Music and Imagination: (C.E.Norton Lectures)

One of the most forthright and talented of American composers writes here of the part played by the freely imaginative mind in composing, performing, and listening to music. He urges more frequent performance and more sensitive hearing of the music of new composers. He discusses sound media, new and old, and looks toward a musical future in which the timbres and intensities developed by the electronic engineer may find their musical shape and meaning. He considers the twentieth-century revolt against classical form and tonality, and the recent disturbing political interference with the form and content of music. He analyzes American and contemporary European music and the flowering of specifically Western imagination in Villa-Lobos and Charles Ives. The final chapter is an account, partially autobiographical, of the composer who seeks to find, in an industrial society like that of the United States, justification for the life of art in the life about him. Mr. Copeland, whose spectacular success in arriving at a musical vernacular has brought him a wide audience, will acquire as many readers as he has listeners with this imaginatively written book.

Review :
Aaron Copland is a notable contemporary example of the 'critical composer, ' the man who can write about music with the same persuasiveness that he writes music itself...Mr. Copland writes about his art with great warmth, intimacy, and liveliness...It is the delight of this little book that it tells so much about his growth and the directions of his spirit.--Wilder Hobson "Saturday Review " Just as the spare, lucid textures of his ballet score "Appalachian Spring" represented a deeply considered response to the artistic and social complexities of its day, so the plain-man's prose of "Music and Imagination" encapsulates the creative findings of half a lifetime...How timeless many of Copland's insights remain.--Musical Quarterly "BBC Music " After reading [this book], it will be hard not to approach music again, or for the first time, with the desire to give it a more spacious place in one's life. After reading Ýthis book¨, it will be hard not to approach music again, or for the first time, with the desire to give it a more spacious place in one's life. More than most composers turned author, Copland is able to give the reader fascinating insight into the creative process in music. With complete candor and with a minimum of the esoteric mumbo-jumbo with which many composers are wont to surround their craft, the reader is taken inside the composer's workshop and while there regaled with some trenchant and penetrating comments on the current state of musical affairs. The essential quality of these lectures is open-mindedness pleading for an equal will to open-mindedness on the part of the reader. A critic who is to be of any use to his readers must be one who can give them the benefit of powers of perception and judgment greater than their own, which will make them aware of what they would not perceive and appreciate by themselves...And Mr. Copland does in fact speak about a wide variety of matters with a composer's illuminating perception, a gift for felicitous statement, and a humor that is only one of the manifestations of an engaging mind and personality.