More than a hundred years ago the United States was only just beginning to be the country we know it to be today. In the early 1900’s we were growing economically, geographically, and with technology. We were still dependent on Europe when we were composing classical music, very much using European ideas as our guide to how to write good music.
Aaron Copland, however, did a great deal to create “American music” in the classical tradition. He composed music that uniquely reflected our land and history. He also helped younger composers become famous in their own right. He encouraged them in personal ways, organized concerts for them and other performances for them, and formed networks and organizations to help support their efforts. He had an easygoing and positive attitude which won people over and helped everyone get along. As a result, he was the beloved leader of American classical music for more than fifty years!
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900. His parents were immigrants from Russia. His parents worked hard to make a secure and safe home for their large family. The two parents got lessons for their older four children, and decided against it for their youngest son, Aaron. However, Aaron begged for lessons and finally won them over. He was a naturally gifted musician and got really good at the piano with regular practice, and he used the piano for his compositions for the rest of his life.
He went to public school, and studied music theory with a private teacher. He went to many concerts in New York City and Brooklyn, and also to operas. By the time he was fifteen he knew he wished to become a composer. He decided not to go to college, and he worked hard to save money from a part time job as a Wall Street Runner, and at his father’s store, as well as allowance from many years, and began to make plans to go to Paris to study composition.
Aaron was the first student who was accepted to a school called Fontainebleau which was near Paris specifically for American musicians. He won a scholarship in 1921 and headed off to France. There he met Nadia Boulanger, a brilliant teacher with great musicality. With the help of his family, Aaron remained in France and took private lessons from her for three years.
Two lucky breaks changed his life. Boulanger persuaded him to write an organ symphony for a concert she was going to play in New York. He returned to America and began his climb to fame. Later he said meeting Nadia was the most important event of his life. The second break came when Koussevitsky, a very famous conductor, gave the second performance of the work. Best of all, Koussevitsky continued to support Copland by having his pieces played for the next few decades by his symphony orchestra.
Copland was being exposed to jazz, Broadway, and other American styles of music, while also listening to composers who were pushing the limits of the old traditions of composition. Copland eventually found his own “American voice.” Between 1925-1935 he put jazz elements into his pieces and then he also tried to use dissonance in his pieces as well. His audience didn’t like the dissonant, hard to listen to music, so he started to write music to please his audience. His audience had grown up around the radio, so they wanted to listen to easier pieces, not the hard, complicated harmonies of Debussy and Schoenberg from Europe. He tried to create sounds that captured wide open spaces of our huge continent, and the tremendous rhythmic energy of our big growing nation.
One of the first pieces in this new style is called El Salon Mexico (1936) and the music sounds like folk songs being played with great energy in a Mexican dance hall. Copland was so successful with that piece that he wrote “Lincoln Portrait” after that, which blends music and narration. He also composed Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, all of which portray the wide open landscape of the American West and are ballets with stories and great characters. He used American folk songs and story lines to capture the spirit of Early America with these pieces.
After the 1940’s he experimented with the twelve tone techniques, but mostly, he spent his later life organizing concerts and performances for young musicians, as well as conducting and playing his own works throughout the world. He also gave lectures and helped young musicians personally, like Leonard Bernstein.
Copland’s most frequently played work is Fanfare for the Common Man, in which the brass section resounds for the democratic tradition. This is often played at inaugurations of presidents, and for great speeches by politicians for the United States.
Aaron Copland did more for American composers and American music than anyone else before him. The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg called “the urbane, respected symbol of a half century of American Music.” Ned Rorem said he “was a wonder and a triumph.” Thanks to Copland, America began to share the spotlight for Western Classical music with Europe.
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