08-11-2019, 01:09 PM
Not too bad.
I can't see an obvious difference in lengths. I heavily use music as metaphor, as you may have noticed. What could be more optimistic than this, something possible before the disclosure of the full horror of the atrocities of National Socialism? Aaron Copland must have believed that the world would go back to normal. Such is what American and British propaganda offered... "There will be bluebirds over/The White Cliffs of Dover".
Aaron Copland was only 44 at the time, and he lived to age 90, but he could never write anything like this again. In the next year the Allied armies would expose the full horrors of the Holocaust, with six million people with ancestry like that of Aaron Copland being murdered in accordance with the hatred of people incapable of excusing innocence. Aaron Copland would have qualified as did composers Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Krasa, and Victor Ullmann for some whiffs of Zyklon-B for being a Jewish Untermensch.
This is a great score of music, arguably on par with the score of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps of similar length. If both express primitivism in music, Stravinsky's barbarous and decadent 1913 work gets more play in concert halls. If Copland's score culminates in the elevation of Simple Gifts, Stravinsky's ballet culminates in a human sacrifice -- which in view of what Russia was like then, suggests a pogrom as in Kishinev in 1905.
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Which better fits the twentieth century and which better fits Heaven?
I can't see an obvious difference in lengths. I heavily use music as metaphor, as you may have noticed. What could be more optimistic than this, something possible before the disclosure of the full horror of the atrocities of National Socialism? Aaron Copland must have believed that the world would go back to normal. Such is what American and British propaganda offered... "There will be bluebirds over/The White Cliffs of Dover".
Aaron Copland was only 44 at the time, and he lived to age 90, but he could never write anything like this again. In the next year the Allied armies would expose the full horrors of the Holocaust, with six million people with ancestry like that of Aaron Copland being murdered in accordance with the hatred of people incapable of excusing innocence. Aaron Copland would have qualified as did composers Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Krasa, and Victor Ullmann for some whiffs of Zyklon-B for being a Jewish Untermensch.
This is a great score of music, arguably on par with the score of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps of similar length. If both express primitivism in music, Stravinsky's barbarous and decadent 1913 work gets more play in concert halls. If Copland's score culminates in the elevation of Simple Gifts, Stravinsky's ballet culminates in a human sacrifice -- which in view of what Russia was like then, suggests a pogrom as in Kishinev in 1905.
.
Which better fits the twentieth century and which better fits Heaven?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.