Essential Copland
The music of Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is as American as it gets. With their folksy tunefulness and open harmonies, his three most famous ballets – 'Rodeo', 'Billy the Kid' and 'Appalachian Spring' – seem to evoke the very spirit of the cowboy and the open prairie.
Read more…In fact, Copland was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants and spent most of his life close to the city, if not in the thick of it. As a young man, he travelled to Paris to study with the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, and returned to the States determined to be on the cutting edge. His works of the 1920s, like the Piano Concerto, were considered aggressively modernist and often contained jazz elements. But it was his shift to a more populist style in the late 1930s and ‘40s that made him famous. He once said, "As I see it, music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple." His Third Symphony (1946), considered by many to be “The Great American Symphony”, concludes with his Fanfare for the Common Man, which seems the very distillation of American idealism in musical form. In his later years, Copland returned to modernism, following Stravinsky in adopting the twelve-tone technique developed by Schoenberg, although these works are rarely played, even today.