Some Notes on Copland's Nonet

Abstract

When Peter Evans discussed the thematic technique of Copland's post-war works in this magazine in 1959, there seemed every justification for claiming—as Mr. Evans did—that the “clear signs of a new orientation and of a new fertility of invention in the Piano Quartet, and still more so in the Piano Fantasy, make Copland at the age of 59 a composer not only of achievement but of promise”. There was nothing patronising about this. It seemed clear then that Copland was moving inevitably—if at times a little tentatively—into a new period of maturity. The Piano Quartet (1950) and the Fantasy (1955–57) bore witness to it. After the war Copland had spent some time re-appraising the music of his early period (the period bounded roughly by the years 1922 and 1934), and the results of the re-appraisal suggested that the range of expression contained by the early works—a range sadly stunted in Copland's ‘functional’ period—was at last to be re-explored and extended. This re-exploration would, one assumed, be attended by all the technical mastery Copland had acquired in the intervening years. In particular, of course, his new music would be marked by a very special feeling for the qualities of instrumental timbres and for the niceties of sonorous distributions; although his orchestration had already been brought to a highly developed state in the works of his early period, one guessed that the influence of Stravinsky, quite strong in many of Copland's film and ballet scores, would develop it even more and in striking new directions.