Duo for Flute and Piano

When William Kincaid, long-time principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, passed away, several of his students asked Aaron Copland to write a piece in his memory. The result, a Duo for Flute and Piano, was completed and published in 1971. Overall, the work calls to mind echoes of Copland’s most familiar compositions, such as Appalachian Spring, written in the so-called “popular style.” And yet there is a dazzling variety in this duo. Copland was now over 70 years old, and he had lost nothing of his creativity.
The first movement opens and closes with a soliloquy for solo flute, framing the main body of flute-piano interaction. The figures are short at first, passing from one instrument to the other and set off by brief pauses. Copland quickly increases the rhythmic motion. One may hear echoes of Debussy and even Tchaikovsky: the theme of the second section, a descending four-note motive A-flat, F, E-flat, D-flat, precisely mimics the opening fanfare from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Following the stark ending of the movement on three marcato chords, the second movement begins as a meditation on dissonance. A major 3rd, C–E, provides the musical anchor that Copland reiterates like a pedal tone. Against this sonority he adds a high, and highly dissonant, E-flat, followed eventually by A-flats and F-sharps. The texture expands around the pedal tones C and E held in the piano, building up to a climactic shift to another consonant 3rd, D-flat to F. This new pitch anchor brings on a more introspective passage. Symmetry is restored when the opening C–E dyad returns at the end of the movement.
Copland’s use of pedal tones and contrasting registers invites a comparison with bell sounds, a sonorous topic further investigated in the finale. This movement is the most rhythmically active of the three. Copland indulges in a lighthearted episode of pointillism—a style commonly associated with Anton Webern—juxtaposed against passages both tonal and lyric. Echoes of bells resound during the final pages, and the entire composition—an interesting mixture of light and dark moods, of modernism and romanticism, of solitude and conversation—ends with a pat cadence on E flat.

(c) Jason Stell