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The Structure And Genesis Of Copland's Quiet City, Stanley V. Kleppinger

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Aaron Copland’s Quiet City (1940), a one-movement work for trumpet, cor anglais, and strings, derives from incidental music the composer wrote for an unsuccessful and now forgotten Irwin Shaw play. This essay explores in detail the pitch structure of the concert work, suggesting dramatic parallels between the music and Shaw’s play.

The opening of the piece hinges on an anhemitonic pentatonic collection, which becomes the source of significant pitch centres for the whole composition, in that the most prominent pitch classes of each section, when taken together, replicate the collection governing the music’s first and last bars. Both this principle …

On The Influence Of Jazz Rhythm In The Music Of Aaron Copland, Stanley V. Kleppinger

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Surveys scholarly views of jazz's rhythmic and metrical structures in the 1920s (at the outset of Copland's career) focusing especially on Copland's own writings on the subject. Analyses of selected passages from Copland's piano concerto, the second piece of Four piano blues, the Piano variations, the piano sonata, the clarinet concerto, and Appalachian spring help to assess the ambiguity surrounding the identification of jazz-based rhythmic influences in Copland's music.