By the middle of the 1930s the reputation of another American modernist, Aaron Copland, was growing. He would soon rank as America’s leading composer. Copland’s music passed through several stylistic phases, including a period of avant-garde modernism early in his career. The chief influence on him at this time was Igor Stravinsky, and one of Copland’s most impressive works is a strenuous set of twenty Variations for piano (1930), which reflects Stravinsky’s dry rhythmic style and his “objective,” anti-Romantic bent.

After this, Copland’s music grew more traditional. Like Richard Strauss, Bartók, Still, and many others of the time, he held back from the most extreme versions of modernism and forged his own style using the modernist elements he needed. Again like Bartók and Still, Copland adopted a nationalist agenda. From the start he felt that as an American, he should write music that would speak to his fellow Americans. Copland reached out for American music of all kinds, regions, and ages.

He first turned to jazz, in orchestral pieces called Music for the Theater and El salón México. Later he incorporated cowboy songs in the ballets Rodeo and Billy the Kid, an old Shaker melody in Appalachian Spring, and square dancing in The Tender Land, an opera about growing up in the corn belt. Old hymns make an appearance in his song cycle Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. In this eclectic attitude we can perhaps again trace the influence of Stravinsky, who over his long career also tapped many musical sources, from Russian folk song to Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Schoenberg.