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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

Aaron Copland

1900 - 1990 AD

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants. The youngest of their five children, he learned music from his older sisters. Showing promise, he took lessons with Rubin Goldmark, the head of composition at the Julliard School, who had studied with Antonín Dvořák and also given lessons to George Gershwin.

In 1921, he moved to Paris and studied formally with a composer named Nadia Boulanger, to whom he attributed much of his success. Copland spent three years in Paris, learning and networking, before returning to America in 1925 and moving to Manhattan.

Back home, he experimenting with avant-garde compositional techniques, but eventually sought to create a more uniquely American form of music. He drew on jazz and nineteenth century folk tunes and composed a number of works with distinctively American character. Popular compositions included "Fanfare for the Common Man," a very democratic answer to centuries of fanfares for royalty; "Hoedown," which depicts a rodeo; tone poems based on American landscapes and folk songs like "Appalachian Spring;" and motion pictures soundtracks for Westerns like "Billy the Kid" and "The Red Pony."

Later in life, he drew on the twelve-tone serialism of Arnold Schönberg, but less as a philosophy and more as a compositional technique. Copland continued to compose, conduct, and teach until his death in 1990.

Compositions

Appalachian Spring

Billy the Kid

Fanfare for the Common Man

Hoedown