Aaron Copland – Music and Imagination (book!)

To start with, while I don’t think anyone in this course would find this idea particularly odd, there are those out there that seem to, so I will quote the dead comedian, Bill Hicks:

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last week and after the show, I went to this waffle house … I’m eating, and reading a book and the waitress comes over to me and says ‘tsk tsk tsk! Whatchu readin’ fer?’ I said ‘wow! I’ve never been asked that. Not “what am I reading?” but “what am I reading for?” Well God damnit, you stumped me. I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but the main one is so that I don’t end up being a f**cking waffle waitress. Yeah, that’d be real high on the list.’ Then this trucker in the next booth gets up and stands over me and says ‘weelll, looks like we got ourselves a reader!’ and I was like ‘what the f**ck is going on?’ it was like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume. What, am I stepping out of some kind of intellectual closet here? I read, ok, there, I said it! I feel better…

Okay, so maybe that’s not the most appropriate quote for an academically inspired web log, but it’s perhaps more apt than some realise. How many times do I hear “books? who reads those anymore?” each day? Well, not many, but I can assure you, I hear it at least a few times per week. From students, as often as not, be they University level or high school level makes very little difference. People just don’t read anymore.

So, I thought I’d make a post about a book that I have read in the last week or so that relates very well to this here course, and as proof that I do do things other than not do listening studies to further my understanding of music.

So, this book, Music and Imagination, is a collection of lectures given by Aaron Copland when he was instated as a Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, back in 1951. It covers a lot of ideas, including some more abstract ones regarding the spirit of the thing itself (which I superimposed from another book that I am reading called The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi); some views and opinions on Stravinsky, Schoenberg and various other composers, on the art of composition itself and what it meant for American cultural identity (something Australia needs to catch up on) and various other things.

What did I get out of it? Well, a sense of hope, ironically enough, that Australia will not always be the cultural wasteland that it is now. America did not seem to get much musical identity until Jazz came around, and that was a few hundred years after its inception, so it stands to reason that soon, Australia will forge ahead and do something new… assuming that people can start caring about such things.

Copland also deals with the imaginative mind, both as listener and as composer and musician, and how they are all related.

Good read, recommended by yours truly.

– Vin