Born in New York City as the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Copland had an upbringing that was about as far from the American heartland as possible. On paper, Copland seemed an unlikely candidate to invent such musical Americana. They are part of the permanent reservoir of Americana.

Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring made Copland’s name famous internationally, are still played continually as orchestral concert pieces, and are familiar to millions of listeners. It’s interesting, however, that only Copland’s examples have proved truly enduring and have remained in the repertoire and the public consciousness. The move toward a musical style that might seem “patriotic” was a response to the troubled times, as was the new ideal of writing music “for the people.” More broadly, this was all part of a “coming of age” of American classical composition, where composers sought to establish a style that would sound as American as Debussy sounded French and Wagner German. composers during the Great Depression and World War II. The search for a style of music with an “American heartland” sound was a common endeavor of a whole school of U.S. His slightly older colleagues Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson were working along these lines too, and they and Copland were in close contact (listen to Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune of 1928 for a foretaste of where Copland would be headed a decade later). It seems to be a popular assumption that Copland created his new Americana style singlehandedly. The trilogy was completed in 1944 by Appalachian Spring, about a pioneer wedding at a Pennsylvania farmhouse-its musical centerpiece a transformation of a Shaker hymn tune, “Simple Gifts.” (Speaking for myself, Rodeo, with its abundant humor and its rousing “Hoe-Down,” has always been my favorite of the trio.) Rodeo, with a simpler scenario of a cowgirl who attends a dance, came in 1940. American, based on cowboy ballads and frontier songs in a retelling of the life of the notorious outlaw. Not long after he followed up with the ballet Billy the Kid, where both the subject matter and the musical themes were U.S. He arrived a new solution, that of combining modern classical technique with American folksong.Ĭuriously enough, the first sign of this new style came in the form of a piece with decided Latin American overtones, the orchestral tone poem El Salon Mexico of 1936. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” Copland had already experimented with interbreeding classical technique and jazz and had found this too limited and constricting. In his words, “it made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. Copland realized that the new electronic media were fostering a new audience for music, one distinct from the traditional concert audience. But on a deeper level, there was also a need to modify his style. One of his means of doing so was to produce incidental music for new mass media like radio and movies. However, by the late 1930s, Copland desired to reach a broader public than was possible with his modernistic works. These works no longer sound shocking or troubling as they did to audiences a hundred years ago, but rather strike us as vintage early-20 th-century music. Such challenging, harmonically pungent pieces as the Piano Variations and Organ Symphony bear witness to this early phase of his career. His early work was imbued with European modernism, learned during his studies in Paris with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. Copland, however, did not start out with any intention of evoking Americana in his music. This sense of “open spaces,” evocative of pastoral life and the vastness of the American landscape, resulted from his particular use of musical texture, of the highs and lows of pitch, and his use of intervals like open fifths, redolent of the open strings of a fiddle. Much of his music is also said to embody a sense of Americana, a quality that is too rarely defined with any precision beyond the feeling of “wide open spaces” and the use of certain American folksongs as thematic material. Its greatness is not diminished by its widespread imitation by lesser talents in movies, television shows, and commercials, where it has served as a ready way to evoke the Far West, small-town life, or other phases of Americana.Īaron Copland (1900–1990) enjoys a reputation as America’s most esteemed composer of classical music. At its best, Aaron Copland’s Americana style is one of the great, ingenious, and enduring achievements in music.

Aaron copland compositions