Odd men in

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Mellers, Wilfrid

During the thirties and forties an American tradition of art music established itself under the leadership of Copland who, almost single-handed, fashioned an American vernacular in his ballets (Billy the Kid, Rodeo and the radiant Appalachian spring), incorporating cowboy rhythms, black bluenotes and the spiritual radiance that sometimes pervaded New England hymnody. Copland could do this because he was the best, strongest, and most original composer of his generation; but he couldn't have brought it off had he not opened his career with an avant garde work that employed similar techniques in rigorous abstraction. Copland's Piano Variations of 1930 start from the bare bones of an embryonic but also disrupted culture - in particular from the ambiguous thirds, sixths and sevenths of the Negro blues and from the vigorous declamation of Jewish synagogue music, both Negroes and Jews being outsiders in white America. The Variations' strict five-note serial pattern-making might be called skeletonic; yet out of these thin, hard, harsh textures Copland extracts grace as well as gravity, tenderness as well as turbulence. These Variations remain a key work in 20th-century music; in them all the ingredients of Copland's still frequently performed ballet and film scores are already latent. This invigorating work has the hardness of the New York skyline but, being a skyline, carries also a sense of new vistas. The piece asks a question: shall these bones live? And answers it with a painful affirmation. This music's gritty integrity is still potent in the compositions of Copland's later maturity, which fuse the austerity of the Piano Variations with the vernacular of his ballets and film scores, as is evident in the great Piano Sonata of 1940.

The forties and fifties were the heyday of vernacular American music. By the seventies American composers seemed to have suffered what Paul Griffiths called 'a failure of nerve '. Many American composers, withdrawn into university music-departments, adopted Schoenbergian chromatic serialism as the only technique valid for a 20th-century composer. Admittedly, in the hands of a few composers of high talent, notably Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, something like serialism could seem the answer to a prayer; as a general prescription, however, it implied a commitment to orthodoxy that maverick Americans were reluctant to make. Significantly, Broyles's section on American serialists is immediately followed by one on their polar opposite, John Cage. Pointedly, this chapter is the longest in the book.

In a sense, justifiably, since Cage is the most maverick composer ever, to the ultimate point at which he ceases to corn-pose (to put things together) at all. Broyles's chapter on Cage simultaneously evokes the wryly smiling man along with the sounds and silences of his work, from the meticulously notated early pieces for piano - 'prepared' by the insertion of bits of rubber , wood and metal within the strings - in which the precise and often exquisite sonorities are chosen by the composer, to later works in which he offers no more than a set of verbal instructions conditioned by Zen and the throwing of dice. Broyles seems to accept Cage's conviction that to release sounds from human will and choice is to enter paradise: though surely that is true only if one regards the abnegation of will as in itself a virtuous act, rather than as a relinquishment of responsibility. Still, after all those serious serialists in the previous chapter), I was prepared to admit that randomness may be a blessing and silence a boon.