In March 1961, one of America’s most distinguished composers and conductors, Aaron Copland, spent about a week in Tucson. Among other activities, he lectured at the UA and conducted a performance of the university symphony orchestra and choir.
Copland addressed about 200 students and instructors at the College of Music. He told them that “by comparison with the ’20s, things are ‘just popping.’” He lauded university music schools and said there were plenty of young composers and musicians.
Among the major issues facing symphonies was adequate funding. But, he also said that a major problem with the orchestras and youth was that 7/8ths of the music performed was “devoted to music of the past.”
In his talk, Copland also did a bit of future gazing. He said “It’s hard to advise young people nowadays what to study,” noting the current fad of electronic tapes and recording in which computers write musical patterns.
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He felt the electronic tapes set up a kind of monotony, but ‘it’s foolish to judge what may happen 10 years from now.’ In the future, musical patterns, he continued, may be a combination of the present harmonic structures and 1/4-tones (splitting notes by one-fourth.)
At another lecture, Copland talked of the history of 20th Century music from ragtime through jazz to atonal.
He also visited with Tucson choreographer Lil Liandre. He watched three members of her company perform at the YWCA. The dancers were Laurie Church, Margaret Gibson and Fern Barber. Liandre then danced her original “Desert Te Deum” to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
Copland was also in the audience for the annual recital of student compositions. He refrained from commenting on any specific composer based on a single work, but he gave a general evaluation of the recital.
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