Details
| Size | | Length: | 690 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 2.2 in | | Weight: | 40.0 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "In maturity Copland stood just under six feet tall, a lanky figure weighing only about one hundred and fifty pounds. He had his mother's oblong face and craggy features, with sensitive pale blue-gray eyes that looked out from under heavy lids with a kind of bemused curiosity."
Industry Reviews
"A Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner or Stravinsky [Copland] was not. But a beloved and important composer her surely was, and one who played a crucial role in the coming age of American music. A book as sober, respectful and finely nuanced as this is just what his legacy deserves."
Boston Book Review - John Rockwell (04/28/2000)
"Personal anecdotes of Copland's private life, often narrated by his closest friends and even amplified by an occasional comment from Copland himself will additionally please the reader interested in the domestic arrangements of an artistic existence. A more ambitious reader or a researcher interested in Copland's music will also find Howard Pollack's opus a highly meritorious one. All chapters dealing with Copland's compositions abound in detail and feature well-argued analyses for each of his major works. The peripeties and transformations of many of Copland's works...are, like many other compositions that underwent such treatment, carefully tracked by the author. We are also given rare insights into Copland's creative trances...and appraised of his close relations with the Hollywood film composers....Important light is also shed by Pollack on Copland's warm friendship with the Mexican composer Carlos Chaves."
Boston Book Review - Marek Zebrowski (08/08/1999)
"Modern biographers appear to feel obliged to write works that weigh in at several pounds; but, length notwithstanding, Pollack's book is remarkably taut and clear."
Fricker
"On Copland the composer, Pollack is invariably lucid, judicious and insightful. His portrait of Copland the man is also fascinating."
McLynn
"Copland's calm demeanor before the committee conveyed an impression of simple civic decency, which is a large part of the 'American' quality that listeners find in his music. But in his music, as at the hearings, Copland concealed his beliefs more than he revealed them. Howard Pollack, in his superb new biography, AARON COPLAND, quotes Leonard Bernstein, who knew Copland as well as anyone: 'He masks his feelings, and there's a great deal going on inside him that doesn't come out, even with his best friends.' Pollack suggests new ways to hear Copland's music that make him less 'American' but perhaps more human."
Atlantic Monthly - David Schiff (01/01/2000)
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