Cut-and-Paste Copland : COPLAND SINCE 1943 <i> by Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis (St. Martin’s Press: $29.95; 998 pp.; 0-312-03313-3 </i>

Aaron Copland sometimes is referred to as the dean of American composers--praise that is, if anything, inadequate. He has turned out to be much more important than Gershwin, and his music, although often very American in spirit, transcends, by the force of his art, its origins. (In this sense, he resembles Bartok, who worked with Hungarian folk melodies and changed the course of music for the entire Western World.)

Copland became sufficiently strong to provide a kind of synthesis in the split between the 12-tone people (a rather rigid rule-laden system of composition championed by Schoenberg) and those trying to move forward by an ever-deeper and ever more complex exploration of tonality.

Copland simply took from serial theory whatever he sensed might be useful in the latter quest, and he did it so well as to garner admiration from both sides. By brilliant example, he was a healer in the music wars, and a champion of music as incandescent mystery. Theory will move back and forth, fashions will advance and recede, but Copland’s music is there forever--lean, clean, vigorous, intelligent and beautiful.

Which makes it sad to report that this compilation, “Copland Since 1943,” is a mess, 427 pages of stuff, desperately trying, and failing, to be a book. Its odd structure--sections written or narrated by Copland, sections providing a social, political and cultural historical overview by Vivian Perlis, and brief statements from friends and colleagues of the great man--inevitably reveals itself as a device to cover up the astonishing absence of Copland himself, who is simply not there as a living person, who is reduced, and reduces himself, to a name in this cut-and-paste tome.

When it is his turn to write in what Perlis calls a coauthored autobiography (oxymoronic, of course, but perhaps excusable as against the “as told to” genre that Perlis would eschew), Copland gives us little more than an extended itinerary of his extensive travels around the world. Facts, dates, names, with occasional asides of an informal nature, facts, dates, names, until the reader’s eyes glaze over in boredom.

It is no mean feat, in a weird sort of way, to write so many words and yet reveal nothing of importance about oneself, nothing of the inner man, nothing of the uniqueness of one’s soul. Copland can claim this Pyrrhic victory; there is not the faintest chink in his armor of reticence; and we close the book knowing a great deal about where he went, who he saw, and what he did, but without knowing who he was or is.

Perlis’ contributions are intelligent, well written, and a bit airy. She struggles to add flesh and blood, to convince us that Copland is not as brittle, distant and emotionally numb as his writing might suggest. She sometimes goes over the same material Copland has covered, trying to shore things up, but of course it is Copland we want, direct, and not Perlis’ secondhand observations.

The contributions from friends and colleagues are for the most part perfunctory and usually relate to a particular project. Martha Graham tells us that she met the man, that he had a wonderful laugh, and that she named “Appalachian Spring.” Only Ned Norem buckles down and takes the task seriously, trying hard in four or five pages to make the point that Copland, austere and enigmatic as he may be, is as human as the rest of us. It sounds defensive, possibly because it is defensive.

The numerous photographs, letters, manuscript facsimiles and telegrams reproduced in this expensive volume begin to take on an odd, evidentiary quality. Why all the banal little notes from famous people? Why the telegrams from Presidents that were of course not written by those men? Why reproduce the programs from the ceremonies attendant to the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal? Or a page from the Herald Tribune?

So powerful is Copland’s absence from the book that this hodgepodge of content-less memorabilia seems included not so much to enhance our understanding of what happened, but to prove that Copland was there when it did, to prove him as a witness. But perhaps, because the book is so truly strange, one begins to read it in strange ways.

Musical historians will find material of interest. The itinerary itself has importance. Copland’s thoughts on movie music, opera and conducting are valuable for the record. The sections on Martha Graham and on Tanglewood will be useful to the cognoscenti. But there is little here for the general reader.

If this book was meant--by Perlis, the publishers and the contributors--as an homage to a great man, (whose cooperation came, one senses, reluctantly), then they have done him a disservice. A poignant situation all around, but particularly so with Perlis, who clearly reveres the subject, and clearly worked hard over many years with the best will in the world. But books are in their own way as mysterious as music. They are not just artifacts, or repositories of data, or records. They have the power to reveal much more than even the authors of them are aware of.

In books, as in music, good intentions do not suffice.