Any opportunity to spend time with Aaron Copland is always a pleasure. Here’s a 28-minute interview I had not seen before, conducted by James Day in 1973. The subject at about 23 minutes in is particularly prescient and gives one pause when one considers this conversation took place 50 years ago!
JAMES DAY: It’s interesting that while we’re developing this new, highly-challenging idiom, which does require attention, concentration, a real depth of interest, we’ve also developed electronic mechanisms to feed music into our ears 24 hours a day. Where primitive man perhaps had to listen to stay alive, modern man almost has to non-listen, stop listen, unlisten, I don’t know what the word is. This must affect the performance of music, if we are being conditioned not to give our full attention.
COPLAND: Yes, I regret that very much. I wish that when people are not in the mood to listen to music that they would turn the darn thing off, because that kind of casual bathing in musical sounds without listening to it, that’s not at all the composer’s idea. If you want to really listen to what he has to say, listen. Otherwise, forget it. Don’t just let it on there like wallpaper on a wall that just is around you because it kind of makes a pleasant sound.
If Copland had lived into the age of YouTube, Spotify, and earbuds, his head would have exploded.
I hadn’t intended to watch the full interview over breakfast, but I found it most enjoyable. Not a lot new, perhaps, for Copland enthusiasts, but always worthwhile. The full conversation is available here:
Happy birthday, Aaron Copland!
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