Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachoutis an American critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 February 1956
CountryUnited States of America
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music.
Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.
I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember.
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.
Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.
Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.
All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.
Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can't save a bad film, and a bad score - so it's said - can't sink a good one.
As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.
In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.