Aaron Copland, famous for Appalachian Spring, is considered America's best-known 20th century composer of classical music in terms of vividly portraying the wide open spaces of America, putting to memory the lives of pioneers and legends of the Wild West.
Copland's film scores, including Of Mice and Men, Our Town and The Heiress, for which he won an Academy Award for best score, set new standards for Hollywood.
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He started his musical lessons with Rubin Goldmark in New York and with the famous French teacher Nadia Boulanger, in Paris, then returned to New York.
Aside from composing, he took a leading part in composers’ organizations and taught at the New School for Social Research for ten years, from 1927. Elmer Bernstein and Alberto Ginastera were among his prominent students.
His early works, such as his Piano Concerto incorporate jazz and modernist idioms. He took avant-garde European styles and gave them a distinctive American pitch.
Copland later assimilated local American styles, notably in the ballets Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring based on the poem by Hart Crane. Among his orchestral works are three symphonies, including a considered very American short piece “Fanfare for the common Man, ” Music for the Theatre, Symphonic Ode, A Dance Symphony, Statements, El Salon Mexico, Music for the Radio, An Outdoor Overture, Quiet City, Letter from Home, Danzon Cubano, Lincoln Portrait for orator and orchestra, piano concerto, and a clarinet concerto.
Copland's Music Distinctly American
In spite earlier great European influence of his contemporaries particularly Schoenberg and Stravinsky, he started seriously looking to his own American homeland for inspiration: Wild West, pioneering life in the Appalachian, music of black Americans, and jazz. He reinforced all these with his talents and skills to come up with an American voice; true enough, his most famous work is known to be the ballet Appalachian Spring, with many quotations from old folk songs, hymns and dances.
Pulitzer Price for ballet Appalachian Spring, 1944
Academy Awards nomination for:
Best music in 1949: The Heiress
The Encyclopedia of Music, by Max Wade-Matthew and Wendy Thompson, Hermes House (2004)
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie (1994)