Three Moods: No. 1 – Embittered

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Musical Terms (7)

• blues inflection English
  The flattened third or seventh degree that gives Copland's jazz-influenced writing its characteristic modal ambiguity and expressive colour.
  In the Four Piano Blues, the flattened notes should neither be over-dramatised nor ignored. They are colour, not accident. Play them with the same touch as the surrounding notes but listen to how they shift the emotional temperature of the phrase. The blues note should feel inevitable.
• jazz idiom English
  Copland's assimilation of blues scales, syncopation, and jazz harmony into an art-music context — not imitation of jazz, but absorption of its rhythmic and harmonic character.
  In the Piano Concerto and Four Piano Blues, the jazz idiom requires a relaxed rhythmic feel where the subdivision leans slightly back, not metronomic. In the Blues pieces, allow a gentle sway without losing pulse. The goal is the quality of improvisation within a composed frame.
• lean texture English
  Copland's aesthetic of using fewer notes than a Romantic composer would, leaving space in the harmony and trusting the listener to fill it.
  Lean texture means resist doubling, resist filling every beat, resist ornament. In the Sonata and Variations, the piano must speak in single lines and spare chords. The silence between gestures is part of the composition. Count the rests.
• long line English
  Copland's gift for melodic writing that breathes in long phrases, often spanning many bars before resolving — a quality shared with his teacher Nadia Boulanger.
  The long melodic line in Copland requires breath-shaped phrasing: a gentle rise toward a peak, a natural taper at the end, and no cutting of phrase tails. In the Sonata's third movement, each phrase must feel inevitable and unhurried. Do not subdivide the phrase into smaller gestures.
• open sound English
  Copland's characteristic use of wide intervals — fourths, fifths, and octaves — to create a spacious, unhurried, distinctly American sonic landscape.
  Resist filling in the texture. Copland's open-interval writing is meant to sound like space and light, not like incomplete harmony. Allow the sustain pedal to blend the wide intervals gently without blurring. Think of the Great Plains rather than the European salon.
• time, freely English
  Copland's instruction for passages that move outside strict meter — not truly free, but with a loose, improvisatory quality that mimics speech or breath.
  'Freely' in Copland is not Romantic rubato. It is more like free verse: each phrase finds its own natural weight and duration, but the governing pulse is never far away. In the Night Thoughts and In Evening Air, allow the line to breathe at natural phrase endings without imposing a grid.
• with simplicity English
  A performance direction appearing throughout Copland's piano music, calling for directness and lack of affectation — not simplicity of technique, but of expression.
  'With simplicity' in Copland means no sentimentality, no rubato unless marked, and no extra weight. The note is the thing. Play it clearly, move on. It is the musical equivalent of Shaker furniture: nothing superfluous, everything functional.