Aaron Copland
(20th-century-United States)
Born:
November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, New York
Died: December 2, 1990, Tarrytown, New York
In his
own words . . .
"To
explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would
say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in
permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts
and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality
with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts (musical ones . .
.) in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should
speak to men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy
of communicative power that no previous art expression can give."
American composer, conductor and author. Copland helped define a twentieth-century American sound. His
influence on his contemporaries and students has been tremendous.
Aaron
Copland seems at first to be an odd person to create a musical style that
combined the myths of the American West and the styles of Latin American music
into a populist music that spoke to a large segment of American society.
Copland was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York, and
found his musical voice in the international, avant-garde atmosphere of Paris
in the 1920s. In New York, he was part of a musical elite, championing the
cause of modern music. At the same time, he had ties to the political and
social left with its reformist agenda. Yet it could be argued that all of these
elements were important ingredients, not just in the fabric of America in the
1920s and 1930s, but in the creation of a distinctly American aesthetic.
Copland
began his study of music with piano lessons from his older sister. He soon
turned to other teachers and began attending symphonic concerts, soaking up the
music of the standard symphonic repertoire. While in high school, he studied
harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration with Rubin Goldmark,
who tried to steer his tastes down a conservative path. But at age twenty,
Copland left New York to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who was to serve
as a teacher and mentor to many of the leading composers of the century. In
Paris, and in his travels through Europe, he was exposed to a wide variety of
new styles. He returned to a New York that was in the midst of an artistic and
social revival, and he immediately became a part of that renewal. From 1928 to
1931 he coordinated a series of concerts with the composer Roger Sessions that
presented important new works to the American public. He lectured at the New
School for Social Research (from which his book What to Listen for in Music took
shape) and built his reputation as a composer.
His
early music mixes very modern musical ideas with hints of jazz influence.
Pieces such as his Piano Variations stand out for their harmonic and rhythmic
experimentation, and jazz rhythms are an important part of his Music for the
Theater. Copland's concern with modern techniques lessened during the Great
Depression. Reacting to a changing social consciousness, he (along with a
number of other composers) began to shape his style to speak to a larger
segment of the population. This comes through most clearly in ballets such as Billy
the Kid and Appalachian Spring and in his music for films. In these
works, simpler (but no less sophisticated) harmonies, broad melodies, and hints
of folk melodies created a sound that came to be associated with our pictures
of the mythic American West. And works such as Fanfare for the Common Man and
A Lincoln Portrait (in which the narrator recites various writings of
Lincoln) added a populist and patriotic element. While Copland never abandoned
the more adventurous style (including, later in his life, twelve-tone composition),
he is best remembered, and justly so, for creating a truly American symphonic
style. Over the course of his life, he not only served as a trendsetter, but
also played an important role in the development of younger composers at places
such as the Tanglewood Music Center. He was, in fact,
the musical father to more than one generation of young composers.
Works Summary
Orchestral
music, including 3 symphonies, Piano Concerto (1926), Short Symphony (1933),
Statements for Orchestra (1933–35), El salon Mˇxico (1936),
A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), and
Connotations for Orchestra (1962)
3
ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian
Spring (1944)
Film
scores, including The City (1939), Of Mice and Men (1939), Our
Town (1940), The Red Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1948)
Piano
music, including Piano Variations (1930)
Chamber
music, choral music, and songs
Featured
Works on the Dalton Wednesday Series and in Class
El
Salon Mexico (9/14
concert)
"Simple
Gifts" from Appalachian Spring
(class study)