The Voice of Solitary Contemplation

Aaron Copland's Music for the Theatre is typically cited as the work in which the composer revealed fully, for the first time, his authentic, personal, American voice.1 Certainly the brash opening of this 1925 work, with its drum roll, dissonant piano chords, and freely rhythmic fanfare for trumpets, heralds the arrival of a distinctive, utterly assured, and assuredly American musical personality (see ex. 1). This trumpet fanfare exemplifies characteristics that have come to be seen as Copland trademarks. Among the most obvious and important are the gradual unfolding of a relatively small amount of pitch material, the employment both of literal repetition and of subtle variations in pitch and rhythm as aspects of this unfolding process, and the strong emphasis on specific intervals-in this case, the perfect fifth and its inversion the perfect fourth, the major sixth, and the major third

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