AARON COPLAND (b. Brooklyn NY, November 14, 1900 - d. Peekskill NY, December 2, 1990) continues to be the most popular American composer of classical music. Through his compositions, conducting, lecturing, writings about music and advocacy for composers, he established a reputation for American classical music both here in the United States and around the world.
Although primarily known for a series of works that have come to define musical "Americana" - the ballet scores Billy The Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944); A Lincoln Portrait (1942); and Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) which was later incorporated into his celebrated Symphony No. 3 (1946) - Copland composed in a variety of styles throughout his life and embodies the polystylistic eclecticism that is the defining quality of contemporary American music. Ranging from the Jewish music-inspired piano trio Vitebsk (1928), and the jazz inflected Piano Concerto (1926) and Clarinet Concerto (written for Benny Goodman in 1948), to the maverick experimentalism of the recently-rediscovered ballet score Grohg and the legendary Piano Variations (1930) and the iconoclastic serialism of the Piano Quartet (1950) and Connotations (1962), to the opera The Tender Land (1954), commissioned by Rodgers and Hammerstein, to eight film scores for Hollywood, Copland's music is a sonic mirror of American in the 20th century. Copland is the only American composer ever to win both a Pulitzer Prize (for Appalachian Spring) and an Academy Award (for his score for the 1948 motion picture The Heiress), and was the first composer ever awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1925).
Born to parents who had emigrated from villages in the Polish and Lithuanian parts of Russia (his father was president of Brooklyn's oldest synagogue), Copland grew up in New York City at the same time as America's classical music. He studied composition in New York with Rubin Goldmark before his legendary tutelage under Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau, the result of a scholarship he received in 1921.
Upon his return to New York in 1924, Copland became an outspoken advocate for new music. With fellow Brooklyn-born composer Roger Sessions, he launched one of the earliest concert series devoted to contemporary music in 1928. For a decade he lectured at the New School for Social Research, and his books What to Listen for in Music (1939) and Our New Music (1941, revised in The New Music 1900-1960) have been highly-influential manifestos for contemporary music.
In addition to co-founding the American Music Center, he helped found the American Composers Alliance and the Tanglewood Festival.
On the eve of Copland's centennial, major Copland events are planned on six continents. Highlights in the United States include performances of Copland's complete orchestral music by the New York Philharmonic, a year-long survey of Copland's music by the Minnesota Orchestra, and a 15-month celebration by a consortium of nearly a dozen arts organizations in the City of Hartford CT.
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First Person Sections:
·Personal & Musical
Backgrounds ofthe
Founders
·The Pre-History of
the Center
·The Center Opens
·The Center's Difficult
First Years
·Great Teachers and
Music
Education
·The State of Music in
the United States
·What is
American Music?
·On Other Composers
and Other Forms
of Music
·Later History of the
AmericanMusic Center
·Advice for Today's
Composers
·Press Release
Announcing the Opening
of the Center
Biographies:
·Marion Bauer
(1882 - 1955)
·Aaron Copland
(1900 - 1990)
·Howard Hanson
(1896 - 1981)
·Harrison Kerr
(1897 - 1978)
·Otto Luening
(1900 - 1996)
·Quincy Porter
(1897 - 1966)
