Music and Imagination (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Aaron Copland is a notable contemporary example of the 'critical composer,' the man who can write about music with the same persuasiveness that he writes music itself...Mr. Copland writes about his art with great warmth, intimacy, and liveliness...It is the delight of this little book that it tells so much about his growth and the directions of his spirit. (Wilder HobsonSaturday Review)More than most composers turned author, Copland is able to give the reader fascinating insight into the creative process in music. With complete candor and with a minimum of the esoteric mumbo-jumbo with which many composers are wont to surround their craft, the reader is taken inside the composer's workshop and while there regaled with some trenchant and penetrating comments on the current state of musical affairs. (Crescendo)A critic who is to be of any use to his readers must be one who can give them the benefit of powers of perception and judgment greater than their own, which will make them aware of what they would not perceive and appreciate by themselves...And Mr. Copland does in fact speak about a wide variety of matters with a composer's illuminating perception, a gift for felicitous statement, and a humor that is only one of the manifestations of an engaging mind and personality. (New York Times Book Review)After reading [this book], it will be hard not to approach music again, or for the first time, with the desire to give it a more spacious place in one's life. (Commonweal)Just as the spare, lucid textures of his ballet scoreAppalachian Springrepresented a deeply considered response to the artistic and social complexities of its day, so the plain-man's prose ofMusic and Imaginationencapsulates the creative findings of half a lifetime...How timeless many of Copland's insights remain. (Musical QuarterlyBBC Music)The essential quality of these lectures is open-mindedness pleading for an equal will to open-mindedness on the part of the reader. (Musical Quarterly)