Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900, above his family's department store on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. He was the youngest of five children of Harris and Sarah Copland, Jewish immigrants of Lithuanian and Russian background who had anglicized the family name after arriving in America ^[1]. The store, H. M. Copland's, supported a comfortable if unglamorous household, and the composer later recalled that nothing in the neighborhood suggested a musical destiny.

Music entered the house through his older siblings. His sister Laurine gave him his first piano lessons, and by his early teens he had decided, with striking self-assurance, that he would become a composer ^[2]. He studied piano with Leopold Wolfsohn and later with Victor Wittgenstein and Clarence Adler, and beginning in 1917 he took harmony and counterpoint lessons with Rubin Goldmark, a respected New York teacher whose conservative tastes the young Copland quietly resisted ^[1]. While Goldmark drilled him in traditional technique, Copland spent his own money on scores by Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, hunting for sounds his teacher distrusted.

After graduating from Boys' High School in Brooklyn in 1918, he skipped college and worked toward a musical career directly. A magazine advertisement for a new summer school for American musicians at Fontainebleau, outside Paris, caught his eye, and in June 1921 the twenty-year-old sailed for France ^[2]. The decision reshaped his life.

At Fontainebleau, Copland encountered Nadia Boulanger, a brilliant young teacher of harmony and composition. Wary at first of studying with a woman, an arrangement then almost unheard of for a composition student, he was quickly won over by her command of the entire literature of music, and he became one of her first American pupils ^[3]. He remained in Paris until 1924, absorbing Stravinsky, jazz-tinged Parisian modernism, and Boulanger's insistence on clarity of line, what she called la grande ligne.

Boulanger secured him a remarkable debut. She had been invited to appear as organ soloist with American orchestras, and she asked her student to write her a concerto. The resulting Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was premiered in January 1925 by the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch, who famously told the audience that a young man capable of writing such a piece at twenty-three might be capable of anything ^[1]. Serge Koussevitzky, the new conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, took up the work and became Copland's most important champion, premiering a long series of his scores over the next quarter century ^[3].

Copland's music of the 1920s, including Music for the Theatre (1925) and the Piano Concerto (1926), drew heavily on jazz rhythms and was often received as harsh and aggressively modern. He supported himself with lectures, journalism, and the first two Guggenheim Fellowships ever awarded to a composer, in 1925 and 1926 ^[4]. With fellow composer Roger Sessions he organized the Copland-Sessions Concerts between 1928 and 1931, giving new American works a hearing in New York, and he became a central organizer at Yaddo festivals and in the League of Composers, earning a reputation as the unofficial dean of American music while still in his thirties ^[2].

In the mid-1930s Copland deliberately simplified his style. Troubled by the gulf between modern composers and the general public, and influenced by the populist currents of the Depression era, he began writing what he called music in an imposed simplicity, aiming to say things in the plainest possible terms without abandoning craft ^[2]. The first widely heard result was El Salón México (1936), an orchestral piece built from Mexican popular tunes he had collected on visits to see his friend, the composer Carlos Chávez.

The ballets that followed fixed his reputation. Billy the Kid (1938), choreographed by Eugene Loring, wove cowboy songs into a taut theatrical score; Rodeo (1942), created with Agnes de Mille, added the exuberant Hoe-Down that later reached millions through television; and Appalachian Spring (1944), written for Martha Graham and a thirteen-instrument ensemble, used the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts in a set of variations that became his best-loved music. Appalachian Spring won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945 ^[5]. From the same wartime years came Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), commissioned by conductor Eugene Goossens for the Cincinnati Symphony, and Lincoln Portrait (1942), which sets Abraham Lincoln's words for narrator and orchestra; both remain fixtures of American civic occasions ^[1].

Hollywood extended his reach. His scores for Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), and The North Star (1943) each earned Academy Award nominations, and The Heiress (1949) won him the Oscar for best dramatic score ^[4]. Among Aaron Copland achievements in the concert hall, the Third Symphony (1946), which folds the Fanfare into its finale, and the Clarinet Concerto (1948), written for Benny Goodman, stand out. His books, including What to Listen for in Music (1939), drawn from his lectures at the New School for Social Research, taught ordinary listeners how music works and stayed in print for decades ^[2].

Copland's influence ran well beyond his own scores. From 1940 to 1965 he headed the composition faculty at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's summer school, where his students and protégés included Leonard Bernstein, David Del Tredici, and Jacob Druckman ^[3]. Bernstein, who met Copland in 1937, became a lifelong friend and the most visible advocate of his music. Copland also delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1951 and 1952, published as Music and Imagination, becoming the first American-born composer to hold that lectureship ^[4].

His prominence carried costs during the Cold War. Copland had supported left-leaning causes in the 1930s, and in 1953 a scheduled performance of Lincoln Portrait at President Eisenhower's inaugural concert was cancelled after a congressman objected to the composer's politics. That May he was summoned before Senator Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee and questioned in a closed session about his affiliations; he was never charged with anything, and the episode did lasting damage to McCarthy's targets rather than to Copland's standing in music ^[6].

In the 1950s and 1960s he surprised admirers of his populist works by adopting elements of twelve-tone technique, notably in the Piano Quartet (1950), Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations (1962), commissioned for the opening of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Inscape (1967) ^[1]. He insisted the method was simply another tool, and his serial works keep the open textures and rhythmic snap of his earlier music.

Copland never married and had no children. He was gay, a fact he handled with the discretion typical of his generation of public figures, though he lived with relative openness among friends and never pretended to relationships he did not have ^[2]. His companions over the years included several younger musicians and artists, and biographers have noted the generosity and lack of bitterness with which he treated former partners.

By temperament he was modest, wry, and famously even-keeled, an unusual profile among major composers. Colleagues remarked on his plain speech and his readiness to promote rivals' music alongside his own. He lived for decades in and around New York City, settling finally at Rock Hill, a house overlooking the Hudson River near Cortlandt Manor and Peekskill in Westchester County, where he worked in a studio filled with scores and correspondence ^[1]. The house is now preserved as a National Historic Landmark and hosts a residency program for composers.

Original composition slowed sharply after the late 1960s, and Copland completed little new music after 1970, a drought he acknowledged candidly, saying that ideas had simply stopped arriving. He filled the gap with a second career on the podium, conducting his own works and other American music with orchestras across the United States, Britain, and elsewhere until about 1983 ^[4]. Recordings he led for Columbia preserve his direct, unfussy interpretations of his major scores.

Honors accumulated steadily. President Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, he received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1979, and Congress voted him a Congressional Gold Medal in 1986 ^[5]. With the writer Vivian Perlis he produced a two-volume oral-history autobiography, Copland: 1900 Through 1942 (1984) and Copland Since 1943 (1989), completed as his memory declined from Alzheimer's disease ^[2].

Aaron Copland died of respiratory failure on December 2, 1990, at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, New York (the village now called Sleepy Hollow), a few weeks after his ninetieth birthday ^[6]. He left the bulk of his estate to fund the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, which continues to support performing organizations and recordings of contemporary American work.

Few composers have shaped a national sound so recognizably. The open intervals, slow-moving harmonies, and folk-inflected melodies of Copland's populist scores became a shorthand for American landscape and character, imitated endlessly in film and television music and echoed in concert works by later generations ^[3]. Fanfare for the Common Man accompanies state funerals, space launches, and sporting events; Appalachian Spring and the western ballets remain among the most performed American orchestral works.

His institutional legacy is equally durable. Tanglewood students carried his teaching across American music schools, the Copland Fund distributes substantial grants each year, and his papers at the Library of Congress form one of the largest single-composer collections in the country ^[5]. Basic Aaron Copland facts, his Brooklyn birth in 1900, the Pulitzer for Appalachian Spring, the Oscar for The Heiress, the ninety-year span from immigrant storefront to national honors, only sketch the outline. Any full Aaron Copland biography must also account for the quieter achievement: a modernist who decided that new music should belong to everyone, and largely made it so ^[2].