Aaron Copland in the CBS Young People's Concert Series
CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Aaron Copland was born in 1900 in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants. The youngest of their five children, he learned music from his older sisters. He decided to become a composer at the age of 16 and took lessons for four years with Rubin Goldmark, the head of composition at the Julliard School. Goldmark had studied with Antonín Dvořák and also given lessons to George Gershwin.

In 1921, he moved to Paris and studied formally with Nadia Boulanger (whose students also included Samuel Barber and Philip Glass, but who would reject George Gershwin just a few years later.) Copland spent three years in Paris, learning and networking; his contacts included famous authors like Ernest Hemingway, artists like Pablo Picasso, and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre.

He returned to America in 1925 and moved to Manhattan, making a living teaching, lecturing, and relying on the support of wealthy patrons and academic grants to continue composing. He experimented with avant-garde Second Viennese School techniques, believing as many academics did (and still do) that their craft need only be accessible, understandable, and (least importantly) enjoyable to other academics, and that the public might catch up some day. However, as the Great Depression hit, Copland learned quickly this modernist approach to music was, if nothing else, unprofitable.

He eventually sought to create more accessible works, and at the same time to craft a more uniquely American style of music. Drawing on jazz and nineteenth century folk tunes, he composed a number of works with distinctively American character. His first major successes were the 1936 orchestral suite “El Salón México” and the ballet “Billy the Kid” in 1938. The following year, he scored two motion pictures, “Of Mice and Men,” based on a novel by American author John Steinbeck, and “Our Town.”

In 1937, he collected several of his lectures and published a book, “What to Listen for in Music,” which you should read.

Throughout the 1940s, Copland refined this American folk style of orchestral music, composing some of his most famous works, including the ballets “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring,” and the brief overture “Fanfare for the Common Man.” In 1949, he scored a film adaptation of another Steinbeck novel, “The Red Pony,” before returning to Europe.

By this time, World War II had ended, and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were on the rise. Copland, who had been fascinated with the Russian Revolution as a young man, had often associated with left-wing political groups, and had even voted for the Communist Party USA in 1936, was caught up in the “Red Scare,” a period of anti-Communist suspicion and accusation dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Copland was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953, and his music was withdrawn from the inauguration ceremony of President Eisenhower. Fortunately, Copland had never actually been a member of the Communist Party, and was able to honestly express his disfavor of the treatment of artists such as Dimitri Shostakovich under Soviet rule, and the accusations fizzled out.

Despite the political difficulties, which clearly affected Copland emotionally, he continued composing, and wrote a full opera, “The Tender Land,” on a grant from Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, in 1953. After this, however, his compositional output slowed and he turned more toward conducting. His health deteriorated throughout the 1980s and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He passed away at his home in Sleepy Hollow, New York in 1990.