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97 Like the Variations, Statements is a purely instrumental work that can be related to the cultural politics of the Collective and the musical aesthetic of the proletarian avant-garde. Statements links a typically modernist, fragmented musical idiom to radical political rhetoric. ” These titles and the short movements they designate represent a conscious attempt on Copland’s part to render his music accessible and his intent audible. “The longer a piece was,” he explained of Statements many years later, “the more 34 : music for the common man difficulties it would present to the ordinary concert-goer.

For one of the finest definitions of revolutionary musical content yet made, we hail Aaron Copland. 82 Here Seeger links the modernist style to radical politics, suggesting that both are opposed to the hegemony of tradition, whether musical or capitalist. Copland’s piece challenges the very nature of a variation set, taking as its subject a decidedly brusque intervallic cell rather than a more traditional melodic theme. In this sense, the work stands up against convention and expectation, while at the same time it draws a connection to the noise, dynamism, and dissociation of life in the modern industrial city.

102 Rather, the Group was aligned with the social democratic, antifascist politics of the cultural front. Clurman and Copland shared a radical political alignment and corresponded about their political interests. In May 1932—just before Copland began work on Statements—Clurman wrote with news that he had been reading (but not relishing) Marx and Lenin. ” Seeming to take up Wilson’s call for socialism without revolution, Clurman argued that the path had not yet been paved for a proletarian insurgence and maintained that a change in social structure would first demand a change in cultural attitude.