In Conversation with Daniel Felsenfeld  An interview with the
author of Ives and Copland: A Listener’s Guide and Britten and
Barber: Their Lives and Their Music  Daniel Felsenfeld  MS: Your
two new books take a look at the life and work of two pairs of
composers. How did you come to settle on these duos in
particular?  DF: No two composers are exactly alike, but
[Amadeus Press] wanted to take musicians that had something
parallel about them and I came up with a whole list. Aaron
Copland and Charles Ives have similar missions and couldn’t have
been more different. I thought it would be really interesting to
try and work these two vaguely contemporary people, these two
Americans who wrote at a time when American classical music was
just getting started and was a very bizarre thing. Ives came out
of the German tradition and came into the American tradition,
and Copland came out of the French tradition and came into the
American tradition. Or not even came into it, but created it.
Both of them sort of invented it