Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 November 1900. He was the youngest of the five children of Harris Morris Copland and Sarah Mittenthal, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire, who ran a department store on the ground floor of the family building. No one in the family was a musician, but Aaron learned piano from his elder sister and at fifteen decided to become a composer. From 1917 he took harmony and composition lessons with Rubin Goldmark, a conservative New York teacher.

In 1921 he went to France to study at the brand-new American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. There he discovered Nadia Boulanger, who became his teacher; he was her first American pupil. For three years he studied with her in Paris, discovering Stravinsky, French music and the European avant-garde, and befriending many artists. Nadia Boulanger encouraged him to find a truly American music. In 1925 she premiered his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in New York under Walter Damrosch.

Back in the United States, Copland searched for an American style. He first drew on jazz, as in his Piano Concerto (1926), then wrote in a more abstract, dissonant style, as in the Piano Variations (1930). He also organised concerts of contemporary music to promote young American composers. With the Great Depression of the 1930s he decided to write simpler music, accessible to the general public, that spoke of America and its people.

After a trip to Mexico he composed El Salón México (1936), evoking a popular dance hall in Mexico City. Then came his famous ballets inspired by the American West: Billy the Kid (1938), about the famous outlaw, and Rodeo (1942), with its rollicking “Hoe-Down”, both using cowboy songs. In 1942, during the Second World War, he composed Fanfare for the Common Man for brass and percussion, and Lincoln Portrait for narrator and orchestra, on texts by Abraham Lincoln.

In 1944 he composed for the choreographer Martha Graham the ballet Appalachian Spring, depicting a spring celebration and a wedding among nineteenth-century pioneers in Pennsylvania. The work uses the Shaker song “Simple Gifts”, which he varies with great tenderness. It won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. In 1946 he composed his Symphony No. 3, whose finale takes up the Fanfare for the Common Man. His music, with its wide open spaces, clear chords and simple melodies, became the very symbol of the sound of America.

Copland also composed for film: Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940) and The Heiress (1949), which won him the Oscar for best film score in 1950. For more than twenty years he taught at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, training and supporting many young composers, including Leonard Bernstein, who became his friend. He also wrote books explaining music to the general public, such as What to Listen For in Music.

In 1953, during McCarthyism, he was summoned before a Senate committee that suspected him of communist sympathies; Lincoln Portrait was dropped from a concert for President Eisenhower’s inauguration. He nevertheless continued his career. From the 1950s he became interested in serial technique, and from the 1970s he devoted himself mainly to conducting. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died on 2 December 1990 at North Tarrytown near New York. He is known as “the dean of American music”.