Aaron Copland The Sensuous Plane Analysis

Among the many successful things Aaron Copland has done for music, he has also written an eloquent description for the three separate musical planes. He begins by explaining that the simplest way to listen to music is “for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself” (Copland, 7). This feeling of listening to music for pleasure is it’s own plane. It is known as the sensuous plane, and Copland believes that this form of listening is “an important one in music, a very important one, but it does not constitute the whole story” (Copland, 8). It seems that Copland believed the reader could understand this concept on a personal level, so he chose not to elaborate on this plane. The second plane is known as the expressive plane, and here it is easier to understand how Copland felt about expression in music. Aaron Copland states, “my own belief is that music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes constitutes” (Copland, 9). This is a very crucial statement to the understanding of this particular plane, Copland believes that each and every piece of music in the world has a meaning behind it, regardless of how significant or insignificant it may be to the

Aaron Copland stated, “the plot and plot development is equivalent to our sheerly musical plane” (Copeland, 14). In my opinion, this was a very clever comparison on his part, which makes my version of the analogy much more difficult. In the sheerly musical plane, a composer creates and develops their theme, whereas a director creates and develops characters, voices, and blocking. This is slightly different than Copland’s analogy because playwrights create the character from their own imagination, whereas a director must now develop the character that already exists into something that can be represented