Hi,

I couldn't agree more about the understatement of SP's influence, not
only on his contemporaries but also on the later, perhaps one should
say 'post-modern'generation. Especially now, now that contemporary
composers have been freed from the vice of serialist atonality, I hear
SP cropping up all over the place, most recently in Thomas Ades violin
concerto (premiered this year). Copland certainly learned a thing or
two from him, as did Barber, Britton, Walton, Poulenc, Antheil,
Shostakovich, even Messian, and just about every film-music composer
there has ever been since. In the examples of John Williams and Elfman,
it sounds more like plagiarism to me rather than an influence!