Trail Blazer from Brooklyn

In Manhattan's Aeolian Hall one afternoon in 1925, Conductor" Walter Damrosch put down his baton, turned to the audience that had just listened to the first performance of a new work by an unknown young composer. Roared Damrosch, in facetious disavowal of music that he had nonetheless thought well worth performing: "If a young man of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."

Many a listener, nerves frayed by the dissonances and the jerky jazzy rhythms he had just heard, sourly agreed. But time has proved audience and conductor wrong. Nobody has ever accused Aaron Copland of murder, even murder of harmony and counterpoint, and this week he reached his soth birthday the most-played and most-honored of living U.S.-born composers. From all over the world, his colleagues were letting him know it.

A Bill for Boston. U.S. composers in particular have a lot to thank Copland for. In a way, homely, friendly Aaron Copland blazed the trail for them.

Born in Brooklyn, "on a street. . . that can only be described as drab," he survived the iron classical discipline of his first teachers, then, at 20, took off for Paris and the "encouraging" teaching of Nadia Boulanger (TIME, March 31, 1947). Other U.S. composers--Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Marc Blitz-stein--were soon following the same Paris path.

In 1924, Copland came back to a U.S. that was not accustomed to paying a cent to a serious native composer for the privilege of performing his music; it was supposed to be gratification enough for an American to get his work played at all. With the help of Serge Koussevitzky, then conducting his first season with the Boston Symphony, Copland blazed that trail too. "Send them a bill!" commanded Koussevitzky after a rehearsal of the young composer's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. Copland sent the symphony society a modest bill ("maybe $25, I've forgotten"), and was paid. When Copland told old,time U.S. Composer Henry F. Gilbert about his check, Gilbert clasped his head in mingled joy and disbelief.

Copland was the first U.S. composer to win a commission (for his Music for the Theater) from the newly formed League of Composers, the first to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. He has also collected a Pulitzer Prize, in 1945, for Appalachian Spring, and a Hollywood "Oscar" this year, for his score for The Heiress.

A Flirtation with Jazz. One night last week, Manhattan's musical advance guard gathered in the Museum of Modern Art auditorium to help the League of Composers pay Composer Copland a birthday tribute, and to hear a retrospective reminder of the musical trails Copland has traveled and how far" they have led him.

Though never a composer "much interested in newness for newness' sake," he had worked in one mode after another. His youthful song, As It Fell Upon a Day (1923), fell upon the ear as thoughtful, tender, simple and serene. Then came a middle period Sextet (1937); complex and difficult, its frenetic rhythms reflected Copland's serious flirtation with jazz. By contrast, the works of the last five years, particularly Seven Songs and a new Piano Quartet, led back, with deeper wisdom and stronger awareness of America's sights and sounds, to a white-note simplicity and plainness of expression which sometimes barely skirted the banal. But skirt it Copland did.

Taken all in all, if Aaron Copland had not yet carved himself a niche among the immortals, he sounded like the best composer the U.S. had yet produced.

Now one of the few U.S. composers able to support himself comfortably from his music, Bachelor Copland lives and works in a roomy house at Sneden's Landing, twelve miles up the Hudson from Manhattan. But his desk is clear for the moment, and he is planning some travel. His addresses for early 1951: the American Academy in Rome, where he will act as a consultant; Tel Aviv, where he will teach a master class in composition.

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