In 1957, Aaron Copland, writing in the New York Times, described his Piano Fantasy as “absolute music.” He declared that his newest composition

Copland seemed to concede that his works of “Americana”—compositions like Billy the Kid (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944)—deserved their own separate category in his oeuvre. But he also hoped to be seen as a composer who wrote “from a single vision,” as he later claimed, in 1967. Demonstrating the tension between portraying a steadfast artistic profile and a sense of compositional versatility, he added, “To have confined myself to a single compositional approach would have enhanced my reputation for consistency, no doubt, but would have afforded me less pleasure as a creator.”Footnote ²

Perhaps Copland could have gone further in collapsing what he called “the apparent dichotomy between my ‘serious’ and my ‘popular’ works.”Footnote ³ Indeed, recent scholarship has called into question the prevailing idea that Copland's embrace of “populist” or “accessible” writing in the 1930s represented a sharp turn away from his more challenging style of the previous decade. Drawing on Michael Denning's work on the Popular Front, Elizabeth B. Crist wrote that “the familiar historiography of the early twentieth century—which so often contrasts the freewheeling, apolitical modernism of the twenties with the radical politics and conservative style of the thirties—obscures a deeper aesthetic continuity between these two decades.”Footnote ⁴ In suggesting links between Piano Variations and Appalachian Spring, Carol J. Oja commented, “American involvement in neoclassicism held firm as the long lines and clean textures promoted within the aesthetic became the basis for a new, more nationalistic idiom.”Footnote ⁵ Beth E. Levy, in her recent study of music and the American West, observed of Copland's Music for Radio that “the kinetic energy of its opening bars could easily be linked to Copland's existing modernist works, but the pastoral strains of its midsection seemed to suggest something new.”Footnote ⁶

In The American Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetics of Copland's New American Music, the Early Works, 1921–1938, Gayle Murchison systematically locates continuity between Copland's “modernist” and “accessible” sides. She does so by placing a large body of Copland's music under a composite Americanist-modernist lens, offering a sort of Grand Unified Theory of Copland's musical output in the complex decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Combining close musical analysis with thoughtful historical contextualization, Murchison follows Copland's own lead to take aim at what she considers the misleading polarity of modernist and Americanist composition in his historiography. For Murchison, Copland embraced Americana but never gave up his modernist roots.

Chapter 1 helpfully locates Copland's budding identity as a modernist in the octatonicism and nonfunctional harmonies of his piano composition Scherzo humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse). Copland completed the work in 1920—the year before he departed for Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. That detail is significant because, as Murchison suggests, Copland likely drew on Stravinsky's music through performances and criticism at home in New York before ever setting foot in Europe. Especially intriguing are the structural links Murchison identifies between the Scherzo and Stravinsky's Petrushka—links that, as she points out, illustrate Stravinsky's transatlantic influence at a time before Boulanger, Stravinsky's advocate, helped introduce new European music to a generation of Americans.

Chapters 2 through 4 address Copland's time as Boulanger's student in Paris, where the possibility of blending modernist and American idioms seems to have crystallized. Murchison shows that octatonicism and rhythmic complexity shaped the “Rondino” (1923) from Two Pieces for String Quartet and the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924). She then devotes special attention to the piano piece “Jazzy” (1921), which Copland completed in Paris. Its jazz rhythms and advanced harmonic practices show its composer to have been “on his way to finding a modern American music” (71, emphasis Murchison’s). And the Dance Symphony (compiled in 1929 from the early ballet Grohg), with its “influences of American jazz and blues, Stravinskian ostinati, and Milhaudesque polytonality” (84), illustrates Copland in the process of soaking up compositional techniques from Les Six.

In chapter 5, with Copland's return to the United States in 1924, Murchison demonstrates continuity between his new American phase and his intense interest in European compositional trends. Composed in America, and containing obvious connections to American popular music, Music for the Theatre (1925) is readily viewed as Copland's first expression of a distinctively American (and non-European) style.Footnote ⁷ But Murchison illustrates the composition's links with the transatlantic modernist style he had already been cultivating. Even Copland's incorporation of popular music in this piece is related, in Murchison's view, to the example set by Milhaud and Poulenc in their use of “the urban folk music of their present-day France” (110). Murchison's goal here is not to downplay the importance of vernacular music in Music for the Theatre; rather, she shows that, like any of Copland's works, it evinces “the conflux of several musical and cultural streams” (110).

Chapter 6, an interlude of sorts, considers two non-French musical and cultural streams whose relationships with Copland's early music have been little explored; the Second Viennese School and Eastern European folk music. Murchison delves into “Poet's Song” (1927), an early twelve-tone work that she links with Anton Webern and calls a “unique synthesis of dodecaphony, Stravinsky, and jazz” (130). She then ties Copland's use of quarter tones in the piano trio Vitebsk (1928) to the influence of the Czech composer Alois Hába, thus linking Copland's interest in folk music to a broad modernist tradition that extended beyond Western Europe.

In the book's remaining chapters, Murchison turns to the 1930s and the music for which Copland is best known. After considering Copland's cultivation of new audiences (chapter 7) and his relationship with leftist politics and mass song (chapter 8), Murchison offers fresh appraisals of El Salon México (1936) in chapter 9 and Billy the Kid (1938) in chapter 10. Murchison suggests that in El Salon México, Copland's incorporation of folk music “lends it a superficial air of simplicity” beneath which lurk “pedals, multiple ostinato, bitonality, the establishing of tonal centers and tonal poles rather than functional tonality, and the exploration of complex rhythms” (205–7). She identifies similar features in Billy the Kid, taking note of the “multiple, often interlocking ostinato, polyrhythms, bitonality, and fragmenting and varying melodies” (216).

Murchison's overview of Copland's music in the 1920s and 1930s is a welcome one—especially at a time of growing scholarly awareness of Copland's transnational profile. As a number of scholars have shown, Copland's development as a composer of distinctively “American” music is profitably viewed in a broader context—one that includes other figures of international significance, such as Carlos Chavez and Serge Koussevitzky.Footnote ⁸ But her study also leaves unanswered several thorny questions about the historiography of twentieth-century music. What is really at stake in attaching the modernist label to American music? Does American music need such a label to deserve close musicological study? And at what point in Copland's career might Stravinskian techniques cease to be strictly “Stravinskian” and begin to be considered just one part of the fabric of an internationally-tinged American—and even, perhaps, “conservative”—musical style? Indeed, Murchison's book contends with far more than its title, The American Stravinsky, suggests. Instead of simply an American version of the Russian-born composer, Copland emerges as a multifaceted musician who was sensitive to the concerns both of a developing American musical ethos and an international musical community.