Content area
Full Text
Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. By Howard Pollack. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999. ISBN 0-8050-- 4909-6. 690 pp. $37.50.
Aaron Copland is one American composer that needs no special introduction. His works have become integral to the nation's cultural fabric, and for many people his sound is the quintessential sound of America in music. The downside of this widespread popularity is that many scholars have assumed his music was not "serious" enough for study, and therefore academic writings on Copland have been relatively infrequent (at least until recently). Most of the few books on Copland have been short and limited in scope. Now Howard Pollack has written Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, a landmark critical study of Copland's life and music-the most comprehensive such work yet published.
The release of this sweeping, richly detailed, and entertaining biography was timed to coincide with the centennial of Copland's birth. This has been natural to assess Copland's place in history-and no work helps us to do this quite like Pollack's. This book deserves a place on the shelf next to Copland's two-part autobiography (written with Vivian Perlis), which has been the principal reference work on the composer since its appearance in the 1980s. The indispensable Copland/Perlis books were limited in some ways by the composer's failing memory and his natural reticence to speak on certain personal issues. As a third-party biographer able to examine Copland's life as a whole, Pollack is able to present a more complete portrait of the composer than anyone else before him.
What makes Pollack's book so important is the breadth and detail of his investigations. Pollack is concerned with the whole of the composer's life, work, and personality. For this purpose he has drawn on Copland's enormous collection of papers at the Library of Congress, which opened to scholars in the early 1990s; this is the first biography (other than Copland/Perlis) to make use of this vast archive. Pollack provides a generous supply of quotes from letters to...