Copland’s Spatial Music

Unlike Stravinsky’s ballet, Copland’s feels less internally driven. Using silence and frequent changes of harmonic material, it continually suspends its own sense of direction. Generally, Copland eschews both transition and that which to which it would transition to. In this way, it sometimes seems that storytelling itself propels development. This lends the music its apparently spatial and explorative character. The ballet, meanwhile, is not enough to quench our imagination of the story, which is motivated by the need to provide what the music seems to lack developmentally. This gives the music an intense evocative power. The tightly-knit themes of the music are very compelling in themselves, drawing in the listener in such a way that she forgets where she is in the music, and tending in this way to assuage concerns about absence of direction in the music.

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