Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland an American composer, teacher and conductor (1900-1990), often called the dean of American music. He forged a distinctly national idiom that ranged from the jazz-inflected to the spare and serial, and his ballets of the 1930s and 1940s gave the United States some of its most enduring concert works.

Early Life and Education

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900, the youngest of five children of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who ran a neighbourhood department store. He discovered music through local teachers and the concert halls of New York, and after early studies he left for Europe in 1921 to study at the Fontainebleau school near Paris. There he became the first American pupil of the formidable teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Boulanger instilled in him a rigorous technique and a broad European perspective, and under her guidance he composed his first works for the organ and orchestra. He returned to New York in 1924 determined to create a music that was modern yet unmistakably American. The premiere of his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, with Boulanger as soloist, announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice.

His early years in New York brought him into contact with the composers, painters and writers of the American avant-garde, and he became a leading figure among the young modernists of the 1920s. He supplemented his income by writing for magazines and by teaching, and he proved an energetic organiser for the cause of contemporary music. These experiences gave him both a wide artistic culture and a practical sense of how to make new music heard.

The American Ballets and Popular Works

During the 1930s Copland wrote in an austere and dissonant style, but he increasingly sought a directness that would reach a wider public. The result was a series of scores for the choreographers of the American ballet, beginning with Billy the Kid in 1938, the story of the outlaw of the frontier, whose quotation of cowboy songs and open ballads evoked the American West.

Rodeo of 1942 and the towering Appalachian Spring of 1944, written for Martha Graham, brought this phase to its height. Appalachian Spring won the Pulitzer Prize and remains his best-loved work, and the Fanfare for the Common Man, composed during the Second World War, became a lasting emblem of the national spirit. His orchestral suite El Salon Mexico distilled the sounds of Mexican popular music.

The ballets of these years grew from a deliberate decision to write music that a broad American public could understand and enjoy, without abandoning the standards of the concert hall. Copland quoted folk tunes and hymns, and he used open intervals and spare textures to suggest the breadth of the American landscape. The result was a sound that many listeners came to regard as authentically national.

Later Style and the Twelve-Tone Works

In the 1950s Copland turned to a more abstract and severe idiom, adopting the twelve-tone method of Arnold Schoenberg in works such as the Piano Fantasy, Connotations and Inscape. These pieces disappointed some admirers who preferred the accessible ballets, but they represented a deliberate reinvention and a refusal to repeat an earlier success.

He continued to compose into his late years, though ill health and the death of friends cast a shadow over his final decades. He wrote the opera The Tender Land, chamber music and songs, and notably the Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, which set the poet's verse with a restraint and inwardness that reveal another side of his character. His late music rewards the listener who follows him beyond the familiar scores.

The turn to serialism followed a period of uncertainty about the direction of his music, and he approached the method not as a dogma but as a means of extending his language. Works such as the Orchestral Variations and the Piano Quartet show a composer of undiminished craft, willing to risk the loss of an audience he had worked hard to win. The two styles can be heard together in the later pieces, which unite the open sonorities of the ballets with the disciplined logic of the twelve-tone system.

Teacher, Writer and Conductor

Copland was one of the most influential teachers of his time, and through the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood he shaped the education of generations of American composers. His writings, including What to Listen for in Music and Our New Music, introduced a wide public to the appreciation of contemporary music and defended a distinctly American modernism.

From the 1950s he increasingly devoted himself to conducting, touring Europe, Latin America and Asia as an advocate for American music. He recorded much of his own work and that of his colleagues, and his readings remain authoritative. His role as a public figure for serious music made him a model of the composer as citizen and mentor.

His teaching at Tanglewood and his numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, reflected his standing as the foremost representative of American music. He founded and supported programmes that gave younger composers opportunities to be heard, and he served on the boards of musical institutions. His generosity toward colleagues was widely acknowledged, and he worked to build an infrastructure for American concert life.

Influence and Legacy

Copland's synthesis of folk material, jazz and modern technique helped define a national school of composition at a time when American music was still regarded as a provincial offshoot of Europe. His ballets and the Fanfare for the Common Man have become part of the cultural vocabulary of the United States, used in films, ceremonies and concert halls alike.

The Copland Fund and the prizes and foundations that bear his name continue to support American composers, and his teaching echoes through the work of those he trained. He died in 1990, honoured as the central figure of a musical tradition he had largely created. His example taught that an American composer could be both accessible and serious.

His scores are now standard works in the orchestral repertoire and are studied in universities as models of synthesis between tradition and innovation. The simplicity of his most popular music conceals a deep technical sophistication, and its lasting appeal rests on something more than nostalgia. He remains a reference point for any composer who seeks to write seriously for a wide public.

See also

• Appalachian Spring
• Rodeo (ballet)
• Fanfare for the Common Man
• American classical music