While the observation that each of Aaron Copland's three major piano works—the Variations (1930), the Sonata (1939-1941), and the Fantasy (1955-1957)—signals a turning point in the composer's style is not quite accurate, it can be said that each of these works bears the distinctive stamp of its place in Copland's creative development. The first of these, the Piano Variations, is perhaps the most characteristic of Copland's "modernist" works; it aptly reflects the composer's particular attention to an austerity of means in a context of angular melodies, irregular rhythms and meters, and pungent harmonies. Though his later ballets and concert works—written in a more overtly accessible vein—overshadowed the Variations in popularity, this work remains one of Copland's most notable accomplishments, the first certifiable masterpiece from the man who would emerge as the "dean of American composers." The work was highly influential (the young Leonard Bernstein was one of its early proponents), and its astringency was only slightly less bracing decades later, when Copland dusted it off and used it as the basis for his Orchestral Variations (1957).

The germinal material of the Variations is a four-note motive (E - C - D sharp - C sharp) whose compact collection of intervals gives rise to the tangy harmonies that so strongly characterize the work. The theme and 20 variations flow into one other without interruption; as Copland relates in What to Listen for in Music, the traditional roles of the theme and first variation are reversed, the initial statement of the theme making a strident and dramatic entrance, the first variation presenting a simpler, more subdued version.

Variations one through 11 treat the theme in a generally straightforward, if "bangy" and dissonant manner. Variations 12 through 19 are more rhythmically active and of a somewhat lighter tone, at times taking on the character of a scherzo. Variations 19 and 20 provide the impetus for a buildup into a tremendous coda.

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