saying anything.

So I wrote a very romantic sort of music. She's waiting and he's coming, and da, da, da, da, dee, dee, and so forth. And finally at the climax of the scene, when the final you see the final carriage goes by, she decides he's not coming, she's being jilted. She goes back very dejected into the house. And we took the picture out, as they do, to one little movie-house that didn't know it was going to see going to see a tryout of a film. And when that scene was played and she turned away, the audience laughed. Well, that was murder. The director came to me and said, "Copland, this is impossible. If they laugh at her, then we don't have a story. They won't take it seriously. They don't care about her. You've got to do something to save this scene. You've got to stop them from laughing. I said, "Well, how can I stop them from laughing if they want to?" He said, "Do anything you like, but stop them from. laughing. || Then I went back and I thought, this is a rather interesting problem. Maybe I can stop them from laughing. So I threw out the music I had written and wrote a completely different sort of music, very hectic and dissonant, more dissonant than you are used to hearing in a film theater, certainly sort of modern-music style hectic. And they took it out to another little theater without warning. They played the same scene. And there wasn't a sound in the house. The audience probably wasn't didn't know music was going on. it created a tense and taut kind of feeling around I felt it myself when I heard the thing which prevented them from thinking of it as funny.

It was a very good illustration to me, the power of music of the film theater to kind of control the emotions of an audience, even against when they don't know their emotions are being played with.

STUDENT: TRAH: Mr. Copland, I've played quite a bit of your music from "Rodeo." However, I don't know anything about when it was written, what it was written for.

COPLAND: Oh, well, "Rodeo" was a ballet created by Agnes Deilille, who's a very well-known choreographer and, when she was younger, dancer. And when she first asked me to

called me down to her apartment and told me about this plan for a ballet that she had in her mind and wanted me to write the music for, I said, "Well, I'm not interested because I've already written a cowboy ballet." I had written "Billy the Kid" before. "And "Oh," she said, "this one is going to be different." And she got up and started loping around her living-room, like this, to show me the steps she was going' to use And she convinced me that it was going to be lighter

"Billy the Kid" was a little bit of an epic of the West, opening of the West. But this was going to be bouncier and lighter and gayer, happier. And I told her I'd go home and think about it. So I went home and think, about thought about it, and decided

I'd do it.

- -

And it is different from "Billy." "Billy" is more in the epic manner, you know, opening up the great West. And "Rodeo"'' is just sort of fun, with dancers, very characteristic gestures.

I'm in a mood to relax. I've been composing for 50 years. That's a long time. to say.

You have lots of time to say what you want It would be lovely if all the ideas kept flowing along. Some lucky devils I suppose that was true of imagine Bach. He lived to be 65, didn't he? I don't know that he ever quieted down.

MOYERS: It's a paradox to me that a boy from Brooklyn, from New York City, could have such affinity with the space and these skies and these mountains and the vastness of the West. How did that happen?

COPLAND: Well, I suppose it's a feat of the imagination, you might say. You get it from reading the poems of Walt Whitman, you get it from traveling around the country. I've been to a lot of different places in America, even as a young fellow in

my twenties. And, I don't know, it sort of seeps in somehow.

MOYERS: But you used the term once, "the need of seeking out a conscious Americanism." And in this season of the Bicentennial, 200 years later, I'm trying to figure out what it was that was consciously American in your work then and what you think today about the term "conscious Americanism."

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COPLAND: I suppose the rhythmic life of my music would be recognized by a European as somehow American. That would be the most obvious way it would be American. The kind of sentiment expressed in the music might not be quite so complex as perhaps a German musician's work. It might be more direct in expression. It needn't be, but it might be. That also would -- would give it an American feel that a European would not have.

MOYERS: In the music, "Billy the Kid," "Rodeo," "Applachian

Spring, some of your other works," there is an optimism and a youthfulness about about those works that I like and the public at large responded to. Do you think you could feel, if composing about America today, as optimistic as you were then?

you were

COPLAND: Probably not. Something youthful is implied in that kind of reaction, you know. And after you have lived in the country for 50 years I suppose you're not quite as, shall I say naive or quite as sensitive, perhaps, or...

MOYERS: You know about it, too. A lot happened. These last two decades have been melancholy decades, violent decades.

COPLAND: Well, you could write a very pessimistic piece reflecting America if you wanted to. That's another side of America.

MOYERS: Why don't you?

COPLAND: Well, maybe I do, I don't know. I've written some pretty pessimistic music in my time.

(SOUNDS OF ORCHESTRA TUNING UP)

COPLAND: There isn't a great deal of Americana being written in serious terms nowadays. The boys have gotten very interested in new kinds of harmonies suggested by the twelve-tone method of Arnold Schoenberg. They write music inspired by electronic possibilities that were not there a not there a few years ago. There are different -- they are thinking about different things. They're not thinking about expressing America in the terms that we are talking about.

(MUSIC) Connotations"

COPLAND: Yes. Together.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: Softer. Softer, winds, please.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: Mezzo piano.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: Level's a little too high.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: A little more.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: I like to keep aware of what's going on,

even if I don't I don't love it all, as I naturally wouldn't love it all. want to be left behind in the procession and get -- with the great men of my generation, the Schoenbergs and the Stravinskys

just get left and the Bartoks. So that music is a continuing art, and we all want to stay a la page, up there in the front, knowing what's going on around us.

MOYERS: Is it possible for you to project where American music, contemporary music, is going? Is there any direction to it?

COPLAND: It would be very hard to say. I don't think it's going in any one direction, certainly. I think it has different potentialities and there are different strands going in different places. It's a much more lively scene than it was 50 years ago, when I began. When we had ten serious composers then, we must have at least a hundred now. So the mere amount of activity in the field of serious music is much greater than was true 50 years

ago.

MOYERS: Do you think that the language of contemporary music has been understandable to a mass of people?

COPLAND: Well, we don't ask people to confine their music listening only to the contemporary music. 1 mean contemporary music is one thing and the great musical works of the past is another. The whole world of music is what we ask them to react

to.

MOYERS: But you once said that people tend tends generally to want to be pillowed by the music.

COPLAND: That's correct.

MOYERS: To have the public

COPLAND: They want to hear what's familiar. That's very important. It's the new thing in music which throws them all the time, because they can't sort of get close to it.

MOYERS: Your music ranged far afield, from the simplicities of "Billy the Kid" and the devotional music of the, oh, New England life and the Shakers, to the severe strains that we hear out here. this summer that you are conducting. How do you explain it?

COPLAND: I'd like to think it was a richness of personality. (Laughter) The ability to feel many things, reflect many different things that we feel in the air.

(MUSIC)

COPLAND: I mean to go faster one measure before four-twenty. You seem to be dragging me. Can we do it from two measures three measures before four measures before four-twenty. One, two, three, four. The seven-eighths. Four before four-twenty.

COPLAND: More effect. And Softer...

I hope my music will be a permanent record of what it felt like to one human being to be alive in this period.

MOYERS: Is there a philosophy to all of your work? Is there an integrating core?

COPLAND: I think so. I would like to think so.

MOYERS: What is it?

COPLAND: A sense of affirmation.

(APPLAUSE)_ "Bravo."

MOYERS: What's your reaction when you read that somebody, has said Aaron Copland is the "eagle of American music."

COPLAND (Laughing): Inever read that, by the way.

MOYERS: It's been said about you.

COPLAND: Has it?

MOYERS: Along with "the representative American composer of the 20th century... 'The Dean of American music

COPLAND: Yes, that I all that I recognize, yes. Well, I suppose I hope they're right. But it doesn't really make me sure that they're right. I think being an artist is an enormous gamble. There must be examples of men who felt enormously famous in their time that we don't even think about any more. And they would be amazed to come back and find the extent to which their work has been passed by and forgotten. And, on the other hand, the fellows who thought nobody they weren't able to interest anybody in their work at the time they were alive, come back and find that it's one of the basic contributions in the arts. So it works both ways.

MOYERS: But you've had your share, and considerably more than your share, of recognition and honor and acclaim. Is that a danger?

COPLAND: I don't think so, no. I don't think it might be. I mean it depends on your temperament. I can't imagine my head being so turned it would change my character in any way.

MOYERS: There is a danger, though, in being pressed to try to define too much of what art is, isn't there?

COPLAND: Oh, definitely, yes. And that's a particular disease of the layman, the person who isn't a pro. He always wants you to be more specific about what it is you've done than the artist feels he need explain it. I mean when you explain something you limit it. He doesn't want the work to be limited by so many words of explanation. He wants you to feel it and he wants you to feel it differently each time. He doesn't want it to mean just one thing. He wants it to be full of meanings if possible, and the richer the meanings the richer the work, the greater the work. So that you have to discourage the layman from wanting to pin you down too specifically in what art means. He's limiting it that way.

MOYERS: Can you speaking of emotions, can you you check your emotions when a colleague like Leonard Bernstein five years ago was saying that Aaron Copland's left simplicities, The he's left eat, basic themes of his music, and we miss you, won't you come

home.

COPLAND: Did he say that?

MOYERS: Something to that effect.

COPLAND: Five years ago?

MOYERS: When you were on your 70th birthday.

COPLAND: Yes?

MOYERS: He wrote that "my friend, Aaron, has left us."

COPLAND: I've managed to forget that.

MOYERS: (Laughs) How do you react? Do you just slough off criticism?

·

COPLAND: You always take into account who says it.

If Lenny Bernstein says it he may be in a bad mood or in a particular point in his development where everything that he thought was great seems less great now. That's always possible, you know, and he may be right. He may have exaggerated in the other direction. He tends to exaggerate, anyhow, both ways SI think in the end the whole thing is decided by posterity. You'll never really know how it's going to seem to people a hundred years from now. You think you know. You hope you know. At the time that you write it you are convinced that you know. But when you sit back and think about it coolly, if you're realistic at all, there really is no guarantee. And that would never stop an artist from creating, not a a real artist. There are no guarantees in art. There are no absolutes. Except that Bach has lasted four hundred years. We think in another four hundred years he will still be around. And that's a pretty good guess. But it's not an absolute certainty.

MOYERS: And no one, including Aaron Copland, in print or in words, has ever really said all that needs to be said or could be said about your work.

COPLAND: I hope not. That would limit it.

MOYERS: It isn't without significance that Aaron Copland

and the American century, as we used to call it, came of age together. What a time it's been, from the ringing turn of the century, with its promise of new beginnings, to the tragic facts of humanity that followed, as the era gave way to the steady spread of disillusionment.

Through it all, Aaron Copland has lifted boundaries from

the conventional sounds of music, not always without criticism.

But he has always reached constantly to affirm the power, restlessness and irrepressible hope of the human heart, even when the world around it sighs with melancholy and hurt. The honesty of his imagination has embraced not only the simple pieties of an earlier patriotism but the conflicts and discords of a time in which everything familiar began, to crumble.

Music is poetry a book can't hold.. And Aaron Copland is

a poet whose own power cannot be captured in words alone. Suffice it to say that, at 75, his life testifies that America, troubled, perplexed, and hopeful, still, on the eve of its own anniversary, remains also an affair of the spirit.