Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland ranks among the towering presences in American music. Joining the first cohort of literary and musical expatriates who converged on Paris during the 1920s, he returned equipped to occupy a commanding position for the following fifty years as composer, advocate, and instructor. His broad popularity and emblematic stature have carried his works far beyond the concert stage into everyday awareness, where they frame both solemn observances and festive gatherings worldwide, notably in Fanfare for the Common Man, while also supplying the soundtrack for the familiar slogan “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner!” drawn from Rodeo that millions of viewers heard on television.

The youngest of five children born to Harris and Sarah Copland, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who ran a department store in Brooklyn, he waited until age thirteen before beginning formal piano lessons, by which point he had already started producing modest compositions. Forgoing university, he pursued theory and composition with Rubin Goldmark, took piano instruction from Victor Wittgenstein and Clarence Adler, and attended every concert, opera, and ballet within reach. In 1921 he sailed to Fontainebleau, France, to enroll in conducting and composition classes at the American Conservatory; he continued his training in Paris with Ricardo Viñes and Nadia Boulanger, devoting the next three years to absorbing every strand of European culture, recent and longstanding, that he could encounter. He grew to admire composers such as Stravinsky, Milhaud, Fauré, and Mahler as well as the writer André Gide. Boulanger’s performance of his 1924 Organ Symphony alongside Koussevitzky inaugurated a friendship that placed Copland on the faculty of the Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood) from 1940 until 1965.

After settling back in the United States, Copland cultivated a lean, severe idiom that mirrored the austerity of Depression-era America; the Piano Variations of 1930 stands as the clearest embodiment of that phase and remains among his defining achievements. Eschewing academic posts, he wrote for journals and newspapers, arranged concerts, and assumed administrative roles within composers’ groups to champion American music. By the mid-1930s, guided by the conviction that direct communication with listeners mattered most, he developed, in tandem with Virgil Thomson and Roy Harris, an American idiom shaped by folk sources, melodic and harmonic clarity, and an unpretentious immediacy most fully realized in the ballets of those years, which finally secured widespread public regard.

Although his productivity gradually declined after the mid-1950s, Copland persisted in testing new avenues of expression, among them a distinctive application of twelve-tone procedures in works such as the Piano Fantasy and Connotations for orchestra. The fundamentally lyrical character of his language nevertheless endured, surfacing now and then with an unexpected retrospective cast, as in the Duo for flute and piano of 1971. He continued teaching and writing while collecting numerous awards at home and abroad. Beginning in 1958 he conducted orchestras internationally, presenting music by eighty other composers in addition to his own across the next twenty years. By the mid-1970s he had effectively ceased composing; one of his final creative acts was finishing the two-volume autobiography he prepared with musicologist Vivian Perlis, an indispensable chronicle of twentieth-century American music’s evolution.