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Signature. Aaron Copland ( / ˈkoʊplənd /, KOHP-lənd; [1] [2] November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies ...
Aaron Copland sorting his mail, Music Division, Library of Congress. In 1950 it seemed that another of Copland's ambitions was about to be fulfilled: Sir Rudolf Bing approached him with the suggestion that he and Thornton Wilder write an operatic version of Our Town for the Metropolitan Opera. But Wilder declined ("I'm convinced that I write a-musical plays . . . that in them even the life of ...
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Copland had the ability to “paint pictures” with his compositions. A talented and versatile composer, Copland wrote ballets, orchestral music, chamber music, vocal works, operas and film scores. The compositions of Aaron Copland were often used to raise the morale of American soldiers during World War II. Hundreds of young composers ...
- Biography
- Composer
- Film Composer
- Critic, Writer, and Teacher
- Conductor
- Awards
- Film
- Written Works
- Sources
- External Links
Early life
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn of Lithuanian Jewish descent, the last of five children. Before emigrating from Scotland to the United States, Copland's father, Harris Morris Copland, Anglicized his surname "Kaplan" to "Copland". Throughout his childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn shop, H.M. Copland's, at 628 Washington Avenue (which Aaron would later describe as "a kind of neighborhood Macy's"), on the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue,...
Studying in Paris
From 1917 to 1921, Copland composed juvenile works of short piano pieces and art songs. Copland's passion for the latest European music, plus glowing letters from his friend Aaron Schaffer, inspired him to go to Paris for further study. His father wanted him to go to college, but his mother's vote in the family conference allowed him to give Paris a try. On arriving in France, he studied at the Fontainebleau School of Music with noted pianist and pedagogue Isidor Philipp and with Paul...
1925 to 1950
Upon returning to America, Copland was determined to make his way as a full-time composer. He rented a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, which kept him close to Carnegie Hall and other musical venues and publishers. He remained in that area for the next thirty years, later moving to Westchester County, New York. Copland lived frugally and survived financially with help from two $2,500 Guggenheim Fellowships--one in 1925 and one in 1926. Lecture-recitals, awards, appointments and sm...
Influences
Copland's earliest musical inclinations as a teenager ran toward Chopin, Debussy, Verdi and the Russian composers. Some of his preferences might also have been formed by the anti-German feelings during World War I, as later he studied German music. Copland's curiosity about the latest music from Debussy and Scriabin was frustrated by the fact that sheet music for "avant-garde" works was expensive at that time and hard to come by. So he borrowed these works from a music library and stu...
Early work
Copland's earliest compositions before leaving for Paris were short works for piano and some art songs, inspired mostly by Liszt and Debussy. He experimented with ambiguous beginnings and endings, rapid key changes, and the frequent use of tritones. His first published work was The Cat and the Mouse (1920), a piano solo piece based on a Jean de la Fontaine fable.[100] In Three Moods (1921), Copland's final movement is entitled "Jazzy", which he noted "is based on two jazz melodies and oug...
Popular works
Impressed with the success of Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints in Three Acts", Copland wrote El Salón México between 1932 and 1936, which met with popular acclaim, in contrast to the relative obscurity of most of his previous works. It appears he intended it to be a popular favorite, as he wrote in 1927: "It seems a long, long time since anyone has written an Espana or a Bolero—the kind of brilliant piece that everyone loves."[107] Copland derived freely from two collections of Mexican folk tune...
By the 1930s, Hollywood began to beckon "serious" composers with promises of better films and higher pay.[139] The reality, however, was that few found good projects.[140] Copland sought to enter that arena, as both a challenge for his abilities as a composer and an opportunity to expand his reputation and audience for his more serious works. Unlik...
Starting with his first critiques in 1924, Copland began a long career as music critic, teacher, and observer, mostly of contemporary classical music.[151] He was an avid lecturer and lecturer-performer. He wrote reviews of specific works, trends, composers, festivals, books about music, and recordings.[152] He took on a wide range of issues from t...
Copland studied conducting in Paris in 1921, but not until his involvement conducting his own Hollywood scores, did he undertake it except out of necessity. On his international travels in the 1940s, however, he began to make appearances as a guest conductor, performing his own works. By the 1950s, he was conducting the works of other composers as ...
On September 14, 1964, Aaron Copland was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.In honor of Copland's vast influence on American music, on December 15, 1970 he was awarded the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit.[164]Beginning in 1964, this award "e...Copland was awarded the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in composition for Appalachian Spring.[165] His scores for Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), and The North...He was a recipient of Yale University's Sanford Medal.[166]Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait(1985). Directed by Allan Miller. Biographies in Music series. Princeton, New Jersey: The Humanities.Appalachian Spring(1996). Directed by Graham Strong, Scottish Television Enterprises. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the Humanities.Copland Portrait(1975). Directed by Terry Sanders, United States Information Agency. Santa Monica, California: American Film Foundation.Fanfare for America: The Composer Aaron Copland(2001). Directed by Andreas Skipis. Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in association with Reiner Moritz Associates. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the...Copland, Aaron (1939; Revised 1957), What to Listen For in Music, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, reprinted many times.Copland, Aaron (2006). Music and Imagination, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58915-5Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland(Oxford University Press, 1953)Hall, Roger, A Guide to Film Music: Songs and Scores(Stoughton, MA: PineTree Press, 2007)Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation, 3rd edition (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College, 1997), ISBN 0-07-036521-0Carol J. Oja & Judith Tick, eds., Aaron Copland and His World(Princeton University Press, 2005)Aaron Copland as subject of a Young People’s Concert, 1970. Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900–December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, in his later years he was often ...
Biography. Often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers," Aaron Copland was an influential composer of the 20 th century and instrumental in the development of a distinct American style of composition. Born in Brooklyn, New York on November 14 th, 1900 to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent, he was the last of five children.
It is the primary resource for research on Aaron Copland and a major resource for the study of musical life in twentieth-century America generally, particularly from the 1920s to the 1960s. The online Aaron Copland Collection comprises approximately one thousand items selected from Copland's music sketches, correspondence, writings, and ...
