Copland recognized the year 1939 as concluding an epoch of experiment in modern music. This was initiated, he asserts, at the end of the nineteenth century, and passed by way of Mussorgskian realism, French impressionism, embracing, to a certain extent, the traditionalism imposed by Strauss, Scriabine, Sibelius and others. The period includes the expressionist audacity of a Schönberg and a Satie, the dynamism of an early Strawinsky, the politonality of a Bartók (prior to 1908), and flows finally into the complexities of the post-(1914–18) war world. It is precisely during this epilogue that the young Copland himself emerges as a personality, at the disadvantage, on the one hand, of not having taken part in the first acts of the drama, and enjoying, on the other, all the advantages of not having been a protagonist in so involved a historical process. Moreover, his own country, from the time of his birth in a grey Brooklyn street, had followed a scarcely less complicated course.

The position of Aaron Copland as the dominant figure in contemporary American music has now won fairly widespread recognition over here; but the recognition does not depend on any very extensive knowledge of his works. It is general rather than specific; and indeed on the few occasions when his more important works have been played over here, they have been accorded a somewhat unsympathetic reception. Unlike most English critics, I happen to find Copland's music congenial and appealing. It is for this reason that I feel I may be able to make a few points about the nature and significance of his achievement that seem to have been, in this country, overlooked. I shall confine my attention to the two recent sonatas—for piano and for violin and piano—because they are relatively accessible and quotable, and because they are completely representative and amongst the most concentrated and mature of his works.

Aaron Copland's Third Symphony, completed in 1946 after some two years of concentrated labour, comes at the end of more than a decade during which his orchestral efforts were either in response to commissions in the field of ballet (Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring) or cinema (Our Town), contrived to underline spoken text (Lincoln Portrait) or transmit impressions of travel (El Salón México, Danzón Cubano) or otherwise restricted by exterior factors (e.g., Second Hurricane and Outdoor Overture, intended for performance by school children). The degree to which he maintained his integrity and the quality and self-subsistence of his music through all these pièces d'occasion is quite astonishing. But it is, all the same, highly gratifying, and in the realm of the most notable musical occurrences, that he has finally found the leisure (through a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation) to write a full-length symphony (some forty minutes in duration), a work that has not, either in seriousness or dimension, been obliged to compromise in the slightest with an impresario or any other demands of an occasion or dramatic situation.