The Aaron Copland listening experience was a highly enjoyable one. It did push the limits of the concept of "every song on every album in order." Composers are different than bands, so I went for an "All the Major Works In Order" approach and it was highly satisfying. I listened to about 12-hours of Copland. Almost all of it was very good, some of it was transcendent. It really made me feel my age when I was barreling down I-95 blasting this stuff, and when I was pumping gas with it blaring I felt like I was classing-up the joint.
Besides all the well-known favorites, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was pretty damn awesome - and forceful. It was great to see all the hits in the prolific middle period after he abandons the early and brief modernist approach for a more populist approach that he even labeled vernacular: Billy the Kid, Our Town, Fanfare fro the Common Man, Rodeo. He wanted music to be both utilitarian and artistic and boy is it ever. It's so awesomely American. American in the broadest sense too, in that it includes Central America. The jazz influences are sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but it's all about clear melodies and harmonies. This is the musical equivalent of Hemingway.
The only thing I didn't really like was some of the vocal numbers. There's a complete opera, The Tender Land, that has a sort of Of Mice and Men feel to it. I was irritated from the moment they started singing and suffered through the whole piece. I struggled to even follow the the plot- alternately turning it up to try and understand the words and then turning it down when they hit the high notes. I also listened to one Lydia Easley's rendition of his 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, and although that sounds interesting I just don't like opera. Why so much vibrato?
Here is conducting his own stuff, which he did a bunch
Great stuff! A great pleasure to experience en masse. He died in 1990.
