A Study On The Music Techniques Of Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata

Aaron Copland was one of the most weighted and powerful American composers in the 20 th century, he dedicated his full life to creating and developing the music in American styles. In music creation, Copland excellently fused the composing techniques with the American various folk music materials, which made his music not only maintain the diversified characteristics of the American music, but also manifest the characteristics of the modern composing techniques in the 20 th century, and meanwhile observe the methods and advantages of various music schools, in order to create its own unique personalized music vocabulary, at the same time, his creation also reflected the development trend and experienced road of the American professional music in the half century.“Piano Sonata” was created during the year of 1939 and 1941, and this period was in the “practical music”----theatrical music period of Copland’s creation time, he created many practical music and theatrical music in this period, for instance, the representative works well known to the public such as“Portrait of Lincoln”, “Billy the Kid” were all created in this period, “Piano Sonata” was the only one abstruse serious untitled absolute music works created in this period, which was extremely characterized with the personalized music characteristics in the 20 th century. The harmony, rhythm and pitch organization were all distinctive. “Piano Sonata” was firstly played in Buenos Aires, Argentina by Copland himself on October 21, 1941.The analysis and research of the author on Copland’s “Piano Sonata” mainly focuses on the music itself,and it performs the systematic and comprehensive analysis and sorting to the several major components such as the musical structure, subject motivation development, harmony, rhythm and etc, and performsabstraction to the creation techniques characteristics of the music from part to whole, from macroscopic to microscopic, in order to understand the creation style and characteristics of the works.The thesis is composed of the several parts of introduction, main body, conclusion, references and etc; in the main body it makes deep exploration on the creation background, structure characteristics and techniques characteristics and etc. The main body is divided into five chapters. The first chapter mainly summarizes the life and creation periods of Copland, as well s the creation background of “Piano Sonata”;the second chapter mainly analyzes the musical structure characteristics of various movements in the works;and in the third chapter, it analyzes the theme motivation characteristics of the works and the penetration development methods of the theme motivation in the whole works; the fourth chapter analyzes the modal tonality as well as harmonic techniques of the works; and the fifth chapter introduces the works characteristics in rhythm. Make creation techniques exploration of “Piano Sonata” through the music main body analysis in these chapters in order to take a glimpse into the musical creation characteristics of Copland.