On 14 November last, Aaron Copland, born appropriately enough in the first year of a new century, celebrated his 70th birthday. If this makes him chronometrically an old man, it doesn't affect the ebullience of his spirit; nor indeed of his body, if we may judge from the bouncing elasticity with which he approaches the conductor's podium. The music's qualities are immediately manifest in the man, and they amount to a quintessence of America's positive virtues—which we need reminding of, at a time when America, in self-destructive turbulence, is bearing the brunt of the painful dis- or re-integration of our modern world's industrial technocracy.

The musical climate of the 1920s, when Copland came to maturity, was not favourable to the use of popular or traditional material or idioms in ‘serious’ composition. Nationalism was no longer a powerful force in the Western world. Increased respect for folk-musics as cultural relics inhibited composers from using them freely as composition sources. Popular music was associated with commercial exploitation and the wooing of a mass audience on the lowest common level, serious music with uncompromising devotion to Art for Art's sake. The leaders of revolutionary movements—Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, each in different ways—upheld the negative principle that one must not walk where men had walked before. The melodic and harmonic idioms of serious and popular music were growing steadily apart, serious music concentrating its meanings, increasingly concerned with a microstructure in which every detail was to be personal and expressive, popular music freely accepting melodic and harmonic cliché as an integral part of the language. Serious music rejected exact repetition as a means of driving home the message, popular music was heavily repetitive. Serious music often depended on intellectual construction-methods not to be appreciated by the unprepared listener; popular music demanded that all meanings should be immediately apparent.

I recently heard Sir Michael Tippett acknowledge Stravinsky as his master. I think Aaron Copland would do the same: for both men Stravinsky is in many ways an ideal, a hero-figure. He has shown that it is possible for the twentiethcentury composer to create his own tradition; both Tippett and Copland have succeeded in creating their own traditions, the one against the background of an English musical life still very insular in its outlook, the other against the musically barren background of American urban society, and both must have drawn strength and direction from Stravinsky's example. For Copland (as for many of us) Stravinsky is also an enigma, his music a mystery: it ‘seems to exist on a suprapersonal plane, in an aural world of its own … One thinks of the Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, or of Threni… these works, in some curious way, seem strangely removed from everyday ‘events’, and yet they remain for the most part profoundly human.’ Copland concludes ‘The essence of the man… the sum total of his extraordinary individuality, has never to my knowledge been adequately described, let alone imitated. Despite the widespread influence of his music Stravinsky as a composer remains a singularly remote and removed figure, a composer whose passport to the future needs no signature other than his own.’

With the exceptions of Bartók and Messiaen, modern European composers have not shown a particular preference for the piano as the natural vehicle for major works. It has been left to American composers to continue writing works for the piano with the same confidence as the nineteenth-century masters. The list is impressive, ranging from Ives's extraordinary sonatas to Elliott Carter's fine Concerto, via Piston, Sessions, Barber, Cowell, Foss and Copland. The reasons for this American dominance in modern piano literature are complex, although the purely economic factor, that it is cheaper to perform a piano work than an orchestral one, probably influenced Ives's and Copland's generations. To this must be added the use of the piano in jazz, that peculiarly American phenomenon. Indeed the piano, in its more percussive vein, seems to be the quintessential sonority of American music. Looking at Copland's work we can see that piano sound clearly influences the nature of his orchestrations, as it did Ravel's. Some works began life as piano scores (the ballet Billy the Kid for instance), most of the orchestral works include a piano, and many use typical piano gestures—the opening of El Salón México for example. Conversely Copland's piano writing, like that of Beethoven, is influenced by the sounds of the orchestra, although never to such an extent that it prevents truly pianistic writing. The piano works are brilliantly realized in terms of the instrument and are virtuoso pieces, particularly in their rhythmic and sonorous subtleties.

With Aaron Copland's maturity as a composer, American music gained a conscious identity, a persona, a style. Large claims, admittedly, but historically justified, even if it may be argued that they tell us little about the intrinsic quality of his work. About one thing, however, there can be no doubt: when Copland returned from his Parisian studies with Nadia Boulanger (1924), there was no style which could readily be accepted as quintessentially American—as a distillation of experience which belonged to that continent and to no other. There had been a number of brave attempts—composers who had seen the need to swing away from traditional European polarities—but no single figure had bridged the gap between his internal imagination and the responses of the outside world. This didacticism is necessary because of the extraordinary figure of Charles Ives—that enormous image that will loom over American music as long as it is played. Ives, an intrinsically richer personality, more copiously gifted, failed where Copland succeeded. The contrast between their personalities tells us more about the America they both idealised than any separate survey of their works could do. They are, in fact, the antitheses of American music. Both had the rare courage to bring their initially unwelcome attitudes into the full glare of public light, so that their impact could be openly assessed—a fact which would certainly not have been applicable to the many composers who were still vacillating between the accepted quasi-European language, and a kind of regressive provincialism.

• Boulez's Eclat/Multiples (Michael Chanan)

• Lutyens's Essence of Our Happinesses (Anthony Payne)

• Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto (Stephen Peter Lawson)