Aaron Copland was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants living in Brooklyn. After a solid musical education at home, he went abroad to study in Paris. Like many other overseas students, Copland was fortunate to be able to work with a remarkable musician named Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979). For fifty years Boulanger was a revered teacher and mentor of composers, even though she gave up composition herself in deference to the talent of her sister Lili, also a composer, when Lili died tragically at the age of twenty-four. Boulanger encouraged Copland’s interest in Stravinsky, whose avant-garde style influenced him greatly.

Back in America, Copland tirelessly promoted American music. He organized an important series of concerts (with another composer, Roger Sessions) to showcase new American scores, wrote articles and books, and formed the Composers’ Alliance. In this period, around 1930, his music took on an avant-garde edge, but this direction would not last long.

Later in the 1930s Copland was attracted, like many artists and writers of the period, by leftist ideology and the idea that art should serve the people. From this time through the 1940s his style became more accessible and populist. His most well-known works, many drawing on American folk materials, stem from these years. During World War II he wrote A Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, both patriotic works, and Appalachian Spring, a celebration of traditional American values.

After 1940 Copland headed up the composition faculty at the important summer school at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, in association with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but his output as a composer decreased. Among his students was Leonard Bernstein. Devoid of the egoism characteristic of so many artists, Copland was one of the most beloved figures of modern American music.

Chief Works: For orchestra: three symphonies, A Lincoln Portrait (with a speaker), El salón México (incorporating Latin American jazz), a favorite Clarinet Concerto, written for jazzman Benny Goodman ◼ Film scores: Of Mice and Men and Our Town ◼ Operas: The Second Hurricane and The Tender Land; ballet scores Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring ◼ For piano: Variations (Copland’s outstanding modernist work; 1930), a sonata, Piano Fantasy (a fine late work; 1957) ◼ A song cycle to poems by Emily Dickinson

Encore: After Appalachian Spring, listen to El salón México, Clarinet Concerto, and Fanfare for the Common Man.

Image credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.