Copland: 1900 through 1942.

'THE WAY to write American music is simple," Virgil Thomson says. "All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish." As always, Mr. Thomson's point is a clever one, but it isn't as simple as that--not in music and not in anything else, either. Just think of E. B. White musing about the right time to cut hay; Count Basie playing the blues; Fred Astair dancing on the ceiling; Ansel Adams photographing an Arizona sunset; Henry Fonda walking down a dusty road. There is a common tone in what these men do, a kind of exuberant plainness, that says "American" in accents as crisp and clear as fireworks on the Fourth of July. And there is a composer whose music speaks to us in those very same accents, whose vitality and serenity and simplicity are American music: Aaron Copland.

To be sure, Mr. Copland's music comes in a variety of styles: the hard, brittle grandiosity of the Piano Variations, the lucid stillness of Appalachian Spring and the Emily Dickinson songs, the high-kicking charm of "popular" pieces like Rodeo and Billy the Kid. But all of these styles are part and parcel of the same sensibility and serve the same artistic ends. Samuel Lipman has expressed these ends better than anyone else:

Copland's true achievement . . . lies in his ability, through the use of melody, to evoke a mood--the mood of America of the period from the Civil War to World War II. There is in this period of American life a combination of leanness and grandeur that Copland manages to capture. He does more: He catches the emptiness of the city and the quiet of the land. Having done all this, he has succeeded in fixing in the mind of a large public an aural image of what America, and therefore American music, sounds like. Copland sounds like American music, and music that is felt to be American sounds like Copland.

But Aaron Copland's place in the history of American music goes beyond his activity as a composer. Since the 1925 premiere of his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, Copland has been a powerful and continuing presence on the American musical scene. An entire generation of promising composers, following Copland's example, went to France to study with Nadia Boulanger, heard their music played at Copland-sponsored concerts, saw their music praised in Copland-written articles, got their music pulbished on Copland's recommendation by the Cos Cob Press. His influence has by all accounts been consistently benign, it's virtually impossible to get anybody to speak ill of Copland, in public or in private, and those who now call him "the dean of American composers" do so without a trace of irony.

Copland stopped writing music a decade ago, and advancing age has gradually forced him to cut back on his conducting engagements, giving him time to work on the autobiography he "always intended to write." With the assistance of Vivian Perlis, director of the oral-history project in American music at Yale University, he has now brought out the first volume of his memoirs, Copland: 1900 through 142. It is Copland's fifth book, and like its predecessors it is written in a plain, unadorned prose whose typically American sound echoes the familiar cadences of his best music.

Copland's contribution to Copland: 1900 through 1942 consists of ten chapters that cover his childhood in Brooklyn, his studies in Fontainebleau and Paris, his early days as a musical enfant terrible in New York, and the period of stylistic transition during which he simplified his musical language--stimulated, it seems, by the "socialist realism" of his friends at The New Masses and in the Popular Front movement--without compromising his artistic integrity. ("I wish these people could see," Leonard Bernstein wrote to Copland after hearing the 1936 premiere of El Salon Mexico, "that a composer is just as serious when he writes a work, even if the piece is not defeatist . . . and Weltschmerzy and misanthropic and long.") These chapters are intentionally somewhat "external" in tone, since Copland's purpose in writing an autobiography "was not to present a personal memoir so much as to tell the story of American music as I experienced it in my lifetime"; the closest he gets to an intimate confession of any sort is when he admits to having once greatly admired the writings of Andre Gide. His modesty is unforced, his recollections rich and detailed; anyone with even a peripheral interest in modern American music will attend to Copland's story with delighted interest.

Such scholarly apparatus as is to be found in Copland: 1900 through 1942 has been supplied by Vivian Perlis, who has written four "interludes" that supply a historical context for Copland's more informal narrative. These interludes are unnecessary to the flow of the story, with the exception of an intelligent discussion of the period during which Copland flirted with the far Left that puts his short tenure as a "fellow-traveler" into perspective. Miss Perlis has also interpolated statements by several of Copland's friends and colleagues, some of which are far more personally revealing than anything Copland himself has contributed to his autobiography. The illustrations are numerous and extremely well chosen; the index is satisfactory; the footnotes are so thorough as to supply a German translation of "On Wings of Song" and to list 63 people who have narrated Copland's Lincoln Portrait.

The only thing missing from Copland: 1900 through 1942 is the story of what happened to Copland after 1942, an "omission" that will, one gathers, be rectified fairly soon. Still, it's amply clear that Aaron Copland's memoirs will be remembered as a key document in the history of this country's musical growth. And they are already a moving testament to the decency and integrity of our greatest composer: a gawky Jewish boy from Brooklyn who turned the city streets and lonely prairies of America into ballets and sonatas and film scores and concertos for all time.