Aaron Copland and the Politics of Twelve-Tone Composition in the Early Cold War United States *

摘要

In a speech at the March 1949 Waldorf Peace Conference in New York, Aaron Copland protested the simplistic but widespread dichotomies that the Cold War encouraged, including “communism vs. the profit system” and “the mass-appeal music of a Shostakovich” vs. “the musical radicalism of a Schoenberg.” Having supported causes in the 1930s and 40s that many deemed “dangerously communist” in the early Cold War years—including the Peace Conference—Copland soon realized the urgency of demonstrating his distance from Soviet musical policies. Copland's first use of a twelve-tone technique in his 1950 Piano Quartet can be viewed as a practical demonstration of this distance.