Well, dang me. I've just been googling away happily. It's 'the famous Stanton Cottage weekend' apparently (Stanton Cottage being in the grounds of the hospital where William Meyer worked) when Britten and Pears also first met Colin McPhee who was a patient at the hospital at the time and who introduced them to Balinese music among other things. 

Speaking of the Stravinsky connection, there's a great story about Copland's time studying with Boulanger in Paris. Apparently he spotted Igor on the street one day and followed him around (at a respectable distance, so Stravinsky wouldn't notice) for the rest of the day doing errands, etc. When Stravinsky seemed to be headed home, Copland stopped, and Stravinsky never knew it had happened.

Copland also writes that Prokofiev, who would often attend salons at Boulanger's house, used to stand over AC at the piano when the latter was playing his music and bark critiques over the sound of the instrument. "Too much bassi ostinati!" is the one that sticks in my mind.

I think Ron sums up the Copland situation pretty well. When young, I responded readily to the populist ballets. The Piano Variations initially came as a shock, but I persevered and came to love them after many hearings. But how many pianists have them in their repertoires? Rather few, I think. I know hardly anybody who knows, let alone likes them. I see that Stephen Hough has recorded them (good for him) but coupled with American music which is even less well-known. No big sales there, then.

Fanfare for the Common Man has been over-played, yet somehow it does not seem to have been done to death. I think this is because, unlike most fanfares, it contains no clichés whatsoever.

The situation regarding his later works is not helped by Sony/CBS (his record company) right now; while the popular middle period works exist in several couplings with may duplications, the late pieces, which were in a boxed set, are out of print at present. Perhaps there'll be an equivalent of the Stravinsky box to come: after him, Copland and Bernstein were their most prestigious composer/performers, and in both cases the back catalogues have yet to be completely anthologised.

Sorry to digress briefly, but does anyone here know whether our Sir Barrett was named after Wagner or after Strauss?

I fear that the case of Copland is not unakin to that of Rakhmaninov years ago (though admittedly by no means to the same extent), in that most people know him through only a disproportionately few of his works. I have only heard about half of his known output over the years and I have to say that, much as I respect him (how could one not?), there is little of it that truly excites me. Copland was obviously a most important figure in American musical life and will surely always be remembered for that; he did much to encourage interest in and promote the music of his fellow American (sorry for that Reaganism!) composers and put American music on the 20th century map.

It is well known that he wrote Appalachian Spring on the Carters' dining room table and that their friendship, such as it was, seems not especially to have been adversely affected by Copland's increasing lack of sympathy and understanding of the ways in which Carter later developed (he must have had quite a substantial rethink before he paid so fulsome a tribute to his younger colleague around 1970).

Carter's work in the 1930s concentrated quite heavily on writing about others' music and, in those days, he was one of Copland's rather more vociferous champions; this, of course, was in the days before Carter's own compositional activities took over from his critical work.

Obviously, certain of Copland's work is likely to reach far wider audiences more easily than certain of Carter's will do; that said, however, I have never yet encountered anything of Copland that has the depth, expressive range and sheer substance that inform (for example) Carter's Variations for Orchestra, Concerto for Orchestra, Three Occasions, Symphonia, etc. (but that's just a personal opinion, of course).

Best,

Alistair

Please admire my fortitude in restraining a loud gasp of astonishment.


Rodney Bennett, I thought?...

I thought it was Cliff? Or maybe Little?