6/16/2020 Symphony guide: Copland's Third | Music | The Guardian

Symphony guide: Copland's Third

Aaron Copland's monumental symphony gave post-war America what it needed -
'the Great American Symphony'.

Tom Service
Tue 22 Apr 2014 07.00 BST

There were many candidates for the "Great American Symphony" by the 1940s (among them Roy
Harris’s Third, Samuel Barber’s First, and William Schuman’s Third) and yet by the end of the second
world war there was still a need for a grand musical expression of a nation’s hopes, joys, and anxieties
about the post-war world. And there remained a musical gap for a piece that would genuinely galvanise
the widest possible musical public as well as satisfy the stringent demands of what a popular but serious
mid-century American symphony might be; music that would take on the most symbolically European of
forms and reform it in the image of a post-war, post-New Deal America.

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6/16/2020 Symphony guide: Copland's Third | Music | The Guardian

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