Copland

This week's New Yorker features an excerpt from Alex Ross's upcoming book, The Art of Noise, that focuses on how Aaron Copland became something of a target in midcentury cold-war and musical politics. Many years ago, as a young editor at St. Martin's Press, I was asked to supervise the publication of Copland: Since 1943, the second volume of Copland's autobiography. That book owes its existence primarily to the heroic exertions of Vivian Perlis, whose long-standing devotion to new music is sincere and ardent. I never met the great man, who by that time was in declining physical and mental health, but the book's publication was the occasion of one of the most memorable evenings of my life: a New York Philharmonic all-Copland concert at Fisher Hall where in one fell swoop I met John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, and that evening's conductor, Leonard Bernstein--all thanks to the generosity of Vivian Perlis.

Clearly Ross relies on Copland: Since 1943 for some information, but he fills the story in beautifully, giving Copland's struggles during that era depth and context. It may just have been the way the piece was edited, but it omits a curious fact. Readers may be interested to know that, in a sign of the split personality that marked the cultural gyrations of that period, Life magazine, which had savagely attacked Copland as a Communist fellow traveler and dupe in 1949, published his late piano work, "Down a Country Lane," not 13 years later!