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= Aaron_Copland =
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Introduction
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Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American
composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist, and conductor of his own
and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and
critics as the "Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing
harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many consider the
sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and
pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s
and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as
"populist" and which he called his "vernacular" style. Works in this
vein include the ballets 'Appalachian Spring', 'Billy the Kid' and
'Rodeo', his 'Fanfare for the Common Man' and Third Symphony. In
addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in
many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera, and
film scores.
After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark, Copland
traveled to Paris, where he first studied with Isidor Philipp and Paul
Vidal, then with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He studied three
years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his
own broad taste. Determined upon his return to the U.S. to make his
way as a full-time composer, Copland gave lecture-recitals, wrote
works on commission and did some teaching and writing. But he found
that composing orchestral music in a modernist style, which he had
adopted while studying abroad, was unprofitable, particularly in light
of the Great Depression. He shifted in the mid-1930s to a more
accessible musical style that mirrored the German idea of ("music for
use"), music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes.
During the Depression years, he traveled extensively to Europe,
Africa, and Mexico, formed an important friendship with Mexican
composer Carlos Chávez, and began composing his signature works.
During the late 1940s, Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other
fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenberg's use of
twelve-tone (serial) techniques. After he had been exposed to the
works of French composer Pierre Boulez, he incorporated serial
techniques into his 'Piano Quartet' (1950), 'Piano Fantasy' (1957),
'Connotations' for orchestra (1961), and 'Inscape' for orchestra
(1967). Unlike Schoenberg, Copland used his tone rows in much the same
fashion as his tonal material--as sources for melodies and harmonies,
rather than as complete statements in their own right, except for
crucial events from a structural point of view. From the 1960s onward,
Copland's activities turned more from composing to conducting. He
became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and the UK
and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia
Records.
Early years
=============
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900. He
was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish immigrant
family of Lithuanian origin. While emigrating from Russia to the
United States, Copland's father, Harris Morris Copland, lived and
worked in Scotland for two to three years to pay for his boat fare to
the United States. It was there that Copland's father may have
Anglicized his surname "Kaplan" to "Copland", though Copland himself
believed for many years that the change had been caused by an Ellis
Island immigration official when his father entered the country.
Copland was unaware until late in his life that the family name had
been Kaplan, his parents having never told him. Throughout his
childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn
shop, H. M. Copland's, at 628 Washington Avenue (which Aaron later
called "a kind of neighborhood Macy's"), on the corner of Dean Street
and Washington Avenue, and most of the children helped out in the
store. His father was a staunch Democrat. The family members were
active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes, where Aaron
celebrated his bar mitzvah. Not especially athletic, the sensitive
young man became an avid reader and often read Horatio Alger stories
on his front steps.
Copland's father had no musical interest. His mother, Sarah Mittenthal
Copland, sang, played the piano, and arranged music lessons for her
children. Copland had four older siblings: two brothers, Ralph and
Leon, and two sisters, Laurine and Josephine. Of his siblings, his
oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically; he was
proficient on the violin. Laurine had the strongest connection with
Aaron; she gave him his first piano lessons, promoted his musical
education, and supported him in his musical career. A student at the
Metropolitan Opera School and frequent opera-goer, Laurine also
brought home libretti for Aaron to study. Copland attended Boys High
School and in the summer went to various camps. Most of his early
exposure to music was at Jewish weddings and ceremonies, and
occasional family musicales.
Copland began writing songs at the age of eight and a half. His
earliest notated music, about seven bars he wrote when age 11, was for
an opera scenario he created and called 'Zenatello'. From 1913 to 1917
he took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn, who taught him the
standard classical fare. Copland's first public music performance was
at a Wanamaker's recital. By age 15, after attending a concert by
Polish composer-pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Copland decided to
become a composer. At 16, he heard his first symphony, at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music. After attempts to further his music study from a
correspondence course, Copland took formal lessons in harmony, theory,
and composition from Rubin Goldmark, a noted teacher and composer of
American music (who had given George Gershwin three lessons).
Goldmark, with whom Copland studied between 1917 and 1921, gave the
young Copland a solid foundation, especially in the Germanic
tradition. As Copland later said: "This was a stroke of luck for me. I
was spared the floundering that so many musicians have suffered
through incompetent teaching." But Copland also said that Goldmark had
"little sympathy for the advanced musical idioms of the day" and his
"approved" composers ended with Richard Strauss.
Copland's graduation piece from his studies with Goldmark was a
three-movement piano sonata in a Romantic style. But he had also
composed more original and daring pieces that he did not share with
his teacher. In addition to regularly attending the Metropolitan Opera
and the New York Symphony, where he heard the standard classical
repertory, Copland continued his musical development through an
expanding circle of musical friends. After graduating from high
school, he played in dance bands. Continuing his musical education, he
received further piano lessons from Victor Wittgenstein, who found him
"quiet, shy, well-mannered, and gracious in accepting criticism".
Copland's fascination with the Russian Revolution and its promise for
freeing the lower classes drew a rebuke from his father and uncles. In
spite of that, in his early adult life, Copland developed friendships
with people who had socialist and communist leanings.
Study in Paris
================
Copland's passion for the latest European music, plus glowing letters
from his friend Aaron Schaffer, inspired him to go to Paris for
further study. An article in 'Musical America' about a summer school
program for American musicians at the Fontainebleau School of Music,
offered by the French government, encouraged Copland further. His
father wanted him to go to college, but his mother's vote in the
family conference allowed him to give Paris a try. On arriving in
France, he studied at Fontainebleau with pianist and pedagog Isidor
Philipp and composer Paul Vidal. When Copland found Vidal too much
like Goldmark, he switched at the suggestion of a fellow student to
Nadia Boulanger, then aged 34. He had initial reservations: "No one to
my knowledge had ever before thought of studying with a woman." She
interviewed him, and recalled later: "One could tell his talent
immediately."
Boulanger had as many as 40 students at once and employed a formal
regimen that Copland had to follow. Copland found her incisive mind
much to his liking and her ability to critique a composition
impeccable. Boulanger "could always find the weak spot in a place you
suspected was weak... She also could tell you 'why' it was weak
[italics Copland]." He wrote in a letter to his brother Ralph, "This
intellectual Amazon is not only professor at the Conservatoire, is not
only familiar with all music from Bach to Stravinsky, but is prepared
for anything worse in the way of dissonance. But make no mistake ... A
more charming womanly woman never lived." Copland later wrote: "it was
wonderful for me to find a teacher with such openness of mind, while
at the same time she held firm ideas of right and wrong in musical
matters. The confidence she had in my talents and her belief in me
were at the very least flattering and more--they were crucial to my
development at this time of my career." Though he had planned on only
one year abroad, he studied with her for three years, finding that her
eclectic approach inspired his own broad musical taste.
Along with his studies with Boulanger, Copland took classes in French
language and history at the Sorbonne, attended plays, and frequented
Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore that was a
gathering place for expatriate American writers. Among this group in
the heady cultural atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s were Paul Bowles,
Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and
Ezra Pound, as well as artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and
Amedeo Modigliani. Also influential on the new music were the French
intellectuals Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André
Gide; Copland said the latter was his favorite and most read. Travels
to Italy, Austria, and Germany rounded out Copland's musical
education. During his stay in Paris, he began writing musical
critiques, the first on Gabriel Fauré, which helped spread his fame
and stature in the music community.
1925 to 1935
==============
Copland returned to America optimistic and enthusiastic about the
future, determined to make his way as a full-time composer. He rented
a studio apartment on New York City's Upper West Side in the Empire
Hotel, close to Carnegie Hall and other musical venues and publishers.
He remained in that area for the next 30 years, later moving to
Westchester County, New York. Copland lived frugally and survived
financially with help from two $2,500 Guggenheim Fellowships in 1925
and 1926 (each of the two 2500). Lecture-recitals, awards,
appointments, and small commissions, plus some teaching, writing, and
personal loans, kept him afloat in the subsequent years through World
War II.
Also important, especially during the Depression, were wealthy patrons
who underwrote performances, helped pay for publication of works, and
promoted musical events and composers. Among them was Serge
Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who
was known as a champion of "new music". Koussevitsky proved to be very
influential in Copland's life, perhaps the second most important
figure in Copland's career after Boulanger. Beginning with the
Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), Koussevitzky performed more
of Copland's music than that of any the composer's contemporaries, at
a time when other conductors were programming only a few of Copland's
works.
Soon after his return to the United States, Copland was exposed to the
artistic circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. While Copland did
not care for Stieglitz's domineering attitude, he admired his work and
took to heart Stieglitz's conviction that American artists should
reflect "the ideas of American Democracy." This ideal influenced not
just Copland, but also a generation of artists and photographers,
including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe,
and Walker Evans. Evans's photographs inspired portions of Copland's
opera 'The Tender Land'.
In his quest to take up the slogan of the Stieglitz group, "Affirm
America", Copland found only the music of Carl Ruggles and Charles
Ives upon which to draw. Without what Copland called a "usable past"
in American classical composers, he looked to jazz and popular music,
something he had started to do while in Europe. In the 1920s,
Gershwin, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong were in the forefront of
American popular music and jazz. By the end of the decade, Copland
felt his music was going in a more abstract, less jazz-oriented
direction. But as large swing bands such as those of Benny Goodman and
Glenn Miller became popular in the 1930s, Copland took a renewed
interest in the genre.
Inspired by the example of Les Six in France, Copland sought out
contemporaries such as Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and
Walter Piston, and quickly established himself as a spokesperson for
composers of his generation. He also helped found the Copland-Sessions
Concerts to showcase these composers' chamber works to new audiences.
Copland's relationship with these men, who became known as "commando
unit", was one of both support and rivalry, and he played a key role
in keeping them together until after World War II. He also was
generous with his time with nearly every American young composer he
met during his life, later earning the title "Dean of American Music."
With the knowledge he had gained from his studies in Paris, Copland
came into demand as a lecturer and writer on contemporary European
classical music. From 1927 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1938, he taught
classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Eventually, his New School lectures appeared in the form of two
books--'What to Listen for in Music' (1937, revised 1957) and 'Our New
Music' (1940, revised 1968 and retitled 'The New Music: 1900-1960').
During this period, Copland also wrote regularly for 'The New York
Times', 'The Musical Quarterly', and other journals. These articles
appeared in 1969 as the book 'Copland on Music'. During his time at
The New School, Copland was active as a presenter and curator, using
The New School to present a wide range of composers and artists.
Copland's compositions in the early 1920s reflected the modernist
attitude that prevailed among intellectuals, that the arts need be
accessible to only a cadre of the enlightened, and that the masses
would come to appreciate their efforts over time. But mounting
troubles with the 'Symphonic Ode' (1929) and 'Short Symphony' (1933)
caused Copland to rethink this approach. It was financially
unprofitable, particularly during the Depression. Avant-garde music
had lost what cultural historian Morris Dickstein calls "its buoyant
experimental edge" and the national attitude toward it had changed. As
biographer Howard Pollack writes:
Copland observed two trends among composers in the 1930s: first, a
continuing attempt to "simplify their musical language" and, second, a
desire to "make contact" with as wide an audience as possible. Since
1927, he had been in the process of simplifying, or at least paring
down, his musical language, though in such a manner as to sometimes
have the effect, paradoxically, of estranging audiences and
performers. By 1933 ... he began to find ways to make his starkly
personal language accessible to a surprisingly large number of people.
In many ways, this shift mirrored the German idea of ("music for
use"), as composers sought to create music that could serve a
utilitarian as well as artistic purpose. This approach encompassed two
trends: first, music that students could easily learn, and second,
music which would have wider appeal, such as incidental music for
plays, movies, radio, etc. To this end, Copland provided musical
advice and inspiration to The Group Theatre, a company that also
attracted Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and Lee Strasberg. Philosophically
an outgrowth of Stieglitz and his ideals, the Group focused on
socially relevant plays by American authors. Through it and later his
work in film, Copland met several major American playwrights,
including Thornton Wilder, William Inge, Arthur Miller, and Edward
Albee, and considered projects with all of them.
1935 to 1950
==============
Around 1935 Copland began to compose musical pieces for young
audiences, in accordance with the first goal of American
Gebrauchsmusik. These works included piano pieces ('The Young
Pioneers') and an opera ('The Second Hurricane'). During the
Depression years, Copland traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and
Mexico. He formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos
Chávez and returned often to Mexico for working vacations conducting
engagements. During his initial visit to Mexico, Copland began
composing the first of his signature works, 'El Salón México',
completed in 1936. In it and in 'The Second Hurricane' Copland began
"experimenting", as he phrased it, with a simpler, more accessible
style. This and other incidental commissions fulfilled the second goal
of American Gebrauchsmusik, creating music of wide appeal.
Concurrent with 'The Second Hurricane', Copland composed (for radio
broadcast) "Prairie Journal" on a commission from the Columbia
Broadcast System. This was one of his first pieces to convey the
landscape of the American West. This emphasis on the frontier carried
over to his ballet 'Billy the Kid' (1938), which along with 'El Salón
México' became his first widespread public success. Copland's ballet
music established him as an authentic composer of American music much
as Stravinsky's ballet scores connected the composer with Russian
music and came at an opportune time. He helped fill a vacuum for
American choreographers to fill their dance repertory and tapped into
an artistic groundswell, from the motion pictures of Busby Berkeley
and Fred Astaire to the ballets of George Balanchine and Martha
Graham, to both democratize and Americanize dance as an art form. In
1938, Copland helped form the American Composers Alliance to promote
and publish American contemporary classical music. He was president of
the organization from 1939 to 1945. In 1939, Copland completed his
first two Hollywood film scores, for 'Of Mice and Men' and 'Our Town',
and composed the radio score "John Henry", based on the folk ballad.
While these works and others like them that followed were accepted by
the listening public at large, detractors accused Copland of pandering
to the masses. Music critic Paul Rosenfeld, for one, warned in 1939
that Copland was "standing in the fork in the high road, the two
branches of which lead respectively to popular and artistic success".
Even some of Copland's friends, such as composer Arthur Berger, were
confused about Copland's simpler style. One, composer David Diamond,
went so far as to lecture Copland: "By having sold out to the mongrel
commercialists half-way already, the danger is going to be wider for
you, and I beg you dear Aaron, don't sell out [entirely] yet."
Copland's response was that his writing as he did and in as many
genres was his response to how the Depression had affected society, as
well as to new media and the audiences made available by these new
media. As he put it, "The composer who is frightened of losing his
artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer
aware of the meaning of the word art."
The 1940s were arguably Copland's most productive years, and some of
his works from this period cemented his fame. His ballet scores for
'Rodeo' (1942) and 'Appalachian Spring' (1944) were huge successes.
'Lincoln Portrait' and 'Fanfare for the Common Man' became patriotic
standards. Also important was the Third Symphony. Composed from 1944
to 1946, it became Copland's best-known symphony. The Clarinet
Concerto (1948), scored for solo clarinet, strings, harp, and piano,
was a commission piece for band-leader and clarinetist Benny Goodman
and a complement to Copland's earlier jazz-influenced work, the Piano
Concerto (1926). His 'Four Piano Blues' is an introspective
composition with a jazz influence. Copland finished the 1940s with two
film scores, one for William Wyler's 'The Heiress' and one for the
film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel 'The Red Pony'.
In 1949, Copland returned to Europe, where he found French composer
Pierre Boulez dominating the group of postwar avant-garde composers
there. He also met with proponents of twelve-tone technique, based on
the works of Arnold Schoenberg, and found himself interested in
adapting serial methods to his own musical voice.
1950s and 1960s
=================
In 1950, Copland received a U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission
scholarship to study in Rome, which he did the following year. Around
this time, he also composed his Piano Quartet, adopting Schoenberg's
twelve-tone method, and 'Old American Songs' (1950), the first set of
which was premiered by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, the second by
William Warfield. During the 1951-52 academic year, Copland gave a
series of lectures under the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at
Harvard University. These lectures were published as the book 'Music
and Imagination'.
Because of his leftist views, which had included his support of the
Communist Party USA ticket during the 1936 presidential election and
his strong support of Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace in
the 1948 presidential election, Copland was investigated by the FBI
during the Red scare of the 1950s. He was included on an FBI list of
151 artists thought to have Communist associations and found himself
blacklisted, with 'A Lincoln Portrait' withdrawn from the 1953
inaugural concert for President Dwight Eisenhower. Called later that
year to a private hearing at the United States Capitol in Washington,
D.C., Copland was questioned by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn about his
lecturing abroad and his affiliations with various organizations and
events. McCarthy and Cohn ignored Copland's works, which made a virtue
of American values. Outraged by the accusations, many members of the
musical community held up Copland's music as a banner of his
patriotism. The investigations ceased in 1955 and were closed in 1975.
The McCarthy probes did not seriously affect Copland's career and
international artistic reputation, however taxing as they might have
been on his time, energy, and emotional state. Nevertheless, beginning
in 1950, Copland--who had been appalled at Stalin's persecution of
Dmitri Shostakovich and other artists--began resigning from
participation in leftist groups. Copland, Pollack writes, "stayed
particularly concerned about the role of the artist in society". He
decried the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union, and in his
1954 Norton lecture he asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet
Communism deprived artists of "the immemorial right of the artist to
be wrong." He began to vote Democratic, first for Stevenson and then
for Kennedy.
Potentially more damaging for Copland was a sea change in artistic
tastes, away from the Populist mores that infused his work of the
1930s and 40s. Beginning in the 1940s, intellectuals assailed Popular
Front culture, to which Copland's music was linked, and labeled it, in
Dickstein's words, "hopelessly middlebrow, a dumbing down of art into
toothless entertainment". They often linked their disdain for Populist
art with technology, new media and mass audiences--in other words, the
areas of radio, television and motion pictures, for which Copland
either had or soon would write music, as well as his popular ballets.
While these attacks actually began at the end of the 1930s with the
writings of Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald for 'Partisan
Review', they were based in anti-Stalinist politics and accelerated in
the decades following World War II.
Despite any difficulties that his suspected Communist sympathies might
have posed, Copland traveled extensively during the 1950s and early
1960s to observe the avant-garde styles of Europe, hear compositions
by Soviet composers not well known in the West, and experience the new
school of Polish music. In Japan, he was taken with the work of Tōru
Takemitsu and began a correspondence with him that lasted over the
next decade. Copland revised his text "The New Music" with comments on
the styles that he encountered. He found much of what he heard dull
and impersonal. Electronic music seemed to have "a depressing sameness
of sound", while aleatoric music was for those "who enjoy teetering on
the edge of chaos". As he summarized, "I've spent most of my life
trying to get the right note in the right place. Just throwing it open
to chance seems to go against my natural instincts."
In 1952, Copland received a commission from the League of Composers,
funded by a grant from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, to write
an opera for television. While Copland was aware of the potential
pitfalls of that genre, which included weak libretti and demanding
production values, he had also been thinking about writing an opera
since the 1940s. Among the subjects he had considered were Theodore
Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy' and Frank Norris's 'McTeague' He
finally settled on James Agee's 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men', which
seemed appropriate for the more intimate setting of television and
could also be used in the "college trade", with more schools mounting
operas than they had before World War II. The resulting opera, 'The
Tender Land', was written in two acts but later expanded to three. As
Copland feared, when the opera premiered in 1954 critics found the
libretto to be weak. In spite of its flaws, the opera became one of
the few American operas to enter the standard repertory.
In 1957, 1958, and 1976, Copland was the music director of the Ojai
Music Festival, a classical and contemporary music festival in Ojai,
California. For the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Centennial, Copland composed 'Ceremonial Fanfare for Brass Ensemble'
to accompany the exhibition "Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries." Leonard
Bernstein, Piston, William Schuman, and Thomson also composed pieces
for the museum's Centennial exhibitions.
Later years
=============
From the 1960s onward, Copland turned increasingly to conducting.
Though not enamored of the prospect, he found himself without new
ideas for composition, saying, "It was exactly as if someone had
simply turned off a faucet." He became a frequent guest conductor in
the United States and the United Kingdom and made a series of
recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records. In 1960, RCA
Victor released Copland's recordings with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra of the orchestral suites from 'Appalachian Spring' and 'The
Tender Land'; these recordings were later reissued on CD, as were most
of Copland's Columbia recordings (by Sony).
From 1960 until his death, Copland resided at Cortlandt Manor, New
York. Known as Rock Hill, his home was added to the National Register
of Historic Places in 2003 and further designated a National Historic
Landmark in 2008. Copland's health deteriorated through the 1980s, and
he died of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure on December 2,
1990, in North Tarrytown, New York (now Sleepy Hollow).
Following his death, his ashes were scattered over the Tanglewood
Music Center near Lenox, Massachusetts. Much of his large estate was
bequeathed to the creation of the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers,
which bestows over $600,000 per year to performing groups.
Personal life
======================================================================
Copland never enrolled as a member of any political party.
Nevertheless, he inherited a considerable interest in civic and world
events from his father. His views were generally progressive and he
had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular
Front, including Clifford Odets. Early in his life, Copland developed,
in Pollack's words, "a deep admiration for the works of Frank Norris,
Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, all socialists whose novels
passionately excoriated capitalism's physical and emotional toll on
the average man." Even after the McCarthy hearings, he remained a
committed opponent of militarism and the Cold War, which he regarded
as having been instigated by the United States. He condemned it as
"almost worse for art than the real thing". Throw the artist "into a
mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war
attitude and he'll create nothing".
While Copland had various encounters with organized religious thought,
which influenced some of his early compositions, he remained agnostic.
He was close with Zionism during the Popular Front movement, when it
was endorsed by the left. Pollack writes:
Like many contemporaries, Copland regarded Judaism alternately in
terms of religion, culture, and race; but he showed relatively little
involvement in any aspect of his Jewish heritage. At the same time, he
had ties to Christianity, identifying with such profoundly Christian
writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins and often spending Christmas Day at
home with a special dinner with close friends. In general, his music
seemed to evoke Protestant hymns as often as it did Jewish chant.
Copland characteristically found connections among various religious
traditions. But if Copland was discreet about his Jewish background,
he never hid it, either.
Pollack states that Copland was gay and that the composer came to an
early acceptance and understanding of his sexuality. Like many at that
time, Copland guarded his privacy, especially in regard to his
homosexuality. He provided few written details about his private life,
and even after the Stonewall riots of 1969, showed no inclination to
"come out". However, he was one of the few composers of his stature to
live openly and travel with his intimates. They tended to be talented,
younger men involved in the arts, and the age-gap between them and the
composer widened as he grew older. Most became enduring friends after
a few years and, in Pollack's words, "remained a primary source of
companionship". Among Copland's love affairs were ones with
photographer Victor Kraft, artist Alvin Ross, pianist Paul Moor,
dancer Erik Johns, composer John Brodbin Kennedy, and painter Prentiss
Taylor.
Victor Kraft became a constant in Copland's life, though their romance
might have ended by 1944. Originally a violin prodigy when the
composer met him in 1932, Kraft gave up music to pursue a career in
photography, in part due to Copland's urging. Kraft would leave and
re-enter Copland's life, often bringing much stress with him as his
behavior became increasingly erratic, sometimes confrontational. Kraft
fathered a child to whom Copland later provided financial security,
through a bequest from his estate.
Music
======================================================================
Vivian Perlis, who collaborated with Copland on his autobiography,
writes: "Copland's method of composing was to write down fragments of
musical ideas as they came to him. When he needed a piece, he would
turn to these ideas (his 'gold nuggets')." If one or more of these
nuggets looked promising, he would then write a piano sketch and
eventually work on them at the keyboard. The piano, Perlis writes,
"was so integral to his composing that it permeated his compositional
style, not only in the frequent use in the instrument but in more
subtle and complex ways". His habit of turning to the keyboard tended
to embarrass Copland until he learned that Stravinsky also did so.
Copland would not consider the specific instrumentation for a piece
until it was complete and notated. Nor, according to Pollack, did he
generally work in linear fashion, from beginning to end of a
composition. Instead, he tended to compose whole sections in no
particular order and surmise their eventual sequence after all those
parts were complete, much like assembling a collage. Copland himself
admitted, "I don't compose. I assemble materials." Many times, he
included material he had written years earlier. If the situation
dictated, as it did with his film scores, Copland could work quickly.
Otherwise, he tended to write slowly whenever possible. Even with this
deliberation, Copland considered composition, in his words, "the
product of the emotions", which included "self-expression" and
"self-discovery".
Influences
============
While Copland's earliest musical inclinations as a teenager ran toward
Chopin, Debussy, Verdi and the Russian composers, Copland's teacher
and mentor Nadia Boulanger became his most important influence.
Copland especially admired Boulanger's total grasp of all classical
music, and he was encouraged to experiment and develop a "clarity of
conception and elegance in proportion". Following her model, he
studied all periods of classical music and all forms--from madrigals
to symphonies. This breadth of vision led Copland to compose music for
numerous settings--orchestra, opera, solo piano, small ensemble, art
song, ballet, theater and film. Boulanger particularly emphasized "la
grande ligne" (the long line), "a sense of forward motion ... the
feeling for inevitability, for the creating of an entire piece that
could be thought of as a functioning entity".
During his studies with Boulanger in Paris, Copland was excited to be
so close to the new post-Impressionistic French music of Ravel,
Roussel, and Satie, as well as Les Six, a group that included Milhaud,
Poulenc, and Honegger. Webern, Berg, and Bartók also impressed him.
Copland was "insatiable" in seeking out the newest European music,
whether in concerts, score reading or heated debate. These "moderns"
were discarding the old laws of composition and experimenting with new
forms, harmonies and rhythms, and including the use of jazz and
quarter-tone music. Milhaud was Copland's inspiration for some of his
earlier "jazzy" works. He was also exposed to Schoenberg and admired
his earlier atonal pieces, thinking Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire'
above all others. Copland named Igor Stravinsky as his "hero" and his
favorite 20th-century composer. Copland especially admired
Stravinsky's "jagged and uncouth rhythmic effects", "bold use of
dissonance", and "hard, dry, crackling sonority".
Another inspiration for much of Copland's music was jazz. Although
familiar with jazz back in America--having listened to it and also
played it in bands--he fully realized its potential while traveling in
Austria: "The impression of jazz one receives in a foreign country is
totally unlike the impression of such music heard in one's own country
... when I heard jazz played in Vienna, it was like hearing it for the
first time." He also found that the distance from his native country
helped him see the United States more clearly. Beginning in 1923, he
employed "jazzy elements" in his classical music, but by the late
1930s, he moved on to Latin and American folk tunes in his more
successful pieces. Although his early focus of jazz gave way to other
influences, Copland continued to make use of jazz in more subtle ways
in later works. Copland's work from the late 1940s onward included
experimentation with Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, resulting in two
major works, the Piano Quartet (1950) and the Piano Fantasy (1957).
Early works
=============
Copland's compositions before leaving for Paris were mainly short
works for piano and art songs, inspired by Liszt and Debussy. In them,
he experimented with ambiguous beginnings and endings, rapid key
changes, and the frequent use of tritones. His first published work,
'The Cat and the Mouse' (1920), was a piece for piano solo based on
the Jean de La Fontaine fable "The Old Cat and the Young Mouse". In
'Three Moods' (1921), Copland's final movement is entitled "Jazzy",
which he noted "is based on two jazz melodies and ought to make the
old professors sit up and take notice".
The Symphony for Organ and Orchestra established Copland as a serious
modern composer. Musicologist Gayle Murchison cites Copland's use
melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements endemic in jazz, which he
would also use in his 'Music for the Theater' and Piano Concerto to
evoke an essentially "American" sound. he fuses these qualities with
modernist elements such as octatonic and whole-tone scales,
polyrhythmic ostinato figures, and dissonant counterpoint. Murchinson
points out the influence of Igor Stravinsky in the work's nervous,
driving rhythms and some of its harmonic language. Copland in
hindsight found the work too "European" as he consciously sought a
more consciously American idiom to evoke in his future work.
Visits to Europe in 1926 and 1927 brought him into contact with the
most recent developments there, including Webern's Five Pieces for
Orchestra, which greatly impressed him. In August 1927, while staying
in Königstein, Copland wrote 'Poet's Song', a setting of a text by E.
E. Cummings and his first composition using Schoenberg's twelve-tone
technique. This was followed by the 'Symphonic Ode' (1929) and the
Piano Variations (1930), both of which rely on the exhaustive
development of a single short motif. This procedure, which provided
Copland with more formal flexibility and a greater emotional range
than in his earlier music, is similar to Schoenberg's idea of
"continuous variation" and, according to Copland's own admission, was
influenced by the twelve-tone method, though neither work actually
uses a twelve-tone row.
The other major work of Copland's first period is the 'Short Symphony'
(1933). In it, music critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg writes,
the "jazz-influenced dislocations of meter that are so characteristic
of Copland's music of the 1920s are more prevalent than ever".
Compared to the 'Symphonic Ode', the orchestration is much leaner and
the composition itself more concentrated. In its combination and
refinement of modernist and jazz elements, Steinberg calls the 'Short
Symphony' "a remarkable synthesis of the learned and the vernacular,
and thus, in all its brevity [the work last just 15 minutes], a
singularly 'complete' representation of its composer". However,
Copland moved from this work toward more accessible works and folk
sources.
Populist works
================
Copland wrote 'El Salón México' between 1932 and 1936, which met with
a popular acclaim that contrasted the relative obscurity of most of
his previous works. Inspiration for this work came from Copland's
vivid recollection of visiting the "Salon Mexico" dancehall where he
witnessed a more intimate view of Mexico's nightlife. Copland derived
his melodic material for this piece freely from two collections of
Mexican folk tunes, changing pitches and varying rhythms. The use of a
folk tune with variations set in a symphonic context started a pattern
he repeated in many of his most successful works right on through the
1940s. It also marked a shift in emphasis from a unified musical
structure to the rhetorical effect the music might have on an audience
and showed Copland refining a simplified, more accessible musical
language.
'El Salón' prepared Copland to write the ballet score 'Billy the Kid',
which became, in Pollack's words, an "archetypical depiction of the
legendary American West". Based on a Walter Noble Burns novel, with
choreography by Eugene Loring, 'Billy' was among the first to display
an American music and dance vocabulary. Copland used six cowboy folk
songs to provide period atmosphere and employed polyrhythm and
polyharmony when not quoting these tunes literally to maintain the
work's overall tone. In this way, Copland's music worked much in the
same way as the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, in that it employed
elements that could be grasped easily by a mass audience. The ballet
premiered in New York in 1939, with Copland recalling: "I cannot
remember another work of mine that was so unanimously received." Along
with the ballet 'Rodeo', 'Billy the Kid' became, in the words of
musicologist Elizabeth Crist, "the basis for Copland's reputation as a
composer of Americana" and defines "an uncomplicated form of American
nationalism".
Copland's brand of nationalism in his ballets differed from that of
European composers such as Béla Bartók, who tried to preserve the folk
tones they used as close to the original as possible. Copland enhanced
the tunes he used with contemporary rhythms, textures and structures.
In what could seem contradictory, he used complex harmonies and
rhythms to simplify folk melodies and make them more accessible and
familiar to his listeners. Except for the Shaker tune in 'Appalachian
Spring', Copland often syncopates traditional melodies, changes their
metric patterns and note values. In 'Billy the Kid', he derives many
of the work's sparse harmonies from the implied harmonic constructions
of the cowboy tunes themselves.
Like Stravinsky, Copland mastered the ability to create a coherent,
integrated composition from what was essentially a mosaic of divergent
folk-based and original elements. In that sense, Copland's Populist
works such as 'Billy the Kid', 'Rodeo', 'Appalachian Spring' are not
far removed from Stravinsky's ballet 'The Rite of Spring'. Within that
framework, however, Copland preserved the American atmosphere of these
ballets through what musicologist Elliott Antokoletz calls "the
conservative handling of open diatonic sonorities", which fosters "a
pastoral quality" in the music. This is especially true in the opening
of 'Appalachian Spring', where the harmonizations remain "transparent
and bare, suggested by the melodic disposition of the Shaker tune".
Variations which contrast to this tune in rhythm, key, texture and
dynamics, fit within Copland's compositional practice of juxtaposing
structural blocks.
Film scores
=============
When Hollywood beckoned concert hall composers in the 1930s with
promises of better films and higher pay, Copland saw both a challenge
for his abilities as a composer as well as an opportunity to expand
his reputation and audience for his more serious works. In a departure
from other film scores of the time, Copland's work largely reflected
his own style, instead of the usual borrowing from the late-Romantic
period. He often avoided the full orchestra, and he rejected the
common practice of using a leitmotif to identify characters with their
own personal themes. He instead matched a theme to the action, while
avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis.
Another technique Copland employed was to keep silent during intimate
screen moments and only begin the music as a confirming motive toward
the end of a scene. Virgil Thomson wrote that the score for 'Of Mice
and Men' established "the most distinguished populist musical style
yet created in America". Many composers who scored for Western movies,
particularly between 1940 and 1960, were influenced by Copland's
style, though some also followed the late Romantic "Max Steiner"
approach, which was considered more conventional and desirable.
Later works
=============
Copland's work in the late 1940s and 1950s included use of
Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, a development that he had recognized
but not fully embraced. He had also believed the atonality of
serialized music to run counter to his desire to reach a wide
audience. Copland therefore approached dodecaphony with some initial
skepticism. While in Europe in 1949, he heard a number of serial works
but did not admire much of it because "so often it seemed that
individuality was sacrificed to the method". The music of French
composer Pierre Boulez showed Copland that the technique could be
separated from the "old Wagnerian" aesthetic with which he had
associated it previously. Subsequent exposure to the late music of
Austrian composer Anton Webern and twelve-tone pieces by Swiss
composer Frank Martin and Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola
strengthened this opinion.
Copland came to the conclusion that composing along serial lines was
"nothing more than an angle of vision. Like fugal treatment, it is a
stimulus that enlivens musical thinking, especially when applied to a
series of tones that lend themselves to that treatment." He began his
first serial work, the "Piano Fantasy", in 1951 to fulfill a
commission from the young virtuoso pianist William Kapell. The piece
became one of his most challenging works, over which he labored until
1957. During the work's development, in 1953, Kapell died in an
aircraft crash. Critics lauded the "Fantasy" when it was finally
premiered, calling the piece "an outstanding addition to his own
oeuvre and to contemporary piano literature" and "a tremendous
achievement". Jay Rosenfield stated: "This is a new Copland to us, an
artist advancing with strength and not building on the past alone."
Serialism allowed Copland a synthesis of serial and non-serial
practices. Before he did this, according to musicologist Joseph
Straus, the philosophical and compositional difference between
non-tonal composers such as Schoenberg and tonal composers like
Stravinsky had been considered too wide a gulf to bridge. Copland
wrote that, to him, serialism pointed in two opposite directions, one
"toward the extreme of total organization with electronic
applications" and the other "a gradual absorption into what had become
a very 'freely interpreted tonalism' [italics Copland]". The path he
said he chose was the latter one, which he said, when he described his
'Piano Fantasy', allowed him to incorporate "elements able to be
associated with the twelve-tone method and also with music tonally
conceived". This practice differed markedly from Schoenberg, who used
his tone rows as complete statements around which to structure his
compositions. Copland used his rows not very differently from how he
fashioned the material in his tonal pieces. He saw his rows as sources
for melodies and harmonies, not as complete and independent entities,
except at points in the musical structure that dictated the complete
statement of a row.
Even after Copland started using 12-tone techniques, he did not stick
to them exclusively but went back and forth between tonal and
non-tonal compositions. Other late works include: 'Dance Panels'
(1959, ballet music), 'Something Wild' (1961, his last film score,
much of which would be later incorporated into his 'Music for a Great
City'), 'Connotations' (1962, for the new Lincoln Center Philharmonic
hall), 'Emblems' (1964, for wind band), 'Night Thoughts' (1972, for
the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition), and 'Proclamation'
(1982, his last work, started in 1973).
Critic, writer, teacher
======================================================================
Copland did not consider himself a professional writer. He called his
writing "a byproduct of my trade" as "a kind of salesman for
contemporary music". As such, he wrote prolifically about music,
including pieces on music criticism analysis, on musical trends, and
on his own compositions. An avid lecturer and lecturer-performer,
Copland eventually collected his presentation notes into three books,
'What to Listen for in Music' (1939), 'Our New Music' (1941), and
'Music and Imagination' (1952). In the 1980s, he collaborated with
Vivian Perlis on a two-volume autobiography, 'Copland: 1900 Through
1942' (1984) and 'Copland Since 1943' (1989). Along with the
composer's first-person narrative, these two books incorporate 11
"interludes" by Perlis and other sections from friends and peers. Some
controversy arose over the second volume's increased reliance over the
first on old documents for source material. Due to the then-advanced
stage of Copland's Alzheimer's and the resulting memory loss, however,
this fallback to previous material was inevitable. The use in both
books of letters and other unpublished sources, expertly researched
and organized, made them what Pollack terms "invaluable".
During his career, Copland met and helped hundreds of young composers,
whom he met and who were drawn to him by his continual interest and
acuity into the contemporary musical scene. This assistance came
mainly outside an institutional framework--other than his summers at
the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, a decade of teaching and
curating at The New School, and a few semesters at Harvard and the
State University of New York at Buffalo, Copland operated outside an
academic setting. Pollack writes: "Those composers who actually
studied with him were small in number and did so for only brief
periods; rather, Copland helped younger composers more informally,
with intermittent advice and aid." This advice included focusing on
expressive content rather than on purely technical points and on
developing a personal style.
Copland's willingness to foster talent extended to critiquing scores
in progress that were presented to him by his peers. Composer William
Schuman writes: "As a teacher, Aaron was extraordinary.... Copland
would look at your music and try to understand what 'you' were after
[italics Schuman]. He didn't want to turn you into another Aaron
Copland.... When he questioned something, it was in a manner that
might make you want to question it yourself. Everything he said was
helpful in making a younger composer realize the potential of a
particular work. On the other hand, Aaron could be strongly critical."
Conductor
======================================================================
Although Copland studied conducting in Paris in 1921, he remained
essentially a self-taught conductor with a very personal style.
Encouraged by Igor Stravinsky to master conducting and perhaps
emboldened by Carlos Chavez's efforts in Mexico, he began to direct
his own works on his international travels in the 1940s. By the 1950s,
he was also conducting the works of other composers, and after a
televised appearance where he directed the New York Philharmonic,
Copland became in high demand. He placed a strong emphasis in his
programs on 20th-century music and lesser-known composers, and until
the 1970s rarely planned concerts to feature his music exclusively.
Performers and audiences generally greeted his conducting appearances
as positive opportunities to hear his music as the composer intended.
His efforts on behalf of other composers could be penetrating but also
uneven.
Understated on the podium, Copland modeled his style after other
composer/conductors such as Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. Critics
wrote of his precision and clarity before an orchestra. Observers
noted that he had "none of the typical conductorial vanities".
Copland's unpretentious charm was appreciated by professional
musicians but some criticized his "unsteady" beat and "unexciting"
interpretations. Koussevitzky advised him to "stay home and compose".
Copland at times asked for conducting advice from Bernstein, who
occasionally joked that Copland could conduct his works "a little
better". Bernstein also noted that Copland improved over time, and he
considered him a more natural conductor than Stravinsky or Hindemith.
Eventually, Copland recorded nearly all his orchestral works with
himself conducting.
Legacy
======================================================================
Copland wrote a total of about 100 works which covered a diverse range
of genres. Many of these compositions, especially orchestral pieces,
have remained part of the standard American repertoire. According to
Pollack, Copland "had perhaps the most distinctive and identifiable
musical voice produced by this country so far, an individuality ...
that helped define for many what American concert music sounds like at
its most characteristic and that exerted enormous influence on
multitudes of contemporaries and successors." His synthesis of
influences and inclinations helped create the "Americanism" of his
music. The composer himself pointed out, in summarizing the American
character of his music, "the optimistic tone", "his love of rather
large canvases", "a certain directness in expression of sentiment",
and "a certain songfulness".
While "Copland's musical rhetoric has become iconic" and "has
functioned as a mirror of America", conductor Leon Botstein suggests
that the composer "helped define the modern consciousness of America's
ideals, character and sense of place. The notion that his music played
not a subsidiary but a central role in the shaping of the national
consciousness makes Copland uniquely interesting, for the historian as
well as the musician." Composer Ned Rorem states, "Aaron stressed
simplicity: Remove, remove, remove what isn't needed.... Aaron brought
leanness to America, which set the tone for our musical language
throughout [World War II]. Thanks to Aaron, American music came into
its own."
Awards
======================================================================
* On September 14, 1964, Aaron Copland was presented with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
* In honor of Copland's vast influence on American music, on December
15, 1970, he was awarded the prestigious University of Pennsylvania
Glee Club Award of Merit. Beginning in 1964, this award "established
to bring a declaration of appreciation to an individual each year that
has made a significant contribution to the world of music and helped
to create a climate in which our talents may find valid expression".
* Copland was awarded the New York Music Critics' Circle Award and the
Pulitzer Prize in composition for 'Appalachian Spring'. His scores for
'Of Mice and Men' (1939), 'Our Town' (1940), and 'The North Star'
(1943) all received Academy Award nominations, while 'The Heiress' won
Best Music in 1950.
* In 1961, Aaron Copland was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal by the
MacDowell Colony where he was a fellow eight times (1925, 1928, 1935,
1938, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1956.)
* He was a recipient of Yale University's Sanford Medal.
* In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
* He was awarded a special Congressional Gold Medal by the United
States Congress in 1987.
* He was made an honorary member of the Alpha Upsilon chapter of Phi
Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1961 and was awarded the fraternity's Charles E.
Lutton Man of Music Award in 1970.
In popular culture
======================================================================
Aaron Copland's music has served as the inspiration for a number of
popular modern works of music:
* "Hoedown" - Annie Moses Band
* "Fanfare for the Common Man" - Emerson, Lake & Palmer
* "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" -
Weezer (partially based upon "Variations on a Shaker Hymn")
Copland's music was prominently featured throughout Spike Lee's 1998
film, 'He Got Game'.
Works
======================================================================
* Scherzo Humoristique: 'The Cat and the Mouse' (1920)
* Four Motets (1921)
* 'Three Moods' (piano solo) (1921)
* 'Passacaglia' (piano solo) (1922)
* Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924)
* 'Music for the Theater' (1925)
* Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1926)
* 'Symphonic Ode' (1927-1929)
* Piano Variations (1930)
* 'Grohg' (ballet) (1925/32)
* 'Dance Symphony' (1929) (using music from 'Grohg')
* 'Short Symphony' (Symphony No. 2) (1931-33)
* 'Statements for Orchestra' (1932-35)
* 'The Second Hurricane, play-opera for high school performance'
(1936)
* 'El Salón México' (1936)
* 'Billy the Kid' (ballet) (1938)
* 'Quiet City' (1940)
* 'Our Town' (1940)
* Piano Sonata (1939-41)
* 'An Outdoor Overture', written for high school orchestras (1938) and
transcribed for wind band (1941)
* 'Fanfare for the Common Man' (1942)
* 'Lincoln Portrait' (1942)
* 'Rodeo' (ballet) (1942)
* 'Danzón cubano' (1942)
* 'Music for Movies' (1942)
* Sonata for violin and piano (1943)
* 'Appalachian Spring' (ballet) (1944)
* Third Symphony (1944-1946)
* 'In the Beginning' (1947)
* 'The Red Pony' (1948)
* Clarinet Concerto (commissioned by Benny Goodman) (1947-1948)
* Film score for 'The Heiress' (1949, Academy Award)
* 'Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson' (1950)
* Piano Quartet (1950)
* 'Old American Songs' (Book One 1950, Book Two 1952)
* 'The Tender Land' (opera) (1954)
* 'Canticle of Freedom' (1955)
* Orchestral Variations (orchestration of Piano Variations) (1957)
* Piano Fantasy (1957)
* 'Dance Panels' (ballet) (1959; revised 1962)
* 'Connotations' (1962)
* 'Down A Country Lane' (1962)
* 'Music for a Great City' (1964) (based on his score of the 1961 film
'Something Wild')
* 'Emblems, for wind band' (1964); orchestral transcription by D.
Wilson Ochoa (2006)
* 'Inscape' (1967)
* Duo for flute and piano (1971)
* 'Night-Thoughts' (1972)
* Three Latin American Sketches (1972)
Source:
Film
======================================================================
* 'Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait' (1985). Directed by Allan Miller.
Biographies in Music series. Princeton, New Jersey: The Humanities.
* 'Appalachian Spring' (1996). Directed by Graham Strong, Scottish
Television Enterprises. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the
Humanities.
* 'Copland Portrait' (1975). Directed by Terry Sanders, United States
Information Agency. Santa Monica, California: American Film
Foundation.
* 'Fanfare for America: The Composer Aaron Copland' (2001). Directed
by Andreas Skipis. Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in association with
Reiner Moritz Associates. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the
Humanities & Sciences.
Written works
======================================================================
* Copland, Aaron (1939; revised 1957), 'What to Listen for in Music',
New York: McGraw-Hill, reprinted many times.
* ---- (1941; revised 1968), 'Our New Music' ('The New Music:
1900-1960', rev.), New York: W. W. Norton.
* ---- (1953), 'Music and Imagination', Harvard University Press.
* ---- (1960), 'Copland on Music', New York: Doubleday.
* ---- (2006). 'Music and Imagination', Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press. .
Further reading
======================================================================
*
*
*
* Dufallo, Richard. 1989. 'Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard
Dufallo'. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Gagne, Cole and Tracy Caras. 1982. 'Soundpieces: Interviews with
American Composers'. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
*
*
External links
======================================================================
* [
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/eadmus.mu002006 The Aaron Copland
Collection] and the
[
https://www.loc.gov/collections/aaron-copland/about-this-collection/Online
Aaron Copland Collection] at the Library of Congress
*
* [
http://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/Coplandtribute.htm A
Tribute to Aaron Copland at American Music Preservation.com]
* [
https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/7/resources/5483 Aaron
Copland Oral History collection at Oral History of American Music]
Listening
===========
* [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dQ55uHYirk 'Hoedown - Annie Moses
Band']
*
*
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20120315164107/http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/coplanda1.shtml
Audio (.ram files) of a 1961 interview for the BBC (archive from March
15, 2012; accessed June 30, 2016)]
* [
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4170338 Audio
(.smil files) of a 1980 interview for NPR]
*
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20150530204756/https://www.classicaltv.com/explore/aaron-copland
Fanfare for America (video)]
License
=========
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Copland
