Connotations in 1966, 1967 and 1968 around the United States. This included an engagement at the Musica Viva series in San Francisco and concerts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. "I spoke to the audiences," Copland writes, "with humorous accounts of the work's adverse effect on droves of letter writers, who had heard the original performance, in person or on TV. Then I asked the brass section to illustrate the opening chords, and the strings how they sounded. Before they knew it, the audience was sympathetic. My purpose was not to sell the work but to demonstrate it." Boulez revival A decade after Bernstein premiered the work, Pierre Boulez, who had succeeded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1971, conducted Connotations with the orchestra for the ten-year anniversary of Philharmonic Hall (subsequently renamed Avery Fisher Hall; later David Geffen Hall). According to Copland, ten years had allowed enough time to change audience perceptions for the better. In his review for The New York Times Harold C. Schonberg wrote that this time, the audience "did not rise in revolt" as it had in 1962. He added, "The composer's cause was helped by, if memory serves, a better performance than had been given in 1962. Mr. Boulez revels in this kind of music, and he brought drama to it as well as a synthesizing quality." AnalysisConnotations was the first orchestral work in which Copland used serial principles of composition. Serial or twelve-tone music, Copland stated, carried "a built-in tenseness ... a certain drama ... a sense of strain or tension" inherent in its extended use of chromaticism. "These are new tensions," he continued, "different from what I would have dreamt up if I had been thinking tonally." To composer John Adams, Copland's embrace of serial technique was not really such a stretch "because ever since the 1920s, he'd already a piss-'n-vinegar penchant for sour intervals, like he did in the Piano Variations." Contrary to the charge that would be made after Connotations premiere that Copland wrote a twelve-tone work to impress younger composers, he had actually begun using the method at a time when few other American composers were doing so. While Copland's first expressly serial works were his Piano Quartet of 1950 and Piano Fantasy and he noted that some critics (whom he did not name)