Perhaps because America is a new country, her more significant composers tend to be radicals and experimentalists. Among the grand old men of American music one thinks of Charles Ives—the closest approach America has made to a major composer: to a lesser degree of Carl Ruggles and of Wallingford Riegger: and of the still active Edgar Varèse whose works, ignored in the twenties, are having so potent an influence on the music of the mid-century. All these men are known of in England, though we have little first-hand acquaintance with the sound of their music. Another senior experimentalist, Harry Partch, is not, however, even a name to us; and although this is in part due to the fact that he is a peculiarly American phenomenon, what he stands for has relevance to the modern world as a whole. It is time we became aware of him: this article is an informal introduction.

When Peter Evans discussed the thematic technique of Copland's post-war works in this magazine in 1959, there seemed every justification for claiming—as Mr. Evans did—that the “clear signs of a new orientation and of a new fertility of invention in the Piano Quartet, and still more so in the Piano Fantasy, make Copland at the age of 59 a composer not only of achievement but of promise”. There was nothing patronising about this. It seemed clear then that Copland was moving inevitably—if at times a little tentatively—into a new period of maturity. The Piano Quartet (1950) and the Fantasy (1955–57) bore witness to it. After the war Copland had spent some time re-appraising the music of his early period (the period bounded roughly by the years 1922 and 1934), and the results of the re-appraisal suggested that the range of expression contained by the early works—a range sadly stunted in Copland's ‘functional’ period—was at last to be re-explored and extended. This re-exploration would, one assumed, be attended by all the technical mastery Copland had acquired in the intervening years. In particular, of course, his new music would be marked by a very special feeling for the qualities of instrumental timbres and for the niceties of sonorous distributions; although his orchestration had already been brought to a highly developed state in the works of his early period, one guessed that the influence of Stravinsky, quite strong in many of Copland's film and ballet scores, would develop it even more and in striking new directions.

The American composer who comes to study in Europe is a familiar figure. His aim is to get away from his older compatriots' petrified stylizations of European techniques—which somehow, in each generation, have never quite crystallized into a self-sufficient native tradition—and to discover for himself what is fresh and valid in the continent which still remains the fountain-head of musical creativity. But too often, he returns home a mere perfectly-finished product of the latest fashionable school—some years ago it was the Parisian boulangerie, today it is one of the serial or electronic workshops of Germany. Wise are the few who keep their heads and work out their own personal salvation.

If one is to settle for any length of time in a new country there is a necessity to adapt oneself to it, and to its society in some measure, if one is to understand it and learn from it. Such an adaptation has nothing to do with compromising one's way of life or one's attitude to life itself and there need be no confusion about this. It is in what I would call this changing of perspectives and focus that the artist is more acutely involved than others when he makes such a move, and it is in just such a move that he is able to pit himself against certain factors relating to himself and to his work which never face him in this way while he works in his native society.

I imagine that most people in Europe, when they think of modern American music (apart from jazz), think of the composers of the twenties and thirties and earlier who were the true pioneers in creating an American style—men like Charles Ives (1874–1954), Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961), Roy Harris (b.1898), Roger Sessions (b.1896) and Aaron Copland (b.1900). These men, together with the somewhat younger William Schuman (b.1910) and Samuel Barber (b.1910) and their contemporaries, still represent the high-water mark of American music. But, since they became known, two new generations of composers have sprung up and revolutionary changes in technique and esthetics have emerged.

Like his name he was both dapper and ungainly. His clothes came from Lanvin but were unpressed; his hands were scrubbed, but the fingernails were bitten to the bone. His physiognomy showed a cross between weasel and trumpet, and featured a large nose through which he wittily spoke. His sunswept apartment on the Luxembourg was elegantly toned in orange plush, but the floors squeaked annoyingly. His social predilections were for duchesses and policemen, though he was born and lived as a wealthy bourgeois. His villa in Noizay was austere and immaculate, but surrounded by densely careless arbors. There he wrote the greatest vocal music of our century, all of it technically impeccable—and truly vulgar. He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.