Aaron Copland
The youngest child of a Brooklyn shopping street found the voice of American music in the great plains and in old hymns.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- TeacherRubin Goldmark
A pupil of Dvořák, he laid a firm foundation in harmony and counterpoint from 1917–1921.
- TeacherNadia Boulanger
She taught him for three years in Paris and, by commissioning the Organ Symphony, launched him into the world as a composer.
- InfluenceIgor Stravinsky
The off-kilter rhythms and dry sonorities he heard from Stravinsky in Paris became the skeleton of Copland's music.
- PatronageSerge Koussevitzky
With the Boston Symphony Orchestra he premiered one of his works after another, commissioned his Symphony No. 3, and entrusted him with a teaching post at Tanglewood.
- FriendshipLeonard Bernstein
A younger colleague and friend who, after they met in 1937, conducted and championed his music for the rest of his life.
- FriendshipMartha Graham
The dancer who commissioned and choreographed "Appalachian Spring," creating one of his signature works together with him.
I. The youngest in Brooklyn · 1900–1921 (age 0–21)
(Birth) He was born in November 1900 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Harris Morris Copland, and his mother, Sarah Mittenthal, were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania). The couple ran a dry-goods store on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn and lived upstairs, and Aaron, the youngest of five children, grew up between the shop counter and the stockroom. He would later remember the street of his childhood as an ordinary row of shops with nothing musical about it. (Siblings) It was his siblings who opened the first door to music. His brother Ralph played the violin, and his sister Laurine taught him the rudiments of the piano. Scribbling pieces on his own from about the age of ten, he persuaded his parents, who felt their older children's lessons had borne little fruit, to let him take formal piano lessons. Amid the ordinary life of a Jewish boy who helped out in the store and celebrated his bar mitzvah, music was the realm he guarded on his own. (Goldmark) For 4 years, beginning in 1917, he studied harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark. Goldmark had studied composition with Dvořák during the Czech composer's stay in New York, which made Copland a kind of grand-pupil of Dvořák. His teacher gave him a solid grounding but was conservative, and frowned on the new scores by Debussy and Scriabin that his student sought out and read in the library. Copland did not go to college. In 1921 he enrolled in the summer school of the newly opened American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and crossed the Atlantic at twenty.
II. Lessons in Paris · 1921–1924 (age 21–24)
(Boulanger) At Fontainebleau he attended the classes of Nadia Boulanger, who taught harmony there, and was soon captivated by her analytical powers. He later confessed frankly that it had never occurred to him to study composition with a woman, yet that autumn he became her private pupil in Paris and spent 3 years with her. Countless American composers would go on to seek out Boulanger, and Copland stood at the head of that procession. (Paris) In the early 1920s Paris was at the very center of new music. At Koussevitzky's concerts he heard the works of Stravinsky, and their fiercely clashing rhythms and dry, hard sonorities stayed in his music for the rest of his life. He shared a room with his friend Harold Clurman. With this man of the theater, who would later found the Group Theatre in New York, he argued late into the night about literature and drama, and together they wrestled with what American art ought to be. (Homecoming) Paradoxically, it was in Paris that he saw America anew. Watching European musicians rave about jazz, he came to believe that serious music could be written in an American voice. In 1924, as his return home approached, Boulanger asked him for a piece for organ and orchestra that she could perform on her American tour, and that same year she introduced him to Koussevitzky. The conductor, about to leave to take over the Boston Symphony Orchestra, promised to play his music. A twenty-three-year-old who had never written for the organ had been handed his first major work.
Commissioned by Boulanger to perform herself on her American tour, it is the first major work of a twenty-three-year-old, into which he poured everything he had learned in Paris.
- In the quietly opening Prelude of the 1st movement, listen for when, and in what colors, the organ enters. It reveals that he used the organ less as a showy solo instrument than as a way to widen the orchestra's palette.
- The 2nd movement, a scherzo (a fast, playful movement), sets offbeat accents that twist the meter over a repeated figure (ostinato) that returns the same rhythmic pattern relentlessly, so that the Stravinsky and the jazz rhythms he absorbed in his Paris years can be heard together.
- In the 3rd movement a theme that begins in the low strings builds layer upon layer toward a climax in which organ and brass burst out together. The daring that prompted Damrosch's 'murder' joke after the premiere is concentrated in this passage.
- In 1928 he revised the work so that it could be performed without organ, issuing it as Symphony No. 1. Comparing the two versions, you can hear how the brass and strings fill the space the organ has left.
III. The New York modernist · 1924–1936 (age 24–36)
(Premiere) In January 1925 the Organ Symphony was premiered in New York, with Boulanger as soloist and Walter Damrosch conducting. Damrosch joked to the audience that if a young man of twenty-three could write a symphony like this, in 5 years he would be ready to commit murder. Meant to soothe a conservative audience, the remark survives as the anecdote that best captures young Copland's daring. That same year he became the first composer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he received it again the following year, which kept him afloat. (Jazz) As promised, Koussevitzky premiered "Music for the Theatre" (1925) and the Piano Concerto (1926) in Boston. Copland drew on jazz syncopation and blues harmonies, and the concerto, in which he played the solo himself in 1927, provoked a fierce backlash from critics. Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" had appeared not long before, but he judged that jazz could hold only a narrow range of emotion, and soon abandoned that path. (Variations) The Piano Variations of 1930 went to the opposite extreme. Built by chiseling and hammering a short four-note theme into towers of piercing dissonance, the piece pushed listeners away, but for his colleagues it became a landmark of American modernism. With Roger Sessions he organized the 'Copland-Sessions Concerts' (1928–1931) to introduce young composers, and at the 1932 Yaddo Festival he presented the songs of the then little-known Charles Ives and wrote about him. (Mexico) That same year, at the invitation of his friend Carlos Chávez, he visited Mexico. His companion on the trip, Victor Kraft, whom he met around this time, would long remain his lover and partner. Copland, who was gay, never made this public, but he did not hide it from those close to him. His impressions of a Mexico City dance hall became "El Salón México" (1936). During the Depression he sympathized with leftist ideas and even wrote choral songs for workers, and he made his living from fellowships and lecture fees at the New School.
The fruit of his turn down the most austere path after giving up jazz, it pushed audiences away but captivated young musicians like Bernstein.
- Be sure to fix in your memory the four-note theme that sounds heavily at the opening. The whole piece is made by stretching, inverting, and splintering these four notes, so once the theme is lodged in your ear you can follow how the variations grow.
- The theme, twenty variations, and a closing section (coda) run on without a break. Listen for the tension between passages that strike the keyboard hard, like a percussion instrument, and long silences left open between one note and the next.
- This is the piece Bernstein played from memory the day they first met in 1937, and he went on playing it at gatherings for years afterward. It is counted among works that demand both great power and precision of the performer.
- Heard alongside the Orchestral Variations that Copland himself arranged in 1957, it lets you compare how the sharp sound of a single piano is transformed into orchestral color.
IV. Voice of the plains · 1937–1944 (age 37–44)
(Bernstein) On November 14, 1937, the night of his thirty-seventh birthday, he met the Harvard student Leonard Bernstein at a dance recital. At the birthday party held in his studio that evening, Bernstein played the Piano Variations from memory, and the two became lifelong teacher and friend at once. (Simplicity) Around this time he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the gulf between modern music and its audience, and resolved to say what he had to say as simply as possible. The beginning was the ballet "Billy the Kid" (1938), woven from cowboy songs on a commission from Lincoln Kirstein. In Hollywood, his scores for the films "Of Mice and Men" (1939) and "Our Town" (1940) brought him a comfortable income for the first time, and from 1940 he taught young composers every summer at the Berkshire Music Center, which Koussevitzky had founded at Tanglewood. (War) In 1942, as America entered World War II, his simple language met the call of the times. In a single year came the ballet "Rodeo," choreographed by Agnes de Mille; "Fanfare for the Common Man," scored for brass and percussion alone on a commission from Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; and "Lincoln Portrait," in which a narrator reads Lincoln's speeches. (Spring) Around the same time came a commission for a ballet for the dancer Martha Graham. Written for thirteen instruments to fit the small stage of the Library of Congress auditorium, the piece was called 'Ballet for Martha' throughout its composition, and just before the premiere Graham gave it the title "Appalachian Spring," taken from a poem by Hart Crane. Premiered in October 1944, the work won him the Pulitzer Prize the following year and became widely performed as an orchestral suite as well.
A work in which the resolve to say 'what he had to say simply' met the mood of wartime America, bringing cowboy songs to life as dance on the stage.
- The four pieces, "Buckaroo Holiday," "Corral Nocturne," "Saturday Night Waltz," and "Hoe-Down," follow the story of a tomboyish cowgirl in search of a sweetheart.
- At the start of "Saturday Night Waltz," the strings draw their bows across open strings (strings not pressed by the fingers), imitating country fiddlers tuning up. Then the tune of the cowboy song "Old Paint" flows by as a slow waltz.
- The main melody of "Hoe-Down" is the old tune "Bonyparte," transcribed from a Library of Congress field recording of the Kentucky fiddler William Hamilton Stepp. Rapid bowing in the strings and woodblock-like percussion sound like hoofbeats.
- Midway through "Hoe-Down," the music suddenly stops short and then dashes off again. It sounds like dancers catching their breath for a moment, and conductors differ in how long they hold this pause.
It was commissioned as a short signal piece to open concerts during the war, but it became a tribute not to heroes but to nameless citizens, and it grew more famous than his own name.
- It opens with mighty strokes from the timpani, bass drum, and a large gong-like percussion instrument (tam-tam). Cutting through the silence, the trumpets sing the theme with one voice (unison).
- The theme leaps upward through wide, hollow-sounding intervals such as 4ths and 5ths. This open sonority, with its chords left unfilled, is considered the heart of the 'Coplandesque sound,' as wide as an open plain.
- The scoring is brass and percussion alone. Listen to how the sound grows steadily thicker as the melody passes from the trumpets to the horns, then to the trombones and tuba.
- He wove this piece directly into the finale of his Symphony No. 3, and in 1977 the rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer arranged it as rock with the composer's permission. The three versions are worth hearing side by side.
Created with Martha Graham, this ballet tells of a young couple who build a new farmhouse and greet the spring on the Pennsylvania frontier in the early 19th century, and it is the work in which his 'simplicity' reached its deepest point.
- The slow introduction is, in the composer's own notes, the scene in which 'the characters are introduced one by one, in a suffused light.' Over chords held long by the strings, the winds add one note at a time, and the sound opens like dawn light spreading.
- In the later part, a solo clarinet first sings the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” and then come variations in which the same tune returns with changing instruments and tempos. At the end the whole orchestra sings it in full majesty.
- The ending, according to the composer's notes, is the scene in which the bride takes her place among her neighbors and the couple are left 'quiet and strong' in their new house. Listen closely to the prayerlike chords of the muted strings.
- Compare the original chamber version, written for thirteen instruments, with the orchestral suite made later, and you will hear how differently the same music can feel in temperature. The original is more transparent; the orchestral version is broader.
V. An age of suspicion · 1945–1959 (age 45–59)
(Symphony) Symphony No. 3 (1946) was commissioned by Koussevitzky in memory of his wife, Natalie, who had died in 1942. This grand work, with the fanfare woven into its finale, was the summit of his 'American style.' In 1950 he won the Academy Award for the score of The Heiress, but when the studio dropped his opening music and put in an arrangement of the old French song “Plaisir d'amour,” he stated publicly that that part was not his music. (Experiment) In 1949–1950 he set twelve poems by the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, dedicating each song to a fellow composer. In the Piano Quartet of the same period he adopted, for the first time, the 12-tone technique that Schoenberg had systematized. It was a stubborn refusal to stay within a popular style, and austere works such as the Piano Fantasy (1957) followed. (Cold War) The Cold War summoned up his past. In 1949 he spoke at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel, a gathering also attended by Shostakovich with the Soviet delegation. In January 1953, after a congressman's protest, Lincoln Portrait was dropped from a concert celebrating President Eisenhower's inauguration. That May he was summoned before Senator McCarthy's subcommittee, testified in closed session that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, and for some time had trouble even renewing his passport. (Opera) The dancer Erik Johns, close to him since the early 1950s, wrote the libretto for the opera The Tender Land (1954) under a pen name, but the premiere met a lukewarm reception.
Commissioned by Koussevitzky in memory of the wife who had died before him, it poured his 'American style' into the largest vessel of all, the symphony, as the war was drawing to a close.
- Movement 1 opens with a broad, slow melody. In the first theme, sung at length by the strings, you can feel the open resonance of Appalachian Spring carrying on.
- In Movement 2, a scherzo (a fast, lively movement), the brass shout out the theme with vigor, and in the middle section the woodwinds offer a plain, homespun tune. The contrast is vivid, which makes it a real pleasure to hear.
- At the start of Movement 4, the flute and clarinet bring out Fanfare for the Common Man very softly. The moment that follows, when the brass and percussion burst out with the same fanfare at full force, is the symphony's most famous passage.
- After the premiere the composer cut part of the finale, and some conductors restore the original measures. It is worth comparing the length and weight of the ending from recording to recording.
Written just before Cold War suspicion closed in on him, this song cycle sets the short, sharp poems of a reclusive poet, each song dedicated to one of twelve fellow composers.
- In the first song, “Nature, the Gentlest Mother,” the voice opens quietly over the calm resonance of the piano. Listen to how Dickinson's distinctive pictures of nature unfold in a simple melody.
- “Going to Heaven!” is quick and playful, the voice leaping widely between high and low notes to paint an elated heart. The singer needs the skill to move lightly across a wide range.
- The final song, “The Chariot,” sets Dickinson's famous poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” The steady rhythm of the piano sounds like the hoofbeats of the horses drawing Death's carriage.
- The piano does not stay in the role of accompanist; it moves as an equal partner, painting the poems' images directly. Listen for the passages where voice and piano trade phrases.
VI. The baton and the silence · 1960–1990 (age 60–90)
(Rock Hill) In 1960 he bought Rock Hill, a house on a hilltop in Cortlandt, New York, and spent his remaining 30 years there. Connotations, the 12-tone orchestral work he wrote for the 1962 opening concert of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, was conducted by Bernstein, but the audience received it coldly. In 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Conducting) From his 60s on, he devoted more time to conducting than to composing. He traveled among orchestras around the world, conducting and recording his own works and those of fellow American composers. Night Thoughts, the piano piece he wrote for the 1972 Van Cliburn Competition, bore the subtitle 'Homage to Ives,' honoring once more the elder composer whose music he had brought to the stage 40 years before. (Silence) After the early 1970s, new works all but ceased. He said his ideas had stopped as if someone had turned off a faucet. In 1976 his longtime companion Victor Kraft died. In the 1980s he published two volumes of memoirs with the musicologist Vivian Perlis, but from around that time his memory declined noticeably. (Farewell) On December 2, 1990, he died at ninety in North Tarrytown, New York, of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure. His ashes were scattered at Tanglewood, where he had taught young composers for twenty-five summers. His estate became the Copland Fund for Music, which supports young composers and new music, and the house at Rock Hill is today a residence for composers.
Lesser-known stories
(Fanfare) In 1942 Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, commissioned eighteen American composers to write fanfares to open his wartime concerts. Practically the only one still played today is Copland's. After weighing several titles, he chose one that echoed 'the century of the common man,' the phrase Vice President Henry Wallace had raised in a speech that year. The premiere fell on March 12, 1943, a few days before the income tax deadline, and he welcomed the timing, saying that tax season was just the right moment to honor the common man. (The wellspring) The 'spring' of Appalachian Spring may not have been a season at all. In Hart Crane's poem “The Dance,” from which Graham took the title, the word reads as a spring of water in the mountains. Copland learned the title only just before the premiere, and in later years, whenever people told him they could see the Appalachian landscape in the music, he would let them in on the story. The Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” in the score was likewise found in a book of Shaker music that Edward Andrews published in 1940; at the time it was a song scarcely known outside the community. (Vitebsk) There are roots, too, hidden behind the image of 'the most American composer.' In 1928 he wrote the piano trio Vitebsk on a Jewish melody used in Ansky's play The Dybbuk. It is a rare work in which the son of Jewish immigrants took up his own roots directly, yet his later image of the great plains is so strong that it is seldom mentioned. (Private life) In his lifetime he said almost nothing about his private life, and the two volumes of memoirs with Vivian Perlis sidestepped it as well. Not until Howard Pollack's 1999 biography, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, were his relationships with Victor Kraft, Erik Johns and others pieced together from letters and testimony.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Syncopation
(Word origin) The Western name syncopation comes from the Greek synkopē, meaning 'to cut off and shorten.' The name holds its character: cutting away the regular places of the beat and putting the stress somewhere unexpected. (In music) Normally the stress falls on the strong beat; syncopation is a rhythm that pulls the accent forward or holds it back by stressing a weak beat or the space between beats. This is where jazz gets the feel that sets your body moving on its own. It is like when friends clap on the beat, counting 'one, two,' and someone slips claps in between, and the rhythm suddenly seems to bounce. (Elsewhere) In medicine, syncope means fainting, a brief loss of consciousness.
Variations
(Word origin) Byeonjugok (變奏曲) means a piece (曲) played (奏) with changes (變). (In music) A form that first presents a single theme (a central melody) and then brings it back again and again, changing its rhythm·harmony·tempo·mood. However much it changes, the skeleton of the original theme remains, so the listener recognizes, 'Ah, that tune from before.' It is like singing the same “Happy Birthday” as a slow ballad, a fast rap and a playful whistle.
Dissonance
(Word origin) Bulhyeophwaeum (不協和音) means a sound (音) that does not (不) harmonize (協和). (In music) A chord whose notes, sounded together, strike the ear as clashing and tense. A chord that blends comfortably, by contrast, is called a consonance. Dissonance is not a wrong sound but a material for building tension, and 20th-century composers sometimes left that tension unresolved. Press two neighboring keys on the piano together (C and C#) and you get a prickly sound; that is a classic dissonance. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech it is often used figuratively for quarrels or friction between people, as in 'discord within the team.'
Fanfare
(In music) A short, vigorous signal piece sounded by brass instruments such as trumpets. In the old days it announced a king's entrance, a hunt or the start of a battle, and even now, at ceremonies and award shows, it serves to declare 'something important is beginning.' The bugle call that rings out 'ta-da-da-dum' at the opening of a school sports day is exactly a fanfare. Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man is an example of such a signal grown into an independent concert piece. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech it is also used figuratively for noisy celebration or publicity, as in 'launched with great fanfare.'
Suite
(Word origin) The Western name suite means 'that which follows, a succession' in French. The name holds its character: several pieces following one after another. (In music) A work in which several short pieces are played in a row as one set. A concert version made from the best passages of a long work, such as a ballet, an opera or a film score, is also called a suite. It is like a highlight reel of only the best scenes from a long drama. Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, too, are usually performed in concert as suites. (Elsewhere) A hotel suite is the same word, meaning a set of several connected rooms.
12-tone technique
(In music) A method in which you first fix an order (a tone row) that uses each of the twelve notes within one octave of the piano keyboard (seven white keys, five black) exactly once, and then build the whole piece by inverting that order or reading it backward. Schoenberg systematized it in the 1920s. Because it is a device to keep any note from becoming the 'center,' it rarely gives the comfort of 'coming home' that we feel in familiar major·minor music. Picture a rule in which twelve classmates each speak exactly once in a fixed order, and in the next round the order is turned backward.