Aaron Copland - Biography
Aaron Copland, perhaps the greatest American composer, was born on November 14th, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, where Copland’s father owned a small department store in the Prospect Heights section. Aaron Copland died in Tarrytown, New York on December 2nd, 1990. Though not musically precocious, he studied piano at an early age and attended Boys High School, then a prestigious public school in Brooklyn. When he was seventeen he started private studies with Rubin Goldmark, a well known teacher who also taught George Gershwin. He went for further musical education in Paris in 1920 at the American Conservatory where he studied under the renowned Nadia Boulanger. He returned to New York in 1924 where he became heavily involved in lecturing, teaching and organizing societies for the propagation of American music. He attracted the attention of the great Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had just arrived from Paris to become the music director of the Boston Symphony. Koussevitzky was an early supporter of Copland’s, conducting the premier performances of Music for the Theatre and the jazz influenced Piano Concerto. His Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was written in 1925 and premiered by the famed conductor Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony.
Copland, besides being a superb musician, was an effective spokesperson for young American composers. He developed a strong bond with young composers like Walter Piston, Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson and they joined together with the aim of garnering recognition for American music. He also developed a friendly relationship with George Gershwin, who was at the time viewed as primarily a popular musician. He closed out his Modernist phase with the knotty Piano Variations; Short Symphony Symphonic Ode, Statements and the Dance Symphony.
Copland was about to enter the phase he is best known for, that of the American populist. Copland was a man of the Left and he had a briefly supported the American Communist movement. He now felt that art music, to be effective in modern times, needed to draw its strength from the music of the people. The first well known piece from this period, El Salon Mexico, was written in 1934. In it, Copland catches the atmosphere that enthralled him when he visited a dancehall in Mexico City. The work was recorded by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony and became a surprise best seller. Copland was to have another major success with the ballet Billy the Kid in1939 (a six minute portion of which was adapted for the popular Billy the Kid Suite).
Copland wrote soundtracks for the films Of Mice and Men and Our Town in the early 1940s. Concert music from this period was to include the rowdy Outdoor Overture, John Henry and music from a documentary film, Quiet City. He composed the second of his western ballets, Rodeo, for Agnes DeMille (Cecil B DeMille’s niece). In 1942, with America’s entry into the Second World War, he was to write his enormously popular patriotic pieces, Fanfare for the Common Man and A Lincoln Portrait. Copland also wrote another ballet about early America, Appalachian Spring, for Martha Graham .The music borrows songs from the early American religious group the Shakers, even though the plot isn’t about them. Serge Koussevitzky had founded the Tanglewood Musical Festival in the Lennox Massachusetts and also created The Berkshire Music Center where Copland was head of the composition department for twenty five tears and later was to become the chairman. In his first years he was to teach the young Leonard Bernstein, who was to become the great interpreter of his music. Copland also wrote two significant music appreciation books What to Listen for in Music and Our New Music.
After the war, Copland wrote his well known Third Symphony, making extensive use of the Fanfare for the Common Man in the last movement. In this period he also wrote a clarinet concerto for Benny Goodman and wonderful scores for the films Red Pony, Washington Square and The Heiress (for which he was to win an Academy Award for best score of 1949). He also wrote two song cycles, 12 Poems of Emily Dickenson and Old American Songs (that includes the delightful “I Got me a Cat”). A sad episode occurred when the scheduled performance of A Lincoln Portrait was cancelled from the 1953 inauguration ceremonies for Eisenhower when conservative groups protested the work of a leftist being performed at a patriotic event. He was called before Congress where he denied ever being a Communist; an admitted progressive, he was an anti-Stalinist and didn’t like how the Soviet government controlled the arts. This evidently was enough to get him off the gray list and he was allowed to travel abroad extensively.
Copland surprised many by being sympathetic to modern trends in European music and he met with the young Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He also studied Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic compositional technique. He was to write one more piece of Americana when he composed the opera The Tender Land, inspired by James Agee and Walker Evans’s book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about Alabama sharecroppers in the New Deal era. It was performed by the New York City Opera but had limited. In the late 1950s, Copland developed a side career as a conductor and he recorded all of his orchestrated, some multiple times. His later works, while admired by professionals, did not have the popular appeal of his “American works.” They include Piano Fantasy, Dance Panels, Connotations, Inscape, Music for a Great City and Proclamations.
In the 1970s, Copland composed very few works, though he occasionally conducted while travelling extensively. There are limited details about his private life because he wanted it that way. He was gay and lived with some well known companions in the arts. By this time, he’d acquired significant wealth from royalties but chose to live a simple, frugal life. In his eighties he developed Alzheimer’s-related dementia and slowly deteriorated until he died a few weeks past his ninetieth birthday on December 2nd, 1990.
Aaron Copland is generally considered to be the most important and (along with Gershwin) most popular American composer. Even if he hadn’t composed a note of music, his contributions as a teacher and writer would have made him a key figure in American music. His most popular works are emblematic of America and are often used for patriotic events and broadcasts, immediately recognizable as both American and Copland. His own recordings are superb. The extensive discography by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic are in a class of their own.