Aaron Copland
(1900–1990)
Who Was
Aaron Copland?
A Brief Introduction
Aaron Copland belonged to the first generation of US composers who became well known internationally, a cohort he led in forging a distinctively American style. The origins of that style lay partly in popular genres: folk songs, hymn tunes, and jazz. But Copland’s music also carved out a new American sound through compositional devices such as widely spaced chords, which suggested the far horizons of Western landscapes and the fresh beginnings of pioneer life. Though Copland himself wrote only a few movie scores, his style was often imitated by other film composers to create American soundscapes.
Copland fully realized this style in his ballet Billy the Kid (1938), which led to works imbued with American patriotism—such as A Lincoln Portrait for orchestra and narrator—and with egalitarianism, most famously Fanfare for the Common Man (both 1942). However, these populist works, clustered in a period of crisis and war, represent only part of Copland’s oeuvre. He became known in his twenties for jazz-tinged pieces; in his thirties, he turned to a more abstract, modernist idiom. He returned to composing more dissonant works in his fifties, though the American style remained available for occasions that demanded it.
Early Years: With the Moderns in Paris and New York
Born to Jewish parents who ran a small department store in Brooklyn, Copland had a relatively comfortable upbringing. He was encouraged by his mother to pursue music and took lessons in theory and composition (1917–21) with Rubin Goldmark. He later completed his training in Paris (1921–24) with Nadia Boulanger, who premiered his first major work, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), as soloist. Later reworked as the First Symphony, the score reveals his exposure to the works of Prokofiev and Stravinsky in Paris with the additional elements of blues and ragtime from his homeland. It was a combination he would continue to use in his compositions, such as the Piano Concerto (1926), after returning to New York.
In 1927, he began teaching classes in contemporary music at the New School for Social Research in New York. At the same time, he was bringing forward the modernist side of his musical personality, notably in his edgy Symphonic Ode (1927–29) and Piano Variations (1930). While this move confused not only his audience, but also his musician friends and allies, the syncopated rhythms and structural intricacy of these works proved essential to the populist style he went on to develop.
Middle Period: Americana
Copland’s breakthrough into his thoroughly American style came by way of a dance hall in Mexico City. In the early 1930s, he made several trips across the border to experience a different culture and nourish his friendship with Carlos Chávez, one of the foremost Mexican composers of the day. The two made frequent visits to the dance hall , and Copland composed a dance piece titled after an establishment he knew well: El Salón México (1932–36).
Copland: El Salón México for Piano and Percussion
A chance to compose a work based on material from US history came soon afterward with the commission for Billy the Kid from Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan—a New York ballet company and precursor to the New York City Ballet. Many other opportunities then arose: over the next four years, Copland composed the score for the film Of Mice and Men (1939), various orchestral pieces such as Quiet City (1940), the Piano Sonata (1939–41), and “another cowboy ballet,” as he called it, Rodeo (1942)—all in addition to A Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man.
This period was crowned by one of Copland’s finest achievements: Appalachian Spring (1943–44). Working with the choreographer Martha Graham, Copland produced a score incorporating the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” to suit her Americana style of modern dance. The piece requires a chamber ensemble of 13 players (though Copland soon made a suite for full orchestra) and shows a deep gift for creating music that speaks plainly, but is never banal.
Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite for Ensemble
This period was crowned by one of Copland’s finest achievements: Appalachian Spring... The piece... shows a deep gift for creating music that speaks plainly, but is never banal.
Written on a grand scale, the Third Symphony (1944–46) then followed. This quintessentially American symphony culminates with a finale based on the theme of Fanfare for the Common Man, and affirmed his arrival within a distinctly American musical tradition.
Late Period: Modernism renewed
The buoyant closing of the Third Symphony pointedly contrasts with the austere opening of Copland’s Piano Quartet (1950). Written in a lean, dissonant style, this piece draws on practices of 12-tone technique—the method of composition pioneered by Schoenberg and his pupils and later adopted by Copland’s hero Stravinsky. Here, and in the works that followed—such as the song cycle Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950) and the Piano Fantasy (1952–57)—the mood is astringent and watchful. However, shades of the explicitly American style persist and are much more pronounced in the opera The Tender Land (1952–54). The libretto was written by Erik Johns—one of several young men whose relationship with Copland transitioned from lover to friend. Colleagues and associates honored his wish, not uncommon at the time, that his private life remain private.
Copland further pursued his new dissonant style in the 1960s. He found that the use of 12-tone technique liberated his harmonic imagination, as is abundantly clear in the Nonet for strings (1960) and his final two orchestral pieces: Connotations (1961–62) and Inscape (1967). This dissonant style also appears in his score for the film Something Wild (1961).
His compositional output came to an end in 1972–73 with a few short instrumental pieces, the most substantial of which is Night Thoughts (1972)—a final work for solo piano.
Legacy
Copland gave his country a musical idiom that it recognized as its own. Whether in orchestral or chamber form, Appalachian Spring remains a repertory piece in the U.S., where it receives around 40 performances a year, and is also often played in German-speaking parts of Europe.
Copland gave his country a musical idiom that it recognized as its own.
As a conductor, Copland recorded much of his orchestral music and helped establish younger U.S. composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, Mario Davidovsky, and David Del Tredici.
Watching and Listening
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Digital Archive includes the Appalachian Spring Suite in its original scoring. CMS artists lend the music its proper serenity and dash, its pure colors and secure togetherness. Many of the same musicians perform on a feature-length program, “The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Shaker Village,” that ends with a performance of the same suite. Bruce Adolphe also leads the audience through the score in an Inside Chamber Music lecture-demonstration at the piano.
Watch pianist Michael Stephen Brown and percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum perform an arrangement of El Salón México. Brown also appears in performances of other Copland works: Poème and Lament—two slow movements from Copland’s late teens— with cellist Nicholas Canellakis and “I Bought Me a Cat”—from the composer’s first set of Old American Songs (1950)—with soprano Erika Baikoff.
