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Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland (/ˈkplənd/, KOHP-lənd;[1][2] November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style.[3] Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.

Aaron Copland as subject of a Young People's Concert, 1970

After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark, Copland traveled to Paris, where he first studied with Isidor Philipp and Paul Vidal, then with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He studied three years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste. Determined upon his return to the U.S. to make his way as a full-time composer, Copland gave lecture-recitals, wrote works on commission and did some teaching and writing. However, he found that composing orchestral music in the modernist style, which he had adopted while studying abroad, was a financially contradictory approach, particularly in light of the Great Depression. He shifted in the mid-1930s to a more accessible musical style which mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik ("music for use"), music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes. During the Depression years, he traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico, formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chávez and began composing his signature works.

During the late 1940s, Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenberg's use of twelve-tone (serial) techniques. After he had been exposed to the works of French composer Pierre Boulez, he incorporated serial techniques into his Piano Quartet (1950), Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations for orchestra (1961) and Inscape for orchestra (1967). Unlike Schoenberg, Copland used his tone rows in much the same fashion as his tonal material—as sources for melodies and harmonies, rather than as complete statements in their own right, except for crucial events from a structural point of view. From the 1960s onward, Copland's activities turned more from composing to conducting. He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and the UK and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records.

Life

Early years

 
Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College (part of the City University of New York)

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900.[4] He was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins.[5] While emigrating from Russia to the United States, Copland's father, Harris Morris Copland (1864–1945), lived and worked in Scotland for two to three years to pay for his boat fare to the United States. It was there that Copland's father may have Anglicized his surname "Kaplan" to "Copland," though Copland himself believed for many years that the change had been due to an Ellis Island immigration official when his father entered the country.[4][6] Copland was, however, unaware until late in his life that the family name had been Kaplan, and his parents never told him this.[6] Throughout his childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn shop, H. M. Copland's, at 628 Washington Avenue (which Aaron would later describe as "a kind of neighborhood Macy's"),[7][8] on the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue,[9] and most of the children helped out in the store. His father was a staunch Democrat. The family members were active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes, where Aaron celebrated his bar mitzvah.[10] Not especially athletic, the sensitive young man became an avid reader and often read Horatio Alger stories on his front steps.[11]

Copland's father had no musical interest. His mother, Sarah Mittenthal Copland (1865–1942), sang, played the piano, and arranged for music lessons for her children.[12] Copland had four older siblings: two brothers, Ralph Copland (1888–1952) and Leon Copland (1890–1975),[13] and two sisters, Laurine Copland Marcus (1892–1972)[14][15] and Josephine Copland Bergman (1894–1967).[16][17] Of his siblings, his oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically; he was proficient on the violin. His sister Laurine had the strongest connection with Aaron; she gave him his first piano lessons, promoted his musical education, and supported him in his musical career.[12] A student at the Metropolitan Opera School and a frequent opera-goer, Laurine also brought home libretti for Aaron to study.[18] Copland attended Boys High School and in the summer went to various camps. Most of his early exposure to music was at Jewish weddings and ceremonies, and occasional family musicales.[10]

Copland began writing songs at the age of eight and a half.[19] His earliest notated music, about seven bars he wrote when age 11, was for an opera scenario he created and called Zenatello.[19][20] From 1913 to 1917 he took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn, who taught him the standard classical fare.[19] Copland's first public music performance was at a Wanamaker's recital.[21][22] By the age of 15, after attending a concert by Polish composer-pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Copland decided to become a composer.[23] At age 16, Copland heard his first symphony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.[24] After attempts to further his music study from a correspondence course, Copland took formal lessons in harmony, theory, and composition from Rubin Goldmark, a noted teacher and composer of American music (who had given George Gershwin three lessons). Goldmark, with whom Copland studied between 1917 and 1921, gave the young Copland a solid foundation, especially in the Germanic tradition.[25] As Copland stated later: "This was a stroke of luck for me. I was spared the floundering that so many musicians have suffered through incompetent teaching."[26] But Copland also commented that the maestro had "little sympathy for the advanced musical idioms of the day" and his "approved" composers ended with Richard Strauss.[27]

Copland's graduation piece from his studies with Goldmark was a three-movement piano sonata in a Romantic style.[28] But he had also composed more original and daring pieces which he did not share with his teacher.[29] In addition to regularly attending the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Symphony, where he heard the standard classical repertory, Copland continued his musical development through an expanding circle of musical friends. After graduating from high school, Copland played in dance bands.[30] Continuing his musical education, he received further piano lessons from Victor Wittgenstein, who found his student to be "quiet, shy, well-mannered, and gracious in accepting criticism."[31] Copland's fascination with the Russian Revolution and its promise for freeing the lower classes drew a rebuke from his father and uncles.[32] In spite of that, in his early adult life, Copland would develop friendships with people with socialist and communist leanings.[33]

Study in Paris

 
Nadia Boulanger in 1925

Copland's passion for the latest European music, plus glowing letters from his friend Aaron Schaffer, inspired him to go to Paris for further study.[34] An article in Musical America about a summer school program for American musicians at the Fontainebleau School of Music, offered by the French government, encouraged Copland still further.[35] His father wanted him to go to college, but his mother's vote in the family conference allowed him to give Paris a try. On arriving in France, he studied at university with pianist and pedagog Isidor Philipp and composer Paul Vidal. When Copland found Vidal too much like Goldmark, he switched at the suggestion of a fellow student to Nadia Boulanger, then aged 34.[36] He had initial reservations: "No one to my knowledge had ever before thought of studying with a woman."[37] She interviewed him, and recalled later: "One could tell his talent immediately."[38]

Boulanger had as many as 40 students at once and employed a formal regimen that Copland had to follow. Copland found her incisive mind much to his liking and found her ability to critique a composition impeccable. Boulanger "could always find the weak spot in a place you suspected was weak... She also could tell you why it was weak [italics Copland]."[39] He wrote in a letter to his brother Ralph, "This intellectual Amazon is not only professor at the Conservatoire, is not only familiar with all music from Bach to Stravinsky, but is prepared for anything worse in the way of dissonance. But make no mistake ... A more charming womanly woman never lived."[40] Copland later wrote that "it was wonderful for me to find a teacher with such openness of mind, while at the same time she held firm ideas of right and wrong in musical matters. The confidence she had in my talents and her belief in me were at the very least flattering and more -- they were crucial to my development at this time of my career."[41] Though he had planned on only one year abroad, he studied with her for three years, finding that her eclectic approach inspired his own broad musical taste.

Along with his studies with Boulanger, Copland took classes in French language and history at the Sorbonne, attended plays, and frequented Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore that was a gathering-place for expatriate American writers.[42] Among this group in the heady cultural atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s were Paul Bowles, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, as well as artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani.[43] Also influential on the new music were the French intellectuals Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Gide; the latter cited by Copland as being his personal favorite and most read.[44] Travels to Italy, Austria, and Germany rounded out Copland's musical education. During his stay in Paris, Copland began writing musical critiques, the first on Gabriel Fauré, which helped spread his fame and stature in the music community.[45]

1925 to 1935

 
Serge Koussevitzky was a mentor and supporter of Copland

After a fruitful stay in Paris, Copland returned to America optimistic and enthusiastic about the future, determined to make his way as a full-time composer.[46] He rented a studio apartment on New York City's Upper West Side in the Empire Hotel, close to Carnegie Hall and other musical venues and publishers. He remained in that area for the next 30 years, later moving to Westchester County, New York. Copland lived frugally and survived financially with help from two $2,500 Guggenheim Fellowships in 1925 and 1926 (each of the two equivalent to $38,629 in 2021).[47] Lecture-recitals, awards, appointments, and small commissions, plus some teaching, writing, and personal loans, kept him afloat in the subsequent years through World War II.[48] Also important, especially during the Depression, were wealthy patrons who underwrote performances, helped pay for publication of works and promoted musical events and composers.[48] Among those mentors was Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and known as a champion of "new music." Koussevitsky would prove to be very influential in Copland's life, and was perhaps the second most important figure in Copland's career after Boulanger.[49] Beginning with the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), Koussevitzky would perform more of Copland's music than that of any the composer's contemporaries, at a time when other conductors were programming only a few of Copland's works.[50]

Soon after his return to the United States, Copland was exposed to the artistic circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. While Copland did not care for Stieglitz's domineering attitude, he did admire his work and took to heart Stieglitz's conviction that American artists should reflect "the ideas of American Democracy."[51] This ideal influenced not just the composer, but also a generation of artists and photographers, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Walker Evans.[51] Evans's photographs inspired portions of Copland's opera The Tender Land.[52]

In his quest to take up the slogan of the Stieglitz group, "Affirm America," Copland found only the music of Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives upon which to draw.[53] Without what Copland called a "usable past" in American classical composers, he looked toward jazz and popular music, something he had already started to do while in Europe.[54] In the 1920s, Gershwin, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong were in the forefront of American popular music and jazz.[55] By the end of the decade, Copland felt his music was going in a more abstract, less jazz-oriented direction.[56] However, as large swing bands such as those of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller became popular in the 1930s, Copland took a renewed interest in the genre.[57]

 
Copland admired the work and philosophy of Alfred Stieglitz

Inspired by the example of Les Six in France, Copland sought out contemporaries such as Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston, and quickly established himself as a spokesperson for composers of his generation.[58] He also helped found the Copland-Sessions Concerts to showcase these composers' chamber works to new audiences.[59] Copland's relationship with these men, who became known as "commando unit," was one of both support and rivalry, and he played a key role in keeping them together until after World War II.[60] He also was generous with his time, with nearly every American young composer he met during his life, later earning the title "Dean of American Music."[61]

With the knowledge he had gained from his studies in Paris, Copland came into demand as a lecturer and writer on contemporary European classical music.[62] From 1927 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1938, he taught classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City.[62] Eventually, his New School lectures would appear in the form of two books —What to Listen for in Music (1937, revised 1957) and Our New Music (1940, revised 1968 and retitled The New Music: 1900–1960).[62] During this period, Copland also wrote regularly for The New York Times, The Musical Quarterly and a number of other journals. These articles would appear in 1969 as the book Copland on Music.[62] During his time at The New School, Copland was active as a presenter and curator, using The New School as a key location to present a wide range of composers and artists from the United States as well as across the globe.

Copland's compositions in the early 1920s reflected the modernist attitude that prevailed among intellectuals, that the arts need be accessible to only a cadre of the enlightened, and that the masses would come to appreciate their efforts over time. However, mounting troubles with the Symphonic Ode (1929) and Short Symphony (1933) caused Copland to rethink this approach. It was financially contradictory, particularly during the Depression. Avant-garde music had lost what cultural historian Morris Dickstein calls "its buoyant experimental edge" and the national mood toward it had changed.[63] As biographer Howard Pollack points out,[64]

Copland observed two trends among composers in the 1930s: first, a continuing attempt to "simplify their musical language" and, second, a desire to "make contact" with as wide an audience as possible. Since 1927, he had been in the process of simplifying, or at least paring down, his musical language, though in such a manner as to sometimes have the effect, paradoxically, of estranging audiences and performers. By 1933 ... he began to find ways to make his starkly personal language accessible to a surprisingly large number of people.

In many ways, this shift mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik ("music for use"), as composers sought to create music that could serve a utilitarian as well as artistic purpose. This approach encompassed two trends: first, music that students could easily learn, and second, music which would have wider appeal, such as incidental music for plays, movies, radio, etc.[65] Toward this end, Copland provided musical advice and inspiration to The Group Theatre, a company which also attracted Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.[66] Philosophically an outgrowth of Stieglitz and his ideals, the Group focused on socially relevant plays by the American authors.[67] Through it and later his work in film, Copland met several major American playwrights, including Thornton Wilder, William Inge, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, and considered projects with all of them.[68]

1935 to 1950

Around 1935 Copland began to compose musical pieces for young audiences, in accordance with the first goal of American Gebrauchsmusik.[69] These works included piano pieces (The Young Pioneers) and an opera (The Second Hurricane).[70] During the Depression years, Copland traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico. He formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chávez and would return often to Mexico for working vacations conducting engagements.[71] During his initial visit to Mexico, Copland began composing the first of his signature works, El Salón México, which he completed in 1936. In it and in The Second Hurricane Copland began "experimenting," as he phrased it, with a simpler, more accessible style.[72] This and other incidental commissions fulfilled the second goal of American Gebrauchsmusik, creating music of wide appeal.

 
Carlos Chávez in 1937

Concurrent with The Second Hurricane, Copland composed (for radio broadcast) "Prairie Journal" on a commission from the Columbia Broadcast System.[73] This was one of his first pieces to convey the landscape of the American West.[74] This emphasis on the frontier carried over to his ballet Billy the Kid (1938), which along with El Salón México became his first widespread public success.[75][76] Copland's ballet music established him as an authentic composer of American music much as Stravinsky's ballet scores connected the composer with Russian music and came at an opportune time.[77] He helped fill a vacuum for American choreographers to fill their dance repertory[78] and tapped into an artistic groundswell, from the motion pictures of Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire to the ballets of George Balanchine and Martha Graham, to both democratize and Americanize dance as an art form.[79] In 1938, Copland helped form the American Composers Alliance to promote and publish American contemporary classical music. Copland was president of the organization from 1939 to 1945.[24] In 1939, Copland completed his first two Hollywood film scores, for Of Mice and Men and Our Town, and composed the radio score "John Henry," based on the folk ballad.[80]

While these works and others like them that would follow were accepted by the listening public at large, detractors accused Copland of pandering to the masses.[81] Music critic Paul Rosenfeld, for one, warned in 1939 that Copland was "standing in the fork in the highroad, the two branches of which lead respectively to popular and artistic success."[82] Even some of the composer's friends, such as composer Arthur Berger, were confused about Copland's simpler style.[83] One, composer David Diamond, went so far as to lecture Copland: "By having sold out to the mongrel commercialists half-way already, the danger is going to be wider for you, and I beg you dear Aaron, don't sell out [entirely] yet."[84] Copland's response was that his writing as he did and in as many genres was his response to how the Depression had affected society, as well as to new media and the audiences made available by these new media.[85] As he himself phrased it, "The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art."[82]

 
Initial trumpet notes from Fanfare for the Common Man, Memorial Garden, Tanglewood

The 1940s were arguably Copland's most productive years, and some of his works from this period would cement his worldwide fame. His ballet scores for Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944) were huge successes. His pieces Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man became patriotic standards. Also important was the Third Symphony. Composed in a two-year period from 1944 to 1946, it became Copland's best-known symphony.[86] The Clarinet Concerto (1948), scored for solo clarinet, strings, harp, and piano, was a commission piece for bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman and a complement to Copland's earlier jazz-influenced work, the Piano Concerto (1926).[87] His Four Piano Blues is an introspective composition with a jazz influence.[88] Copland finished the 1940s with two film scores, one for William Wyler's The Heiress and one for the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Red Pony.[89]

In 1949, Copland returned to Europe, where he found French composer Pierre Boulez dominating the group of post-war avant-garde composers there.[90] He also met with proponents of twelve-tone technique, based on the works of Arnold Schoenberg, and found himself interested in adapting serial methods to his own musical voice.

1950s and 1960s

 
Aaron Copland in 1962 from a television special

In 1950, Copland received a U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship to study in Rome, which he did the following year. Around this time, he also composed his Piano Quartet, adopting Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of composition, and Old American Songs (1950), the first set of which was premiered by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, the second by William Warfield.[91] During the 1951–52 academic year, Copland gave a series of lectures under the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University. These lectures were published as the book Music and Imagination.[92]

Because of his leftist views, which had included his support of the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1936 presidential election and his strong support of Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace during the 1948 presidential election, Copland was investigated by the FBI during the Red scare of the 1950s. He was included on an FBI list of 151 artists thought to have Communist associations and found himself blacklisted, with A Lincoln Portrait withdrawn from the 1953 inaugural concert for President Eisenhower.[93] Called later that year to a private hearing at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., Copland was questioned by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn about his lecturing abroad and his affiliations with various organizations and events.[94] In the process, McCarthy and Cohn neglected completely Copland's works, which made a virtue of American values.[95] Outraged by the accusations, many members of the musical community held up Copland's music as a banner of his patriotism. The investigations ceased in 1955 and were closed in 1975.[96]

The McCarthy probes did not seriously affect Copland's career and international artistic reputation, taxing of his time, energy, and emotional state as they might have been.[96] Nevertheless, beginning in 1950, Copland—who had been appalled at Stalin's persecution of Shostakovich and other artists—began resigning from participation in leftist groups.[97] Copland, Pollack states, "stayed particularly concerned about the role of the artist in society".[98] He decried the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union, and in his 1954 Norton lecture he asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet Communism deprived artists of "the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong." He began to vote Democratic, first for Stevenson and then for Kennedy.[97]

Potentially more damaging for Copland was a sea-change in artistic tastes, away from the Populist mores that infused his work of the 1930s and 40s.[63] Beginning in the 1940s, intellectuals assailed Popular Front culture, to which Copland's music was linked, and labeled it, in Dickstein's words, as "hopelessly middlebrow, a dumbing down of art into toothless entertainment."[63] They often linked their disdain for Populist art with technology, new media and mass audiences—in other words, the areas of radio, television and motion pictures, for which Copland either had or soon would write music, as well as his popular ballets.[63] While these attacks actually began at the end of the 1930s with the writings of Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald for Partisan Review, they were based in anti-Stalinist politics and would accelerate in the decades following World War II.[63]

Despite any difficulties that his suspected Communist sympathies might have posed, Copland traveled extensively during the 1950s and early 1960s to observe the avant-garde styles of Europe, hear compositions by Soviet composers not well known in the West, and experience the new school of Polish music.[99] While in Japan, he was taken with the work of Tōru Takemitsu and began a correspondence with him that would last over the next decade.[100] Copland revised his text "The New Music" with comments on the styles that he encountered.[101] He found much of what he heard dull and impersonal.[102] Electronic music seemed to have "a depressing sameness of sound," while aleatoric music was for those "who enjoy teetering on the edge of chaos."[103] As he summarized, "I've spent most of my life trying to get the right note in the right place. Just throwing it open to chance seems to go against my natural instincts."[103]

In 1952, Copland received a commission from the League of Composers, funded by a grant from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, to write an opera for television.[104] While Copland was aware of the potential pitfalls of that genre, which included weak libretti and demanding production values, he had also been thinking about writing an opera since the 1940s.[104] Among the subjects he had considered were Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Frank Norris's McTeague[104] He finally settled on James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which seemed appropriate for the more intimate setting of television and could also be used in the "college trade," with more schools mounting operas than they had before World War II.[104] The resulting opera, The Tender Land, was written in two acts but later expanded to three. As Copland feared, when the opera premiered in 1954 critics found the libretto to be weak.[105] In spite of its flaws, the opera became one of the few American operas to enter the standard repertory.[105]

In 1957, 1958, and 1976, Copland was the Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival, a classical and contemporary music festival in Ojai, California.[106] For the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial, Copland composed Ceremonial Fanfare for Brass Ensemble to accompany the exhibition "Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries." Leonard Bernstein, Piston, William Schuman, and Thomson also composed pieces for the Museum's Centennial exhibitions.[107]

 
Bust of Aaron Copland, Tanglewood

Later years

From the 1960s onward, Copland turned increasingly to conducting. Though not enamored with the prospect, he found himself without new ideas for composition, saying, "It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet."[108] He became a frequent guest conductor in the United States and the United Kingdom and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records. In 1960, RCA Victor released Copland's recordings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra of the orchestral suites from Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land; these recordings were later reissued on CD, as were most of Copland's Columbia recordings (by Sony).

From 1960 until his death, Copland resided at Cortlandt Manor, New York. Known as Rock Hill, his home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and further designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.[109] Copland's health deteriorated through the 1980s, and he died of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure on December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York (now Sleepy Hollow). Following his death, his ashes were scattered over the Tanglewood Music Center near Lenox, Massachusetts.[110] Much of his large estate was bequeathed to the creation of the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which bestows over $600,000 per year to performing groups.[111]

Personal life

Copland never enrolled as a member of any political party. Nevertheless, he inherited a considerable interest in civic and world events from his father.[112] His views were generally progressive and he had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular Front, including Odets.[113] Early in his life, Copland developed, in Pollack's words, "a deep admiration for the works of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, all socialists whose novels passionately excoriated capitalism's physical and emotional toll on the average man."[114] Even after the McCarthy hearings, he remained a committed opponent of militarism and the Cold War, which he regarded as having been instigated by the United States.[115] He condemned it as "almost worse for art than the real thing." Throw the artist "into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he'll create nothing".[116]

While Copland had various encounters with organized religious thought, which influenced some of his early compositions, he remained agnostic.[117] He was close with Zionism during the Popular Front movement, when it was endorsed by the left. Pollack writes:[118]

Like many contemporaries, Copland regarded Judaism alternately in terms of religion, culture, and race; but he showed relatively little involvement in any aspect of his Jewish heritage. At the same time, he had ties to Christianity, identifying with such profoundly Christian writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins and often spending Christmas Day at home with a special dinner with close friends. In general, his music seemed to evoke Protestant hymns as often as it did Jewish chant. Copland characteristically found connections among various religious traditions. But if Copland was discreet about his Jewish background, he never hid it, either.

 
Victor Kraft, 1935

Pollack states that Copland was gay and that the composer came to an early acceptance and understanding of his sexuality.[119] Like many at that time, Copland guarded his privacy, especially in regard to his homosexuality. He provided few written details about his private life, and even after the Stonewall riots of 1969, showed no inclination to "come out."[120] However, he was one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his intimates.[121] They tended to be talented, younger men involved in the arts, and the age-gap between them and the composer widened as he grew older.[122] Most became enduring friends after a few years and, in Pollack's words, "remained a primary source of companionship."[120] Among Copland's love affairs were ones with photographer Victor Kraft, artist Alvin Ross, pianist Paul Moor, dancer Erik Johns, composer John Brodbin Kennedy,[123] and painter Prentiss Taylor.[124][125]

Victor Kraft became a constant in Copland's life, though their romance might have ended by 1944.[126] Originally a violin prodigy when the composer met him in 1932, Kraft gave up music to pursue a career in photography, in part due to Copland's urging.[127] Kraft would leave and re-enter Copland's life, often bringing much stress with him as his behavior became increasingly erratic, sometimes confrontational.[128] Kraft fathered a child to whom Copland later provided financial security, through a bequest from his estate.[129]

Music

Vivian Perlis, who collaborated with Copland on his autobiography, writes: "Copland's method of composing was to write down fragments of musical ideas as they came to him. When he needed a piece, he would turn to these ideas (his 'gold nuggets')."[130] if one or more of these nuggets looked promising, he would then write a piano sketch and eventually work on them at the keyboard.[130] The piano, Perlis writes, "was so integral to his composing that it permeated his compositional style, not only in the frequent use in the instrument but in more subtle and complex ways".[130] His habit of turning to the keyboard tended to embarrass Copland until he learned that Stravinsky also did so.[130]

Copland would not consider the specific instrumentation for a piece until it was complete and notated.[130] Nor, according to Pollack, did he generally work in linear fashion, from beginning to end of a composition. Instead, he tended to compose whole sections in no particular order and surmise their eventual sequence after all those parts were complete, much like assembling a collage.[131] Copland himself admitted, "I don't compose. I assemble materials."[132] Many times, he included material he had written years earlier.[132] If the situation dictated, as it did with his film scores, Copland could work quickly. Otherwise, he tended to write slowly whenever possible.[132] Even with this deliberation, Copland considered composition, in his words, "the product of the emotions", which included "self-expression" and "self-discovery".[132]

Influences

While Copland's earliest musical inclinations as a teenager ran toward Chopin, Debussy, Verdi and the Russian composers, Copland's teacher and mentor Nadia Boulanger became his most important influence.[133] Copland especially admired Boulanger's total grasp of all classical music, and he was encouraged to experiment and develop a "clarity of conception and elegance in proportion". Following her model, he studied all periods of classical music and all forms—from madrigals to symphonies. This breadth of vision led Copland to compose music for numerous settings—orchestra, opera, solo piano, small ensemble, art song, ballet, theater and film. Boulanger particularly emphasized "la grande ligne" (the long line), "a sense of forward motion ... the feeling for inevitability, for the creating of an entire piece that could be thought of as a functioning entity".[133]

During his studies with Boulanger in Paris, Copland was excited to be so close to the new post-Impressionistic French music of Ravel, Roussel, and Satie, as well as Les Six, a group that included Milhaud, Poulenc, and Honegger. Webern, Berg, and Bartók also impressed him. Copland was "insatiable" in seeking out the newest European music, whether in concerts, score reading or heated debate. These "moderns" were discarding the old laws of composition and experimenting with new forms, harmonies and rhythms, and including the use of jazz and quarter-tone music.[134] Milhaud was Copland's inspiration for some of his earlier "jazzy" works. He was also exposed to Schoenberg and admired his earlier atonal pieces, thinking Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire above all others.[135] Copland named Igor Stravinsky as his "hero" and his favorite 20th-century composer.[135] Copland especially admired Stravinsky's "jagged and uncouth rhythmic effects", "bold use of dissonance", and "hard, dry, crackling sonority".[135]

Another inspiration for much of Copland's music was jazz. Although familiar with jazz back in America—having listened to it and also played it in bands—he fully realized its potential while traveling in Austria: "The impression of jazz one receives in a foreign country is totally unlike the impression of such music heard in one's own country ... when I heard jazz played in Vienna, it was like hearing it for the first time."[113] He also found that the distance from his native country helped him see the United States more clearly. Beginning in 1923, he employed "jazzy elements" in his classical music, but by the late 1930s, he moved on to Latin and American folk tunes in his more successful pieces.[136] Although his early focus of jazz gave way to other influences, Copland continued to make use of jazz in more subtle ways in later works.[136] Copland's work from the late 1940s onward included experimentation with Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, resulting in two major works, the Piano Quartet (1950) and the Piano Fantasy (1957).[137]

Early works

Copland's compositions before leaving for Paris were mainly short works for piano and art songs, inspired by Liszt and Debussy. In them, he experimented with ambiguous beginnings and endings, rapid key changes, and the frequent use of tritones.[38] His first published work, The Cat and the Mouse (1920), was a piece for piano solo based on the Jean de La Fontaine fable "The Old Cat and the Young Mouse".[138] In Three Moods (1921), Copland's final movement is entitled "Jazzy", which he noted "is based on two jazz melodies and ought to make the old professors sit up and take notice".[139]

The Symphony for Organ and Orchestra established Copland as a serious modern composer. Musicologist Gayle Murchison cites Copland's use melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements endemic in jazz, which he would also use in his Music for the Theater and Piano Concerto to evoke an essentially "American" sound.[140] he fuses these qualities with modernist elements such as octatonic and whole-tone scales, polyrhythmic ostinato figures, and dissonant counterpoint.[140] Murchinson points out the influence of Igor Stravinsky in the work's nervous, driving rhythms and some of its harmonic language.[140] Copland in hindsight found the work too "European" as he consciously sought a more consciously American idiom to evoke in his future work.[141]

Visits to Europe in 1926 and 1927 brought him into contact with the most recent developments there, including Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, which greatly impressed him. In August 1927, while staying in Königstein, Copland wrote Poet's Song, a setting of a text by E. E. Cummings and his first composition using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. This was followed by the Symphonic Ode (1929) and the Piano Variations (1930), both of which rely on the exhaustive development of a single short motif. This procedure, which provided Copland with more formal flexibility and a greater emotional range than in his earlier music, is similar to Schoenberg's idea of "continuous variation" and, according to Copland's own admission, was influenced by the twelve-tone method, though neither work actually uses a twelve-tone row.[142]

The other major work of Copland's first period is the Short Symphony (1933). In it, music critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg writes, the "jazz-influenced dislocations of meter that are so characteristic of Copland's music of the 1920s are more prevalent than ever".[143] Compared to the Symphonic Ode, the orchestration is much leaner and the composition itself more concentrated.[143] In its combination and refinement of modernist and jazz elements, Steinberg calls the Short Symphony "a remarkable synthesis of the learned and the vernacular, and thus, in all its brevity [the work last just 15 minutes], a singularly 'complete' representation of its composer".[144] However, Copland moved from this work toward more accessible works and folk sources.

Populist works

Copland wrote El Salón México between 1932 and 1936, which met with a popular acclaim that contrasted the relative obscurity of most of his previous works.[145] Inspiration for this work came from Copland's vivid recollection of visiting the "Salon Mexico" dancehall where he witnessed a more intimate view of Mexico's nightlife.[146] Copland derived his melodic material for this piece freely from two collections of Mexican folk tunes, changing pitches and varying rhythms.[147] The use of a folk tune with variations set in a symphonic context started a pattern he repeated in many of his most successful works right on through the 1940s.[148] It also marked a shift in emphasis from a unified musical structure to the rhetorical effect the music might have on an audience and showed Copland refining a simplified, more accessible musical language.[149]

El Salón prepared Copland to write the ballet score Billy the Kid, which became, in Pollack's words, an "archetypical depiction of the legendary American West".[150] Based on a Walter Noble Burns novel, with choreography by Eugene Loring, Billy was among the first to display an American music and dance vocabulary.[151] Copland used six cowboy folk songs to provide period atmosphere and employed polyrhythm and polyharmony when not quoting these tunes literally to maintain the work's overall tone.[152][153] In this way, Copland's music worked much in the same way as the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, in that it employed elements that could be grasped easily by a mass audience.[79] The ballet premiered in New York in 1939, with Copland recalling: "I cannot remember another work of mine that was so unanimously received."[76] Along with the ballet Rodeo, Billy the Kid became, in the words of musicologist Elizabeth Crist, "the basis for Copland's reputation as a composer of Americana" and defines "an uncomplicated form of American nationalism".[154]

Copland's brand of nationalism in his ballets differed from that of European composers such as Béla Bartók, who tried to preserve the folk tones they used as close to the original as possible.[155] Copland enhanced the tunes he used with contemporary rhythms, textures and structures. In what could seem contradictory, he used complex harmonies and rhythms to simplify folk melodies and make them more accessible and familiar to his listeners.[156] Except for the Shaker tune in Appalachian Spring, Copland often syncopates traditional melodies, changes their metric patterns and note values.[157] In Billy the Kid, he derives many of the work's sparse harmonies from the implied harmonic constructions of the cowboy tunes themselves.[157]

Like Stravinsky, Copland mastered the ability to create a coherent, integrated composition from what was essentially a mosaic of divergent folk-based and original elements.[158] In that sense, Copland's Populist works such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring are not far removed from Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring.[159] Within that framework, however, Copland preserved the American atmosphere of these ballets through what musicologist Elliott Antokoletz calls "the conservative handling of open diatonic sonorities", which fosters "a pastoral quality" in the music.[160] This is especially true in the opening of Appalachian Spring, where the harmonizations remain "transparent and bare, suggested by the melodic disposition of the Shaker tune".[160] Variations which contrast to this tune in rhythm, key, texture and dynamics, fit within Copland's compositional practice of juxtaposing structural blocks.[160]

Film scores

When Hollywood beckoned concert hall composers in the 1930s with promises of better films and higher pay, Copland saw both a challenge for his abilities as a composer as well as an opportunity to expand his reputation and audience for his more serious works.[161] In a departure from other film scores of the time, Copland's work largely reflected his own style, instead of the usual borrowing from the late-Romantic period.[162] He often avoided the full orchestra, and he rejected the common practice of using a leitmotif to identify characters with their own personal themes. He instead matched a theme to the action, while avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis. Another technique Copland employed was to keep silent during intimate screen moments and only begin the music as a confirming motive toward the end of a scene.[163] Virgil Thomson wrote that the score for Of Mice and Men established "the most distinguished populist musical style yet created in America".[164] Many composers who scored for western movies, particularly between 1940 and 1960, were influenced by Copland's style, though some also followed the late Romantic "Max Steiner" approach, which was considered more conventional and desirable.[162][165]

Later works

Copland's work in the late 1940s and 1950s included use of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, a development that he had recognized but not fully embraced. He had also believed the atonality of serialized music to run counter to his desire to reach a wide audience. Copland therefore approached dodecaphony with some initial skepticism. While in Europe in 1949, he heard a number of serial works but did not admire much of it because "so often it seemed that individuality was sacrificed to the method".[166] The music of French composer Pierre Boulez showed Copland that the technique could be separated from the "old Wagnerian" aesthetic with which he had associated it previously. Subsequent exposure to the late music of Austrian composer Anton Webern and twelve-tone pieces by Swiss composer Frank Martin and Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola strengthened this opinion.[167]

Copland came to the conclusion that composing along serial lines was "nothing more than an angle of vision. Like fugal treatment, it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking, especially when applied to a series of tones that lend themselves to that treatment."[168] He began his first serial work, the "Piano Fantasy", in 1951 to fulfill a commission from the young virtuoso pianist William Kapell. The piece became one of his most challenging works, over which he labored until 1957.[169] During the work's development, in 1953, Kapell died in an aircraft crash.[137] Critics lauded the "Fantasy" when it was finally premiered, calling the piece "an outstanding addition to his own oeuvre and to contemporary piano literature" and "a tremendous achievement". Jay Rosenfield stated: "This is a new Copland to us, an artist advancing with strength and not building on the past alone."[170]

Serialism allowed Copland a synthesis of serial and non-serial practices. Before he did this, according to musicologist Joseph Straus, the philosophical and compositional difference between non-tonal composers such as Schoenberg and tonal composers like Stravinsky had been considered too wide a gulf to bridge.[171] Copland wrote that, to him, serialism pointed in two opposite directions, one "toward the extreme of total organization with electronic applications" and the other "a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism [italics Copland]".[172] The path he said he chose was the latter one, which he said, when he described his Piano Fantasy, allowed him to incorporate "elements able to be associated with the twelve-tone method and also with music tonally conceived".[172] This practice differed markedly from Schoenberg, who used his tone rows as complete statements around which to structure his compositions.[173] Copland used his rows not very differently from how he fashioned the material in his tonal pieces. He saw his rows as sources for melodies and harmonies, not as complete and independent entities, except at points in the musical structure that dictated the complete statement of a row.[173]

Even after Copland started using 12-tone techniques, he did not stick to them exclusively but went back and forth between tonal and non-tonal compositions.[174] Other late works include: Dance Panels (1959, ballet music), Something Wild (1961, his last film score, much of which would be later incorporated into his Music for a Great City), Connotations (1962, for the new Lincoln Center Philharmonic hall), Emblems (1964, for wind band), Night Thoughts (1972, for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition), and Proclamation (1982, his last work, started in 1973).[175]

Critic, writer, teacher

Copland did not consider himself a professional writer. He called his writing "a byproduct of my trade" as "a kind of salesman for contemporary music".[176] As such, he wrote prolifically about music, including pieces on music criticism analysis, on musical trends, and on his own compositions.[177] An avid lecturer and lecturer-performer, Copland eventually collected his presentation notes into three books, What to Listen for in Music (1939), Our New Music (1941), and Music and Imagination (1952).[178] In the 1980s, he collaborated with Vivian Perlis on a two-volume autobiography, Copland: 1900 Through 1942 (1984) and Copland Since 1943 (1989). Along with the composer's first-person narrative, these two books incorporate 11 "interludes" by Perlis and other sections from friends and peers.[179] Some controversy arose over the second volume's increased reliance over the first on old documents for source material. Due to the then-advanced stage of Copland's Alzheimer's and the resulting memory loss, however, this fallback to previous material was inevitable.[179] The use in both books of letters and other unpublished sources, expertly researched and organized, made them what Pollack terms "invaluable".[179]

During his career, Copland met and helped hundreds of young composers, whom he met and who were drawn to him by his continual interest and acuity into the contemporary musical scene.[180][181] This assistance came mainly outside an institutional framework—other than his summers at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, a decade of teaching and curating at The New School, and a few semesters at Harvard and the State University of New York at Buffalo, Copland operated outside an academic setting.[182] Pollack writes: "Those composers who actually studied with him were small in number and did so for only brief periods; rather, Copland helped younger composers more informally, with intermittent advice and aid."[182] This advice included focusing on expressive content rather than on purely technical points and on developing a personal style.[183][184]

Copland's willingness to foster talent extended to critiquing scores in progress that were presented to him by his peers. Composer William Schuman writes: "As a teacher, Aaron was extraordinary.... Copland would look at your music and try to understand what you were after [italics Schuman]. He didn't want to turn you into another Aaron Copland.... When he questioned something, it was in a manner that might make you want to question it yourself. Everything he said was helpful in making a younger composer realize the potential of a particular work. On the other hand, Aaron could be strongly critical."[185]

Conductor

Although Copland studied conducting in Paris in 1921, he remained essentially a self-taught conductor with a very personal style.[186] Encouraged by Igor Stravinsky to master conducting and perhaps emboldened by Carlos Chavez's efforts in Mexico, he began to direct his own works on his international travels in the 1940s.[187] By the 1950s, he was also conducting the works of other composers, and after a televised appearance where he directed the New York Philharmonic, Copland became in high demand.[188] He placed a strong emphasis in his programs on 20th-century music and lesser-known composers, and until the 1970s rarely planned concerts to feature his music exclusively.[189] Performers and audiences generally greeted his conducting appearances as positive opportunities to hear his music as the composer intended. His efforts on behalf of other composers could be penetrating but also uneven.[190]

Understated on the podium, Copland modeled his style after other composer/conductors such as Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith.[191] Critics wrote of his precision and clarity before an orchestra.[191] Observers noted that he had "none of the typical conductorial vanities".[192] Copland's unpretentious charm was appreciated by professional musicians but some criticized his "unsteady" beat and "unexciting" interpretations.[193] Koussevitzky advised him to "stay home and compose".[194] Copland at times asked for conducting advice from Bernstein, who occasionally joked that Copland could conduct his works "a little better." Bernstein also noted that Copland improved over time, and he considered him a more natural conductor than Stravinsky or Hindemith.[195][196] Eventually, Copland recorded nearly all his orchestral works with himself conducting.[197]

Legacy

Copland wrote a total of about 100 works which covered a diverse range of genres. Many of these compositions, especially orchestral pieces, have remained part of the standard American repertoire.[198] According to Pollack, Copland "had perhaps the most distinctive and identifiable musical voice produced by this country so far, an individuality ... that helped define for many what American concert music sounds like at its most characteristic and that exerted enormous influence on multitudes of contemporaries and successors."[198] His synthesis of influences and inclinations helped create the "Americanism" of his music.[199] The composer himself pointed out, in summarizing the American character of his music, "the optimistic tone", "his love of rather large canvases", "a certain directness in expression of sentiment", and "a certain songfulness".[200]

While "Copland's musical rhetoric has become iconic" and "has functioned as a mirror of America," conductor Leon Botstein suggests that the composer "helped define the modern consciousness of America's ideals, character and sense of place. The notion that his music played not a subsidiary but a central role in the shaping of the national consciousness makes Copland uniquely interesting, for the historian as well as the musician."[201] Composer Ned Rorem states, "Aaron stressed simplicity: Remove, remove, remove what isn't needed.... Aaron brought leanness to America, which set the tone for our musical language throughout [World War II]. Thanks to Aaron, American music came into its own."[202]

In the City University of New York, the Queens College's music school is named after Aaron Copland.

Awards

In popular culture

Aaron Copland's music has served as the inspiration for a number of popular modern works of music:

Copland's music was prominently featured throughout Spike Lee's 1998 film, He Got Game.

Selected works

Source:[214]

Film

  • Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait (1985). Directed by Allan Miller. Biographies in Music series. Princeton, New Jersey: The Humanities.
  • Appalachian Spring (1996). Directed by Graham Strong, Scottish Television Enterprises. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the Humanities.
  • Copland Portrait (1975). Directed by Terry Sanders, United States Information Agency. Santa Monica, California: American Film Foundation.
  • Fanfare for America: The Composer Aaron Copland (2001). Directed by Andreas Skipis. Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in association with Reiner Moritz Associates. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the Humanities & Sciences.

Written works

  • Copland, Aaron (1939; revised 1957), What to Listen for in Music, New York: McGraw-Hill, reprinted many times.
  • —— (1941; revised 1968), Our New Music (The New Music: 1900–1960, rev.), New York: W. W. Norton.
  • —— (1953), Music and Imagination, Harvard University Press.
  • —— (1960), Copland on Music, New York: Doubleday.
  • —— (2006). Music and Imagination, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58915-5.

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  203. ^ . Archived from the original on May 30, 2015. Retrieved May 30, 2015.
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  208. ^ "Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives Congressional Gold Medal Recipients". Clerk.house.gov. from the original on May 11, 2010. Retrieved May 14, 2010.
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Bibliography

Further reading

  • Berger, Arthur (1953). Aaron Copland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Copland, Aaron (1960). Copland on Music. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
  • Copland, Aaron (1968). The New Music: 1900 to 1960. New York: W. W. Norton.
  • Hall, Roger Lee (2014). Simple Gifts: Great American Folk Song. Stoughton, Massachusetts: PineTree Press.
  • Service, Tom (April 22, 2014). "Symphony Guide: Copland's Third". The Guardian. Retrieved September 6, 2016.

External links

  • The Aaron Copland Collection and the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress
  • Aaron Copland at Find a Grave
  • A Tribute to Aaron Copland at American Music Preservation.com
  • Aaron Copland Oral History collection at Oral History of American Music

Listening

  • Hoedown – Annie Moses Band
  • Audio (.smil files) of a 1980 interview for NPR

aaron, copland, this, article, needs, additional, citations, verification, please, help, improve, this, article, adding, citations, reliable, sources, unsourced, material, challenged, removed, find, sources, news, newspapers, books, scholar, jstor, december, 2. This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Aaron Copland news newspapers books scholar JSTOR December 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message Aaron Copland ˈ k oʊ p l e n d KOHP lend 1 2 November 14 1900 December 2 1990 was an American composer composition teacher writer and later a conductor of his own and other American music Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the Dean of American Composers The open slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as populist and which the composer labeled his vernacular style 3 Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring Billy the Kid and Rodeo his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony In addition to his ballets and orchestral works he produced music in many other genres including chamber music vocal works opera and film scores Aaron Copland as subject of a Young People s Concert 1970 After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark Copland traveled to Paris where he first studied with Isidor Philipp and Paul Vidal then with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger He studied three years with Boulanger whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste Determined upon his return to the U S to make his way as a full time composer Copland gave lecture recitals wrote works on commission and did some teaching and writing However he found that composing orchestral music in the modernist style which he had adopted while studying abroad was a financially contradictory approach particularly in light of the Great Depression He shifted in the mid 1930s to a more accessible musical style which mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik music for use music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes During the Depression years he traveled extensively to Europe Africa and Mexico formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chavez and began composing his signature works During the late 1940s Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenberg s use of twelve tone serial techniques After he had been exposed to the works of French composer Pierre Boulez he incorporated serial techniques into his Piano Quartet 1950 Piano Fantasy 1957 Connotations for orchestra 1961 and Inscape for orchestra 1967 Unlike Schoenberg Copland used his tone rows in much the same fashion as his tonal material as sources for melodies and harmonies rather than as complete statements in their own right except for crucial events from a structural point of view From the 1960s onward Copland s activities turned more from composing to conducting He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U S and the UK and made a series of recordings of his music primarily for Columbia Records Contents 1 Life 1 1 Early years 1 2 Study in Paris 1 3 1925 to 1935 1 4 1935 to 1950 1 5 1950s and 1960s 1 6 Later years 1 7 Personal life 2 Music 2 1 Influences 2 2 Early works 2 3 Populist works 2 4 Film scores 2 5 Later works 3 Critic writer teacher 4 Conductor 5 Legacy 6 Awards 7 In popular culture 8 Selected works 9 Film 10 Written works 11 References 11 1 Citations 11 2 Bibliography 12 Further reading 13 External links 13 1 ListeningLife EditEarly years Edit Aaron Copland School of Music Queens College part of the City University of New York Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn New York on November 14 1900 4 He was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins 5 While emigrating from Russia to the United States Copland s father Harris Morris Copland 1864 1945 lived and worked in Scotland for two to three years to pay for his boat fare to the United States It was there that Copland s father may have Anglicized his surname Kaplan to Copland though Copland himself believed for many years that the change had been due to an Ellis Island immigration official when his father entered the country 4 6 Copland was however unaware until late in his life that the family name had been Kaplan and his parents never told him this 6 Throughout his childhood Copland and his family lived above his parents Brooklyn shop H M Copland s at 628 Washington Avenue which Aaron would later describe as a kind of neighborhood Macy s 7 8 on the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue 9 and most of the children helped out in the store His father was a staunch Democrat The family members were active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes where Aaron celebrated his bar mitzvah 10 Not especially athletic the sensitive young man became an avid reader and often read Horatio Alger stories on his front steps 11 Copland s father had no musical interest His mother Sarah Mittenthal Copland 1865 1942 sang played the piano and arranged for music lessons for her children 12 Copland had four older siblings two brothers Ralph Copland 1888 1952 and Leon Copland 1890 1975 13 and two sisters Laurine Copland Marcus 1892 1972 14 15 and Josephine Copland Bergman 1894 1967 16 17 Of his siblings his oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically he was proficient on the violin His sister Laurine had the strongest connection with Aaron she gave him his first piano lessons promoted his musical education and supported him in his musical career 12 A student at the Metropolitan Opera School and a frequent opera goer Laurine also brought home libretti for Aaron to study 18 Copland attended Boys High School and in the summer went to various camps Most of his early exposure to music was at Jewish weddings and ceremonies and occasional family musicales 10 Copland began writing songs at the age of eight and a half 19 His earliest notated music about seven bars he wrote when age 11 was for an opera scenario he created and called Zenatello 19 20 From 1913 to 1917 he took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn who taught him the standard classical fare 19 Copland s first public music performance was at a Wanamaker s recital 21 22 By the age of 15 after attending a concert by Polish composer pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski Copland decided to become a composer 23 At age 16 Copland heard his first symphony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music 24 After attempts to further his music study from a correspondence course Copland took formal lessons in harmony theory and composition from Rubin Goldmark a noted teacher and composer of American music who had given George Gershwin three lessons Goldmark with whom Copland studied between 1917 and 1921 gave the young Copland a solid foundation especially in the Germanic tradition 25 As Copland stated later This was a stroke of luck for me I was spared the floundering that so many musicians have suffered through incompetent teaching 26 But Copland also commented that the maestro had little sympathy for the advanced musical idioms of the day and his approved composers ended with Richard Strauss 27 Copland s graduation piece from his studies with Goldmark was a three movement piano sonata in a Romantic style 28 But he had also composed more original and daring pieces which he did not share with his teacher 29 In addition to regularly attending the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Symphony where he heard the standard classical repertory Copland continued his musical development through an expanding circle of musical friends After graduating from high school Copland played in dance bands 30 Continuing his musical education he received further piano lessons from Victor Wittgenstein who found his student to be quiet shy well mannered and gracious in accepting criticism 31 Copland s fascination with the Russian Revolution and its promise for freeing the lower classes drew a rebuke from his father and uncles 32 In spite of that in his early adult life Copland would develop friendships with people with socialist and communist leanings 33 Study in Paris Edit Nadia Boulanger in 1925 Copland s passion for the latest European music plus glowing letters from his friend Aaron Schaffer inspired him to go to Paris for further study 34 An article in Musical America about a summer school program for American musicians at the Fontainebleau School of Music offered by the French government encouraged Copland still further 35 His father wanted him to go to college but his mother s vote in the family conference allowed him to give Paris a try On arriving in France he studied at university with pianist and pedagog Isidor Philipp and composer Paul Vidal When Copland found Vidal too much like Goldmark he switched at the suggestion of a fellow student to Nadia Boulanger then aged 34 36 He had initial reservations No one to my knowledge had ever before thought of studying with a woman 37 She interviewed him and recalled later One could tell his talent immediately 38 Boulanger had as many as 40 students at once and employed a formal regimen that Copland had to follow Copland found her incisive mind much to his liking and found her ability to critique a composition impeccable Boulanger could always find the weak spot in a place you suspected was weak She also could tell you why it was weak italics Copland 39 He wrote in a letter to his brother Ralph This intellectual Amazon is not only professor at the Conservatoire is not only familiar with all music from Bach to Stravinsky but is prepared for anything worse in the way of dissonance But make no mistake A more charming womanly woman never lived 40 Copland later wrote that it was wonderful for me to find a teacher with such openness of mind while at the same time she held firm ideas of right and wrong in musical matters The confidence she had in my talents and her belief in me were at the very least flattering and more they were crucial to my development at this time of my career 41 Though he had planned on only one year abroad he studied with her for three years finding that her eclectic approach inspired his own broad musical taste Along with his studies with Boulanger Copland took classes in French language and history at the Sorbonne attended plays and frequented Shakespeare and Company the English language bookstore that was a gathering place for expatriate American writers 42 Among this group in the heady cultural atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s were Paul Bowles Ernest Hemingway Sinclair Lewis Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as well as artists like Pablo Picasso Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani 43 Also influential on the new music were the French intellectuals Marcel Proust Paul Valery Jean Paul Sartre and Andre Gide the latter cited by Copland as being his personal favorite and most read 44 Travels to Italy Austria and Germany rounded out Copland s musical education During his stay in Paris Copland began writing musical critiques the first on Gabriel Faure which helped spread his fame and stature in the music community 45 1925 to 1935 Edit Serge Koussevitzky was a mentor and supporter of Copland After a fruitful stay in Paris Copland returned to America optimistic and enthusiastic about the future determined to make his way as a full time composer 46 He rented a studio apartment on New York City s Upper West Side in the Empire Hotel close to Carnegie Hall and other musical venues and publishers He remained in that area for the next 30 years later moving to Westchester County New York Copland lived frugally and survived financially with help from two 2 500 Guggenheim Fellowships in 1925 and 1926 each of the two equivalent to 38 629 in 2021 47 Lecture recitals awards appointments and small commissions plus some teaching writing and personal loans kept him afloat in the subsequent years through World War II 48 Also important especially during the Depression were wealthy patrons who underwrote performances helped pay for publication of works and promoted musical events and composers 48 Among those mentors was Serge Koussevitzky the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and known as a champion of new music Koussevitsky would prove to be very influential in Copland s life and was perhaps the second most important figure in Copland s career after Boulanger 49 Beginning with the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra 1924 Koussevitzky would perform more of Copland s music than that of any the composer s contemporaries at a time when other conductors were programming only a few of Copland s works 50 Soon after his return to the United States Copland was exposed to the artistic circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz While Copland did not care for Stieglitz s domineering attitude he did admire his work and took to heart Stieglitz s conviction that American artists should reflect the ideas of American Democracy 51 This ideal influenced not just the composer but also a generation of artists and photographers including Paul Strand Edward Weston Ansel Adams Georgia O Keeffe and Walker Evans 51 Evans s photographs inspired portions of Copland s opera The Tender Land 52 In his quest to take up the slogan of the Stieglitz group Affirm America Copland found only the music of Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives upon which to draw 53 Without what Copland called a usable past in American classical composers he looked toward jazz and popular music something he had already started to do while in Europe 54 In the 1920s Gershwin Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong were in the forefront of American popular music and jazz 55 By the end of the decade Copland felt his music was going in a more abstract less jazz oriented direction 56 However as large swing bands such as those of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller became popular in the 1930s Copland took a renewed interest in the genre 57 Copland admired the work and philosophy of Alfred Stieglitz Inspired by the example of Les Six in France Copland sought out contemporaries such as Roger Sessions Roy Harris Virgil Thomson and Walter Piston and quickly established himself as a spokesperson for composers of his generation 58 He also helped found the Copland Sessions Concerts to showcase these composers chamber works to new audiences 59 Copland s relationship with these men who became known as commando unit was one of both support and rivalry and he played a key role in keeping them together until after World War II 60 He also was generous with his time with nearly every American young composer he met during his life later earning the title Dean of American Music 61 With the knowledge he had gained from his studies in Paris Copland came into demand as a lecturer and writer on contemporary European classical music 62 From 1927 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1938 he taught classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City 62 Eventually his New School lectures would appear in the form of two books What to Listen for in Music 1937 revised 1957 and Our New Music 1940 revised 1968 and retitled The New Music 1900 1960 62 During this period Copland also wrote regularly for The New York Times The Musical Quarterly and a number of other journals These articles would appear in 1969 as the book Copland on Music 62 During his time at The New School Copland was active as a presenter and curator using The New School as a key location to present a wide range of composers and artists from the United States as well as across the globe Copland s compositions in the early 1920s reflected the modernist attitude that prevailed among intellectuals that the arts need be accessible to only a cadre of the enlightened and that the masses would come to appreciate their efforts over time However mounting troubles with the Symphonic Ode 1929 and Short Symphony 1933 caused Copland to rethink this approach It was financially contradictory particularly during the Depression Avant garde music had lost what cultural historian Morris Dickstein calls its buoyant experimental edge and the national mood toward it had changed 63 As biographer Howard Pollack points out 64 Copland observed two trends among composers in the 1930s first a continuing attempt to simplify their musical language and second a desire to make contact with as wide an audience as possible Since 1927 he had been in the process of simplifying or at least paring down his musical language though in such a manner as to sometimes have the effect paradoxically of estranging audiences and performers By 1933 he began to find ways to make his starkly personal language accessible to a surprisingly large number of people In many ways this shift mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik music for use as composers sought to create music that could serve a utilitarian as well as artistic purpose This approach encompassed two trends first music that students could easily learn and second music which would have wider appeal such as incidental music for plays movies radio etc 65 Toward this end Copland provided musical advice and inspiration to The Group Theatre a company which also attracted Stella Adler Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg 66 Philosophically an outgrowth of Stieglitz and his ideals the Group focused on socially relevant plays by the American authors 67 Through it and later his work in film Copland met several major American playwrights including Thornton Wilder William Inge Arthur Miller and Edward Albee and considered projects with all of them 68 1935 to 1950 Edit Opening Appalachian Spring original version for 13 instruments source Sample of the opening movement in Copland s ballet Problems playing this file See media help Around 1935 Copland began to compose musical pieces for young audiences in accordance with the first goal of American Gebrauchsmusik 69 These works included piano pieces The Young Pioneers and an opera The Second Hurricane 70 During the Depression years Copland traveled extensively to Europe Africa and Mexico He formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chavez and would return often to Mexico for working vacations conducting engagements 71 During his initial visit to Mexico Copland began composing the first of his signature works El Salon Mexico which he completed in 1936 In it and in The Second Hurricane Copland began experimenting as he phrased it with a simpler more accessible style 72 This and other incidental commissions fulfilled the second goal of American Gebrauchsmusik creating music of wide appeal Carlos Chavez in 1937 Concurrent with The Second Hurricane Copland composed for radio broadcast Prairie Journal on a commission from the Columbia Broadcast System 73 This was one of his first pieces to convey the landscape of the American West 74 This emphasis on the frontier carried over to his ballet Billy the Kid 1938 which along with El Salon Mexico became his first widespread public success 75 76 Copland s ballet music established him as an authentic composer of American music much as Stravinsky s ballet scores connected the composer with Russian music and came at an opportune time 77 He helped fill a vacuum for American choreographers to fill their dance repertory 78 and tapped into an artistic groundswell from the motion pictures of Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire to the ballets of George Balanchine and Martha Graham to both democratize and Americanize dance as an art form 79 In 1938 Copland helped form the American Composers Alliance to promote and publish American contemporary classical music Copland was president of the organization from 1939 to 1945 24 In 1939 Copland completed his first two Hollywood film scores for Of Mice and Men and Our Town and composed the radio score John Henry based on the folk ballad 80 While these works and others like them that would follow were accepted by the listening public at large detractors accused Copland of pandering to the masses 81 Music critic Paul Rosenfeld for one warned in 1939 that Copland was standing in the fork in the highroad the two branches of which lead respectively to popular and artistic success 82 Even some of the composer s friends such as composer Arthur Berger were confused about Copland s simpler style 83 One composer David Diamond went so far as to lecture Copland By having sold out to the mongrel commercialists half way already the danger is going to be wider for you and I beg you dear Aaron don t sell out entirely yet 84 Copland s response was that his writing as he did and in as many genres was his response to how the Depression had affected society as well as to new media and the audiences made available by these new media 85 As he himself phrased it The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art 82 Initial trumpet notes from Fanfare for the Common Man Memorial Garden Tanglewood The 1940s were arguably Copland s most productive years and some of his works from this period would cement his worldwide fame His ballet scores for Rodeo 1942 and Appalachian Spring 1944 were huge successes His pieces Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man became patriotic standards Also important was the Third Symphony Composed in a two year period from 1944 to 1946 it became Copland s best known symphony 86 The Clarinet Concerto 1948 scored for solo clarinet strings harp and piano was a commission piece for bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman and a complement to Copland s earlier jazz influenced work the Piano Concerto 1926 87 His Four Piano Blues is an introspective composition with a jazz influence 88 Copland finished the 1940s with two film scores one for William Wyler s The Heiress and one for the film adaptation of John Steinbeck s novel The Red Pony 89 In 1949 Copland returned to Europe where he found French composer Pierre Boulez dominating the group of post war avant garde composers there 90 He also met with proponents of twelve tone technique based on the works of Arnold Schoenberg and found himself interested in adapting serial methods to his own musical voice 1950s and 1960s Edit Aaron Copland in 1962 from a television special In 1950 Copland received a U S Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship to study in Rome which he did the following year Around this time he also composed his Piano Quartet adopting Schoenberg s twelve tone method of composition and Old American Songs 1950 the first set of which was premiered by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten the second by William Warfield 91 During the 1951 52 academic year Copland gave a series of lectures under the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University These lectures were published as the book Music and Imagination 92 Because of his leftist views which had included his support of the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1936 presidential election and his strong support of Progressive Party candidate Henry A Wallace during the 1948 presidential election Copland was investigated by the FBI during the Red scare of the 1950s He was included on an FBI list of 151 artists thought to have Communist associations and found himself blacklisted with A Lincoln Portrait withdrawn from the 1953 inaugural concert for President Eisenhower 93 Called later that year to a private hearing at the United States Capitol in Washington D C Copland was questioned by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn about his lecturing abroad and his affiliations with various organizations and events 94 In the process McCarthy and Cohn neglected completely Copland s works which made a virtue of American values 95 Outraged by the accusations many members of the musical community held up Copland s music as a banner of his patriotism The investigations ceased in 1955 and were closed in 1975 96 The McCarthy probes did not seriously affect Copland s career and international artistic reputation taxing of his time energy and emotional state as they might have been 96 Nevertheless beginning in 1950 Copland who had been appalled at Stalin s persecution of Shostakovich and other artists began resigning from participation in leftist groups 97 Copland Pollack states stayed particularly concerned about the role of the artist in society 98 He decried the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union and in his 1954 Norton lecture he asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet Communism deprived artists of the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong He began to vote Democratic first for Stevenson and then for Kennedy 97 Potentially more damaging for Copland was a sea change in artistic tastes away from the Populist mores that infused his work of the 1930s and 40s 63 Beginning in the 1940s intellectuals assailed Popular Front culture to which Copland s music was linked and labeled it in Dickstein s words as hopelessly middlebrow a dumbing down of art into toothless entertainment 63 They often linked their disdain for Populist art with technology new media and mass audiences in other words the areas of radio television and motion pictures for which Copland either had or soon would write music as well as his popular ballets 63 While these attacks actually began at the end of the 1930s with the writings of Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald for Partisan Review they were based in anti Stalinist politics and would accelerate in the decades following World War II 63 Despite any difficulties that his suspected Communist sympathies might have posed Copland traveled extensively during the 1950s and early 1960s to observe the avant garde styles of Europe hear compositions by Soviet composers not well known in the West and experience the new school of Polish music 99 While in Japan he was taken with the work of Tōru Takemitsu and began a correspondence with him that would last over the next decade 100 Copland revised his text The New Music with comments on the styles that he encountered 101 He found much of what he heard dull and impersonal 102 Electronic music seemed to have a depressing sameness of sound while aleatoric music was for those who enjoy teetering on the edge of chaos 103 As he summarized I ve spent most of my life trying to get the right note in the right place Just throwing it open to chance seems to go against my natural instincts 103 In 1952 Copland received a commission from the League of Composers funded by a grant from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to write an opera for television 104 While Copland was aware of the potential pitfalls of that genre which included weak libretti and demanding production values he had also been thinking about writing an opera since the 1940s 104 Among the subjects he had considered were Theodore Dreiser s An American Tragedy and Frank Norris s McTeague 104 He finally settled on James Agee s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which seemed appropriate for the more intimate setting of television and could also be used in the college trade with more schools mounting operas than they had before World War II 104 The resulting opera The Tender Land was written in two acts but later expanded to three As Copland feared when the opera premiered in 1954 critics found the libretto to be weak 105 In spite of its flaws the opera became one of the few American operas to enter the standard repertory 105 In 1957 1958 and 1976 Copland was the Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival a classical and contemporary music festival in Ojai California 106 For the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial Copland composed Ceremonial Fanfare for Brass Ensemble to accompany the exhibition Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries Leonard Bernstein Piston William Schuman and Thomson also composed pieces for the Museum s Centennial exhibitions 107 Bust of Aaron Copland Tanglewood Later years Edit From the 1960s onward Copland turned increasingly to conducting Though not enamored with the prospect he found himself without new ideas for composition saying It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet 108 He became a frequent guest conductor in the United States and the United Kingdom and made a series of recordings of his music primarily for Columbia Records In 1960 RCA Victor released Copland s recordings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra of the orchestral suites from Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land these recordings were later reissued on CD as were most of Copland s Columbia recordings by Sony Rock Hill Copland s home in Cortlandt Manor New York now a National Historic Landmark From 1960 until his death Copland resided at Cortlandt Manor New York Known as Rock Hill his home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and further designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008 109 Copland s health deteriorated through the 1980s and he died of Alzheimer s disease and respiratory failure on December 2 1990 in North Tarrytown New York now Sleepy Hollow Following his death his ashes were scattered over the Tanglewood Music Center near Lenox Massachusetts 110 Much of his large estate was bequeathed to the creation of the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers which bestows over 600 000 per year to performing groups 111 Personal life Edit Copland never enrolled as a member of any political party Nevertheless he inherited a considerable interest in civic and world events from his father 112 His views were generally progressive and he had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular Front including Odets 113 Early in his life Copland developed in Pollack s words a deep admiration for the works of Frank Norris Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair all socialists whose novels passionately excoriated capitalism s physical and emotional toll on the average man 114 Even after the McCarthy hearings he remained a committed opponent of militarism and the Cold War which he regarded as having been instigated by the United States 115 He condemned it as almost worse for art than the real thing Throw the artist into a mood of suspicion ill will and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he ll create nothing 116 While Copland had various encounters with organized religious thought which influenced some of his early compositions he remained agnostic 117 He was close with Zionism during the Popular Front movement when it was endorsed by the left Pollack writes 118 Like many contemporaries Copland regarded Judaism alternately in terms of religion culture and race but he showed relatively little involvement in any aspect of his Jewish heritage At the same time he had ties to Christianity identifying with such profoundly Christian writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins and often spending Christmas Day at home with a special dinner with close friends In general his music seemed to evoke Protestant hymns as often as it did Jewish chant Copland characteristically found connections among various religious traditions But if Copland was discreet about his Jewish background he never hid it either Victor Kraft 1935 Pollack states that Copland was gay and that the composer came to an early acceptance and understanding of his sexuality 119 Like many at that time Copland guarded his privacy especially in regard to his homosexuality He provided few written details about his private life and even after the Stonewall riots of 1969 showed no inclination to come out 120 However he was one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his intimates 121 They tended to be talented younger men involved in the arts and the age gap between them and the composer widened as he grew older 122 Most became enduring friends after a few years and in Pollack s words remained a primary source of companionship 120 Among Copland s love affairs were ones with photographer Victor Kraft artist Alvin Ross pianist Paul Moor dancer Erik Johns composer John Brodbin Kennedy 123 and painter Prentiss Taylor 124 125 Victor Kraft became a constant in Copland s life though their romance might have ended by 1944 126 Originally a violin prodigy when the composer met him in 1932 Kraft gave up music to pursue a career in photography in part due to Copland s urging 127 Kraft would leave and re enter Copland s life often bringing much stress with him as his behavior became increasingly erratic sometimes confrontational 128 Kraft fathered a child to whom Copland later provided financial security through a bequest from his estate 129 Music EditSee also List of compositions by Aaron Copland Vivian Perlis who collaborated with Copland on his autobiography writes Copland s method of composing was to write down fragments of musical ideas as they came to him When he needed a piece he would turn to these ideas his gold nuggets 130 if one or more of these nuggets looked promising he would then write a piano sketch and eventually work on them at the keyboard 130 The piano Perlis writes was so integral to his composing that it permeated his compositional style not only in the frequent use in the instrument but in more subtle and complex ways 130 His habit of turning to the keyboard tended to embarrass Copland until he learned that Stravinsky also did so 130 Copland would not consider the specific instrumentation for a piece until it was complete and notated 130 Nor according to Pollack did he generally work in linear fashion from beginning to end of a composition Instead he tended to compose whole sections in no particular order and surmise their eventual sequence after all those parts were complete much like assembling a collage 131 Copland himself admitted I don t compose I assemble materials 132 Many times he included material he had written years earlier 132 If the situation dictated as it did with his film scores Copland could work quickly Otherwise he tended to write slowly whenever possible 132 Even with this deliberation Copland considered composition in his words the product of the emotions which included self expression and self discovery 132 Influences Edit While Copland s earliest musical inclinations as a teenager ran toward Chopin Debussy Verdi and the Russian composers Copland s teacher and mentor Nadia Boulanger became his most important influence 133 Copland especially admired Boulanger s total grasp of all classical music and he was encouraged to experiment and develop a clarity of conception and elegance in proportion Following her model he studied all periods of classical music and all forms from madrigals to symphonies This breadth of vision led Copland to compose music for numerous settings orchestra opera solo piano small ensemble art song ballet theater and film Boulanger particularly emphasized la grande ligne the long line a sense of forward motion the feeling for inevitability for the creating of an entire piece that could be thought of as a functioning entity 133 During his studies with Boulanger in Paris Copland was excited to be so close to the new post Impressionistic French music of Ravel Roussel and Satie as well as Les Six a group that included Milhaud Poulenc and Honegger Webern Berg and Bartok also impressed him Copland was insatiable in seeking out the newest European music whether in concerts score reading or heated debate These moderns were discarding the old laws of composition and experimenting with new forms harmonies and rhythms and including the use of jazz and quarter tone music 134 Milhaud was Copland s inspiration for some of his earlier jazzy works He was also exposed to Schoenberg and admired his earlier atonal pieces thinking Schoenberg s Pierrot lunaire above all others 135 Copland named Igor Stravinsky as his hero and his favorite 20th century composer 135 Copland especially admired Stravinsky s jagged and uncouth rhythmic effects bold use of dissonance and hard dry crackling sonority 135 Another inspiration for much of Copland s music was jazz Although familiar with jazz back in America having listened to it and also played it in bands he fully realized its potential while traveling in Austria The impression of jazz one receives in a foreign country is totally unlike the impression of such music heard in one s own country when I heard jazz played in Vienna it was like hearing it for the first time 113 He also found that the distance from his native country helped him see the United States more clearly Beginning in 1923 he employed jazzy elements in his classical music but by the late 1930s he moved on to Latin and American folk tunes in his more successful pieces 136 Although his early focus of jazz gave way to other influences Copland continued to make use of jazz in more subtle ways in later works 136 Copland s work from the late 1940s onward included experimentation with Schoenberg s twelve tone system resulting in two major works the Piano Quartet 1950 and the Piano Fantasy 1957 137 Early works Edit Copland s compositions before leaving for Paris were mainly short works for piano and art songs inspired by Liszt and Debussy In them he experimented with ambiguous beginnings and endings rapid key changes and the frequent use of tritones 38 His first published work The Cat and the Mouse 1920 was a piece for piano solo based on the Jean de La Fontaine fable The Old Cat and the Young Mouse 138 In Three Moods 1921 Copland s final movement is entitled Jazzy which he noted is based on two jazz melodies and ought to make the old professors sit up and take notice 139 The Symphony for Organ and Orchestra established Copland as a serious modern composer Musicologist Gayle Murchison cites Copland s use melodic harmonic and rhythmic elements endemic in jazz which he would also use in his Music for the Theater and Piano Concerto to evoke an essentially American sound 140 he fuses these qualities with modernist elements such as octatonic and whole tone scales polyrhythmic ostinato figures and dissonant counterpoint 140 Murchinson points out the influence of Igor Stravinsky in the work s nervous driving rhythms and some of its harmonic language 140 Copland in hindsight found the work too European as he consciously sought a more consciously American idiom to evoke in his future work 141 Visits to Europe in 1926 and 1927 brought him into contact with the most recent developments there including Webern s Five Pieces for Orchestra which greatly impressed him In August 1927 while staying in Konigstein Copland wrote Poet s Song a setting of a text by E E Cummings and his first composition using Schoenberg s twelve tone technique This was followed by the Symphonic Ode 1929 and the Piano Variations 1930 both of which rely on the exhaustive development of a single short motif This procedure which provided Copland with more formal flexibility and a greater emotional range than in his earlier music is similar to Schoenberg s idea of continuous variation and according to Copland s own admission was influenced by the twelve tone method though neither work actually uses a twelve tone row 142 The other major work of Copland s first period is the Short Symphony 1933 In it music critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg writes the jazz influenced dislocations of meter that are so characteristic of Copland s music of the 1920s are more prevalent than ever 143 Compared to the Symphonic Ode the orchestration is much leaner and the composition itself more concentrated 143 In its combination and refinement of modernist and jazz elements Steinberg calls the Short Symphony a remarkable synthesis of the learned and the vernacular and thus in all its brevity the work last just 15 minutes a singularly complete representation of its composer 144 However Copland moved from this work toward more accessible works and folk sources Populist works Edit Copland wrote El Salon Mexico between 1932 and 1936 which met with a popular acclaim that contrasted the relative obscurity of most of his previous works 145 Inspiration for this work came from Copland s vivid recollection of visiting the Salon Mexico dancehall where he witnessed a more intimate view of Mexico s nightlife 146 Copland derived his melodic material for this piece freely from two collections of Mexican folk tunes changing pitches and varying rhythms 147 The use of a folk tune with variations set in a symphonic context started a pattern he repeated in many of his most successful works right on through the 1940s 148 It also marked a shift in emphasis from a unified musical structure to the rhetorical effect the music might have on an audience and showed Copland refining a simplified more accessible musical language 149 El Salon prepared Copland to write the ballet score Billy the Kid which became in Pollack s words an archetypical depiction of the legendary American West 150 Based on a Walter Noble Burns novel with choreography by Eugene Loring Billy was among the first to display an American music and dance vocabulary 151 Copland used six cowboy folk songs to provide period atmosphere and employed polyrhythm and polyharmony when not quoting these tunes literally to maintain the work s overall tone 152 153 In this way Copland s music worked much in the same way as the murals of Thomas Hart Benton in that it employed elements that could be grasped easily by a mass audience 79 The ballet premiered in New York in 1939 with Copland recalling I cannot remember another work of mine that was so unanimously received 76 Along with the ballet Rodeo Billy the Kid became in the words of musicologist Elizabeth Crist the basis for Copland s reputation as a composer of Americana and defines an uncomplicated form of American nationalism 154 Copland s brand of nationalism in his ballets differed from that of European composers such as Bela Bartok who tried to preserve the folk tones they used as close to the original as possible 155 Copland enhanced the tunes he used with contemporary rhythms textures and structures In what could seem contradictory he used complex harmonies and rhythms to simplify folk melodies and make them more accessible and familiar to his listeners 156 Except for the Shaker tune in Appalachian Spring Copland often syncopates traditional melodies changes their metric patterns and note values 157 In Billy the Kid he derives many of the work s sparse harmonies from the implied harmonic constructions of the cowboy tunes themselves 157 Like Stravinsky Copland mastered the ability to create a coherent integrated composition from what was essentially a mosaic of divergent folk based and original elements 158 In that sense Copland s Populist works such as Billy the Kid Rodeo Appalachian Spring are not far removed from Stravinsky s ballet The Rite of Spring 159 Within that framework however Copland preserved the American atmosphere of these ballets through what musicologist Elliott Antokoletz calls the conservative handling of open diatonic sonorities which fosters a pastoral quality in the music 160 This is especially true in the opening of Appalachian Spring where the harmonizations remain transparent and bare suggested by the melodic disposition of the Shaker tune 160 Variations which contrast to this tune in rhythm key texture and dynamics fit within Copland s compositional practice of juxtaposing structural blocks 160 Film scores Edit When Hollywood beckoned concert hall composers in the 1930s with promises of better films and higher pay Copland saw both a challenge for his abilities as a composer as well as an opportunity to expand his reputation and audience for his more serious works 161 In a departure from other film scores of the time Copland s work largely reflected his own style instead of the usual borrowing from the late Romantic period 162 He often avoided the full orchestra and he rejected the common practice of using a leitmotif to identify characters with their own personal themes He instead matched a theme to the action while avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis Another technique Copland employed was to keep silent during intimate screen moments and only begin the music as a confirming motive toward the end of a scene 163 Virgil Thomson wrote that the score for Of Mice and Men established the most distinguished populist musical style yet created in America 164 Many composers who scored for western movies particularly between 1940 and 1960 were influenced by Copland s style though some also followed the late Romantic Max Steiner approach which was considered more conventional and desirable 162 165 Later works Edit Copland s work in the late 1940s and 1950s included use of Schoenberg s twelve tone system a development that he had recognized but not fully embraced He had also believed the atonality of serialized music to run counter to his desire to reach a wide audience Copland therefore approached dodecaphony with some initial skepticism While in Europe in 1949 he heard a number of serial works but did not admire much of it because so often it seemed that individuality was sacrificed to the method 166 The music of French composer Pierre Boulez showed Copland that the technique could be separated from the old Wagnerian aesthetic with which he had associated it previously Subsequent exposure to the late music of Austrian composer Anton Webern and twelve tone pieces by Swiss composer Frank Martin and Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola strengthened this opinion 167 Copland came to the conclusion that composing along serial lines was nothing more than an angle of vision Like fugal treatment it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking especially when applied to a series of tones that lend themselves to that treatment 168 He began his first serial work the Piano Fantasy in 1951 to fulfill a commission from the young virtuoso pianist William Kapell The piece became one of his most challenging works over which he labored until 1957 169 During the work s development in 1953 Kapell died in an aircraft crash 137 Critics lauded the Fantasy when it was finally premiered calling the piece an outstanding addition to his own oeuvre and to contemporary piano literature and a tremendous achievement Jay Rosenfield stated This is a new Copland to us an artist advancing with strength and not building on the past alone 170 Serialism allowed Copland a synthesis of serial and non serial practices Before he did this according to musicologist Joseph Straus the philosophical and compositional difference between non tonal composers such as Schoenberg and tonal composers like Stravinsky had been considered too wide a gulf to bridge 171 Copland wrote that to him serialism pointed in two opposite directions one toward the extreme of total organization with electronic applications and the other a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism italics Copland 172 The path he said he chose was the latter one which he said when he described his Piano Fantasy allowed him to incorporate elements able to be associated with the twelve tone method and also with music tonally conceived 172 This practice differed markedly from Schoenberg who used his tone rows as complete statements around which to structure his compositions 173 Copland used his rows not very differently from how he fashioned the material in his tonal pieces He saw his rows as sources for melodies and harmonies not as complete and independent entities except at points in the musical structure that dictated the complete statement of a row 173 Even after Copland started using 12 tone techniques he did not stick to them exclusively but went back and forth between tonal and non tonal compositions 174 Other late works include Dance Panels 1959 ballet music Something Wild 1961 his last film score much of which would be later incorporated into his Music for a Great City Connotations 1962 for the new Lincoln Center Philharmonic hall Emblems 1964 for wind band Night Thoughts 1972 for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and Proclamation 1982 his last work started in 1973 175 Critic writer teacher EditCopland did not consider himself a professional writer He called his writing a byproduct of my trade as a kind of salesman for contemporary music 176 As such he wrote prolifically about music including pieces on music criticism analysis on musical trends and on his own compositions 177 An avid lecturer and lecturer performer Copland eventually collected his presentation notes into three books What to Listen for in Music 1939 Our New Music 1941 and Music and Imagination 1952 178 In the 1980s he collaborated with Vivian Perlis on a two volume autobiography Copland 1900 Through 1942 1984 and Copland Since 1943 1989 Along with the composer s first person narrative these two books incorporate 11 interludes by Perlis and other sections from friends and peers 179 Some controversy arose over the second volume s increased reliance over the first on old documents for source material Due to the then advanced stage of Copland s Alzheimer s and the resulting memory loss however this fallback to previous material was inevitable 179 The use in both books of letters and other unpublished sources expertly researched and organized made them what Pollack terms invaluable 179 During his career Copland met and helped hundreds of young composers whom he met and who were drawn to him by his continual interest and acuity into the contemporary musical scene 180 181 This assistance came mainly outside an institutional framework other than his summers at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood a decade of teaching and curating at The New School and a few semesters at Harvard and the State University of New York at Buffalo Copland operated outside an academic setting 182 Pollack writes Those composers who actually studied with him were small in number and did so for only brief periods rather Copland helped younger composers more informally with intermittent advice and aid 182 This advice included focusing on expressive content rather than on purely technical points and on developing a personal style 183 184 Copland s willingness to foster talent extended to critiquing scores in progress that were presented to him by his peers Composer William Schuman writes As a teacher Aaron was extraordinary Copland would look at your music and try to understand what you were after italics Schuman He didn t want to turn you into another Aaron Copland When he questioned something it was in a manner that might make you want to question it yourself Everything he said was helpful in making a younger composer realize the potential of a particular work On the other hand Aaron could be strongly critical 185 Conductor EditAlthough Copland studied conducting in Paris in 1921 he remained essentially a self taught conductor with a very personal style 186 Encouraged by Igor Stravinsky to master conducting and perhaps emboldened by Carlos Chavez s efforts in Mexico he began to direct his own works on his international travels in the 1940s 187 By the 1950s he was also conducting the works of other composers and after a televised appearance where he directed the New York Philharmonic Copland became in high demand 188 He placed a strong emphasis in his programs on 20th century music and lesser known composers and until the 1970s rarely planned concerts to feature his music exclusively 189 Performers and audiences generally greeted his conducting appearances as positive opportunities to hear his music as the composer intended His efforts on behalf of other composers could be penetrating but also uneven 190 Understated on the podium Copland modeled his style after other composer conductors such as Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith 191 Critics wrote of his precision and clarity before an orchestra 191 Observers noted that he had none of the typical conductorial vanities 192 Copland s unpretentious charm was appreciated by professional musicians but some criticized his unsteady beat and unexciting interpretations 193 Koussevitzky advised him to stay home and compose 194 Copland at times asked for conducting advice from Bernstein who occasionally joked that Copland could conduct his works a little better Bernstein also noted that Copland improved over time and he considered him a more natural conductor than Stravinsky or Hindemith 195 196 Eventually Copland recorded nearly all his orchestral works with himself conducting 197 Legacy EditFor Copland s notable students see List of music students by teacher C to F Aaron Copland Copland wrote a total of about 100 works which covered a diverse range of genres Many of these compositions especially orchestral pieces have remained part of the standard American repertoire 198 According to Pollack Copland had perhaps the most distinctive and identifiable musical voice produced by this country so far an individuality that helped define for many what American concert music sounds like at its most characteristic and that exerted enormous influence on multitudes of contemporaries and successors 198 His synthesis of influences and inclinations helped create the Americanism of his music 199 The composer himself pointed out in summarizing the American character of his music the optimistic tone his love of rather large canvases a certain directness in expression of sentiment and a certain songfulness 200 While Copland s musical rhetoric has become iconic and has functioned as a mirror of America conductor Leon Botstein suggests that the composer helped define the modern consciousness of America s ideals character and sense of place The notion that his music played not a subsidiary but a central role in the shaping of the national consciousness makes Copland uniquely interesting for the historian as well as the musician 201 Composer Ned Rorem states Aaron stressed simplicity Remove remove remove what isn t needed Aaron brought leanness to America which set the tone for our musical language throughout World War II Thanks to Aaron American music came into its own 202 In the City University of New York the Queens College s music school is named after Aaron Copland Awards EditOn September 14 1964 Aaron Copland was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B Johnson In honor of Copland s vast influence on American music on December 15 1970 he was awarded the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit 203 Beginning in 1964 this award established to bring a declaration of appreciation to an individual each year that has made a significant contribution to the world of music and helped to create a climate in which our talents may find valid expression Copland was awarded the New York Music Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in composition for Appalachian Spring 204 His scores for Of Mice and Men 1939 Our Town 1940 and The North Star 1943 all received Academy Award nominations while The Heiress won Best Music in 1950 205 In 1961 Aaron Copland was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal by the MacDowell Colony where he was a fellow eight times 1925 1928 1935 1938 1946 1950 1952 1956 206 He was a recipient of Yale University s Sanford Medal 207 In 1986 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts He was awarded a special Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in 1987 208 He was made an honorary member of the Alpha Upsilon chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1961 and was awarded the fraternity s Charles E Lutton Man of Music Award in 1970 209 In popular culture EditAaron Copland s music has served as the inspiration for a number of popular modern works of music Hoedown Annie Moses Band 210 Fanfare for the Common Man Emerson Lake amp Palmer 211 The Greatest Man That Ever Lived Variations on a Shaker Hymn Weezer partially based upon Variations on a Shaker Hymn 212 Copland s music was prominently featured throughout Spike Lee s 1998 film He Got Game Selected works EditMain article List of compositions by Aaron Copland Scherzo Humoristique The Cat and the Mouse 1920 Four Motets 1921 Three Moods piano solo 1921 Passacaglia piano solo 1922 Symphony for Organ and Orchestra 1924 Music for the Theater 1925 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra 1926 Symphonic Ode 1927 1929 Piano Variations 1930 Grohg ballet 1925 32 Dance Symphony 1929 using music from Grohg 213 Short Symphony Symphony No 2 1931 33 Statements for Orchestra 1932 35 The Second Hurricane play opera for high school performance 1936 El Salon Mexico 1936 Billy the Kid ballet 1938 Quiet City 1940 Our Town 1940 Piano Sonata 1939 41 An Outdoor Overture written for high school orchestras 1938 and transcribed for wind band 1941 Fanfare for the Common Man 1942 Lincoln Portrait 1942 Rodeo ballet 1942 Danzon cubano 1942 Music for the Movies 1942 Sonata for violin and piano 1943 Appalachian Spring ballet 1944 Third Symphony 1944 1946 In the Beginning 1947 The Red Pony 1948 Clarinet Concerto commissioned by Benny Goodman 1947 1948 Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson 1950 Piano Quartet 1950 Old American Songs Book One 1950 Book Two 1952 The Tender Land opera 1954 Canticle of Freedom 1955 Orchestral Variations orchestration of Piano Variations 1957 Piano Fantasy 1957 Dance Panels ballet 1959 revised 1962 Connotations 1962 Down A Country Lane 1962 Music for a Great City 1964 based on his score of the 1961 film Something Wild Emblems for wind band 1964 orchestral transcription by D Wilson Ochoa 2006 Inscape 1967 Duo for flute and piano 1971 Night Thoughts 1972 Three Latin American Sketches 1972 Source 214 Film EditAaron Copland A Self Portrait 1985 Directed by Allan Miller Biographies in Music series Princeton New Jersey The Humanities Appalachian Spring 1996 Directed by Graham Strong Scottish Television Enterprises Princeton New Jersey Films for the Humanities Copland Portrait 1975 Directed by Terry Sanders United States Information Agency Santa Monica California American Film Foundation Fanfare for America The Composer Aaron Copland 2001 Directed by Andreas Skipis Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in association with Reiner Moritz Associates Princeton New Jersey Films for the Humanities amp Sciences Written works EditCopland Aaron 1939 revised 1957 What to Listen for in Music New York McGraw Hill reprinted many times 1941 revised 1968 Our New Music The New Music 1900 1960 rev New York W W Norton 1953 Music and Imagination Harvard University Press 1960 Copland on Music New York Doubleday 2006 Music and Imagination Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 58915 5 References EditCitations Edit Copland Aaron InfoPlease Aaron Copland Pronunciation Oxford Advanced Learner s Dictionary OxfordLearnersDictionaries com Pollack 1999 p 186 a b Pollack 1999 p 15 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 19 a b Cone amp Copland 1968 Pollack 1999 p 16 Paton David W July 1 1905 1905 State of New York Census Ninth Election District Block D Eleventh Assembly District Borough of Brooklyn County of Kings p 36 Ross 2007 p 266 a b Pollack 1999 p 26 Smith 1953 p 15 a b Pollack 1999 p 19 Leon Copland in the U S Social Security Death Index 1935 2014 Ancestry com Provo UT USA Ancestry com Operations Inc 2014 Retrieved February 21 2023 Wedding Marcus Copland Brooklyn Daily Eagle June 22 1914 Retrieved February 21 2023 Laurine Marcus in the U S Social Security Death Index 1935 2014 Ancestry com Provo UT USA Ancestry com Operations Inc 2014 Retrieved February 21 2023 Josephine Bergman in the U S Social Security Death Index 1935 2014 Ancestry com Provo UT USA Ancestry com Operations Inc 2014 Retrieved February 21 2023 Obituary Mrs Louis Bergman Sister of Composer The Herald News Passaic NJ April 24 1967 Retrieved February 21 2023 Smith 1953 p 17 a b c Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 22 Pollack 1999 p 32 Smith 1953 p 18 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 23 Pollack 1999 p 33 a b Aaron Copland Residence at the Hotel Empire NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project Retrieved July 12 2021 Pollack 1999 p 34 Smith 1953 p 23 Pollack 1999 p 35 Pollack 1999 p 36 Pollack 1999 p 37 Pollack 1999 p 39 Smith 1953 pp 25 31 Smith 1953 p 30 Pollack 1999 p 237 Smith 1953 p 33 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 35 Copland amp Perlis 1984 pp 47 48 50 Smith 1953 p 41 a b Pollack 1999 p 41 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 63 Pollack 1999 p 47 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 64 Pollack 1999 pp 54 55 Pollack 1999 p 51 Pollack 1999 pp 53 54 Smith 1953 p 62 Pollack 1999 p 55 Pollack 1999 p 89 a b Pollack 1999 p 90 Pollack 1999 pp 121 22 Pollack 1999 p 123 a b Pollack 1999 p 101 Pollack 1999 p 103 Pollack 1999 pp 101 110 Pollack 1999 p 113 Pollack 1999 pp 115 16 Copland amp Perlis 1984 pp 134 35 Pollack 1999 p 116 Pollack 1999 p 159 Pollack 1999 pp 166 67 Pollack 1999 p 176 Pollack 1999 pp 178 215 a b c d Pollack 1999 p 58 a b c d e Oja amp Tick 2005 p 91 Pollack 1999 p 158 Smith 1953 p 162 Pollack 1999 p 258 Pollack 1999 p 257 Pollack 1999 p 267 Pollack 1999 p 303 Pollack 1999 pp 303 05 Pollack 1999 pp 178 226 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 245 Pollack 1999 p 310 Pollack 1999 p 312 Smith 1953 p 187 a b Pollack 1999 p 323 Smith 1953 p 184 Smith 1953 p 185 a b Oja amp Tick 2005 p 94 Smith 1953 p 169 Oja amp Tick 2005 pp 308 336 a b Oja amp Tick 2005 p 338 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 336 Pollack 1999 p 190 Oja amp Tick 2005 pp 308 09 Pollack 1999 pp 410 418 Pollack 1999 p 424 Pollack 1999 p 427 Smith 1953 p 202 Pollack 1999 p 460 Pollack 1999 p 467 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 170 Pollack 1999 p 452 Pollack 1999 pp 455 77 Pollack 1999 pp 452 456 a b Pollack 1999 p 458 a b Pollack 1999 p 285 Pollack 1999 p 286 Pollack 1999 pp 462 64 Pollack 1999 pp 464 65 Pollack 1999 pp 465 66 Pollack 1999 p 466 a b Pollack 1999 p 465 a b c d Pollack 1999 p 470 a b Pollack 1999 p 478 Music Directors Archived July 1 2013 at the Wayback Machine Ojai Music Festival Finding aid for the George Trescher records related to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial 1949 1960 1971 bulk 1967 1970 Archived April 12 2019 at the Wayback Machine Metropolitan Museum of Art Retrieved August 6 2014 Pollack 1999 p 516 National Register Information System National Register of Historic Places National Park Service March 13 2009 Wilson Scott Resting Places The Burial Sites of More Than 14 000 Famous Persons 3rd ed 2 Kindle Location 9788 McFarland amp Company Kindle Edition Pollack 1999 p 548 Pollack 1999 pp 270 71 a b Smith 1953 p 60 Pollack 1999 p 272 Pollack 1999 pp 280 283 84 Pollack 1999 pp 284 85 Pollack 1999 pp 28 328 Pollack 1999 pp 27 28 Pollack 1999 p 234 a b Pollack 1999 p 236 Pollack 1999 p 238 Pollack 1999 p 235 Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon Who s Who in Gay and Lesbian History London 2000 ISBN 9780415253703 page needed Archives of American Art s New Show Reveals Stories of Gay America Copland Aaron 2006 Elizabeth Bergman Crist Wayne D Shirley eds The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland Yale University Press pp 69 72 ISBN 9780300111217 Pollack 1999 p 241 Pollack 1999 pp 239 40 Pollack 1999 pp 243 44 Pollack 1999 p 244 a b c d e Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 255 Pollack 1999 pp 10 11 a b c d Pollack 1999 p 11 a b Pollack 1999 p 49 Smith 1953 p 39 a b c Pollack 1999 p 65 a b Pollack 1999 p 120 a b Pollack 1999 p 481 Smith 1953 p 51 Pollack 1999 p 44 a b c Murchison 2012 pp 48 54 Pollack 1999 p 128 Pollack 1999 pp 68 138 147 a b Steinberg 1998 p 131 Steinberg 1998 p 133 Pollack 1999 p 302 Copland 1939 pp 2 4 Pollack 1999 p 299 Pollack 1999 p 300 Crist 2005 p 43 Pollack 1999 pp 318 19 325 Pollack 1999 p 315 Pollack 1999 pp 317 320 Smith 1953 p 189 Crist 2005 p 111 Oja amp Tick 2005 pp 255 57 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 255 a b Oja amp Tick 2005 p 256 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 257 Oja amp Tick 2005 pp 257 29 a b c Oja amp Tick 2005 p 263 Pollack 1999 p 336 a b Pollack 1999 p 349 Pollack 1999 p 342 Pollack 1999 p 343 Lerner 2001 p 491 99 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 151 Pollack 1999 p 461 Pollack 1999 pp 445 46 Pollack 1999 p 445 Pollack 1999 pp 484 85 Straus 2009 p 61 a b Straus 2009 pp 61 62 a b Pollack 1999 p 447 Straus 2009 p 60 Pollack 1999 pp 487 515 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 175 Smith 1953 p 265 Smith 1953 p 264 a b c Pollack 1999 p 545 Pollack 1999 pp 178 79 Smith 1953 p 285 a b Pollack 1999 p 179 Smith 1953 p 290 Pollack 1999 p 194 Pollack 1999 pp 191 92 Pollack 1999 p 532 Pollack 1999 p 533 Pollack 1999 p 534 Pollack 1999 pp 535 36 Pollack 1999 pp 538 39 a b Pollack 1999 p 536 Pollack 1999 p 537 Pollack 1999 pp 537 38 Pollack 1999 pp 533 34 Pollack 1999 pp 533 538 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 172 Pollack 1999 p 535 a b Pollack 1999 p 555 Smith 1953 pp 292 94 Pollack 1999 p 530 Oja amp Tick 2005 p 442 Copland amp Perlis 1984 p 124 The University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit Recipients Archived from the original on May 30 2015 Retrieved May 30 2015 Pollack 1999 p 404 Smith 1953 p 201 Aaron Copland Artist MacDowell Leading clarinetist to receive Sanford Medal Tourdates Co uk August 31 2005 Archived from the original on July 29 2012 Office of the Clerk of the U S House of Representatives Congressional Gold Medal Recipients Clerk house gov Archived from the original on May 11 2010 Retrieved May 14 2010 Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Guide to Awards PDF sinfonia org Archived from the original PDF on May 27 2011 Retrieved February 16 2011 American Rhapsody Annie Moses Band Archived from the original on December 8 2020 Retrieved November 29 2020 On Fanfare For The Common Man An Anthem For The American Century NPR Morning Edition July 19 2018 Retrieved March 9 2021 Weezer The Red Album Deluxe Edition album notes Dance Symphony July 23 2019 Retrieved February 28 2021 List of Works Copland House Bibliography Edit Cone Edward T Copland Aaron January 1 1968 Conversation with Aaron Copland Perspectives of New Music 6 2 57 72 doi 10 2307 832353 JSTOR 832353 Copland Aaron July 1939 The Story Behind my El Salon Mexico Tempo 4 2 4 JSTOR 943608 Copland Aaron Perlis Vivian 1984 Copland 1900 Through 1942 New York St Martins Marek ISBN 978 0 312 16962 6 Crist Elizabeth 2005 Music for the Common Man Aaron Copland During the Depression and War Oxford England Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 538359 1 OL 3300233M Lerner Neil 2001 Copland s Music of Wide Open Spaces Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood The Musical Quarterly New York Oxford University Press 101 4 477 515 doi 10 1093 musqtl 85 3 477 ISSN 0027 4631 Murchison Gayle 2012 The American Stravinsky the Style and Aesthetics of Copland s New American Music The Early Works 1921 1938 Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press ISBN 978 0 472 06984 2 Oja Carol J Tick Judith 2005 Aaron Copland and His World Princeton Princeton University Press Pollack Howard 1999 Aaron Copland New York Henry Holt ISBN 978 0 8050 4909 1 Ross Alex 2007 The Rest Is Noise Listening to the Twentieth Century 1st ed New York Farrar Straus and Giroux Smith Julia 1953 Aaron Copland New York E P Dutton Steinberg Michael 1998 The Symphony A Listener s Guide New York and Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 512665 5 Straus Joseph N 2009 Twelve Tone Music in America Music in the Twentieth Century Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 107 63731 3 Further reading EditBerger Arthur 1953 Aaron Copland Oxford Oxford University Press Copland Aaron 1960 Copland on Music Garden City New York Doubleday Copland Aaron 1968 The New Music 1900 to 1960 New York W W Norton Hall Roger Lee 2014 Simple Gifts Great American Folk Song Stoughton Massachusetts PineTree Press Service Tom April 22 2014 Symphony Guide Copland s Third The Guardian Retrieved September 6 2016 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Aaron Copland Wikiquote has quotations related to Aaron Copland The Aaron Copland Collection and the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress Aaron Copland at Find a Grave A Tribute to Aaron Copland at American Music Preservation com Aaron Copland Oral History collection at Oral History of American MusicListening Edit Hoedown Annie Moses Band Art of the States Aaron Copland Audio ram files of a 1961 interview for the BBC archive from March 15 2012 accessed June 30 2016 Audio smil files of a 1980 interview for NPR Fanfare for America video Portals Classical music United States Biography Music Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Aaron Copland amp oldid 1141532873, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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