Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland: The Sound America Decided Was Its Own

Before Aaron Copland, "American music" mostly meant European forms performed by American orchestras. After *Appalachian Spring*, it meant open fifths, wide-spaced chords, and a Shaker hymn scored so plainly it sounded like landscape. "I don't compose," Copland once said. "I assemble materials." That claim, both self-deprecating and precisely true, describes how a Brooklyn grocer's son built the sound an entire country came to recognize as its own.

A Grocery Store Above Brooklyn

Copland was born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origin; his father ran a shop the family lived above, which Copland later called "a kind of neighborhood Macy's." His sister Laurine gave him his first piano lessons. Hearing the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski at fifteen convinced him to become a composer, and from 1917 he studied with Rubin Goldmark — the same teacher who had earlier trained George Gershwin — who gave him, in Copland's words, "a solid foundation, especially in the Germanic tradition" but "little sympathy for the advanced musical idioms of the day." Copland wrote his conventional graduation sonata for Goldmark while privately composing more daring pieces he kept hidden from him.

Paris, and "This Intellectual Amazon"

In 1921 Copland sailed for the Fontainebleau summer school in France and, after briefly studying with Paul Vidal, switched to a thirty-four-year-old teacher named Nadia Boulanger — a decision that reshaped his entire career. "This intellectual Amazon is not only professor at the Conservatoire," he wrote to his brother, "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." Boulanger, he said, "could always find the weak spot in a place you suspected was weak... She also could tell you why it was weak." He stayed three years instead of one, absorbing her concept of *la grande ligne* — the long line, a sense of forward inevitability that runs under even his simplest scores. In Paris he also frequented Shakespeare and Company, met Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and discovered Ravel, Satie, and Les Six — and, crucially, heard American jazz for the first time as a foreigner might hear it: "The impression of jazz one receives in a foreign country is totally unlike the impression of such music heard in one's own country."

From Difficult Modernist to National Voice

Copland's 1920s output — the jazz-inflected *Symphony for Organ and Orchestra*, the astringent *Piano Variations* (1930), the *Short Symphony* (1933) — was uncompromisingly modern, built on dissonant counterpoint and exhaustive motivic development, and it found only a narrow audience during the Depression. Around 1933 Copland made a deliberate turn, embracing what he called making his "starkly personal language accessible to a surprisingly large number of people." *El Salón México* (1932–36), built from Mexican folk-tune fragments encountered in a Mexico City nightclub, was the breakthrough; the ballets *Billy the Kid* (1938) and *Rodeo* (1942) followed, drawing on cowboy songs and open-prairie harmony to build what became the sound of American frontier myth on stage. Copland called the reception to *Billy the Kid* the most unanimous of his career.

*Appalachian Spring* (1944), choreographed by Martha Graham, crowned the style: a Shaker tune, "Simple Gifts," harmonized so transparently that the melody seems to have always existed in that shape, set against blocks of contrasting rhythm and texture that Copland assembled almost like collage panels. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics' Circle Award. *Fanfare for the Common Man*, written the same decade, became a civic reflex — played at inaugurations, memorials, and stadium loudspeakers — while *Lincoln Portrait* achieved similar patriotic standing, ironically, just before it became politically radioactive.

Not everyone approved of the shift. Critic Paul Rosenfeld warned in 1939 that Copland stood "in the fork in the high road, the two branches of which lead respectively to popular and artistic success," and the composer David Diamond begged him: "don't sell out entirely yet." Copland's answer was unapologetic: "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 Investigation

Copland's progressive politics — support for the Communist Party USA ticket in 1936, for Henry Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948 — caught up with him during the Red Scare. The FBI placed him on a list of 151 artists with suspected Communist ties; *A Lincoln Portrait* was pulled from Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 inaugural concert; and Copland was hauled before a closed Senate hearing where Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn questioned him about lecturing abroad, apparently without noticing that the man before them had written some of the century's most explicitly patriotic concert music. The investigation closed formally only in 1955. Copland later called the Cold War climate "almost worse for art than the real thing," arguing that an atmosphere of "suspicion, ill-will, and dread" makes creative work nearly impossible.

A Method, and a Second Language

Copland's working method was fragmentary by design: he jotted musical ideas as they occurred — his "gold nuggets" — and, when starting a new piece, sorted through the accumulated pile rather than composing start to finish, assembling whole sections out of sequence like collage panels. In the late 1940s, prompted partly by Stravinsky's own late turn and by Pierre Boulez's serial experiments, Copland began using twelve-tone rows himself — not as complete structural statements the way Schoenberg used them, but as source material for melody and harmony, most fully in the *Piano Fantasy* (1957) and *Connotations* (1961). It let him move between tonal Americana and astringent serialism without ever fully committing to either camp.

He was also, discreetly and for the era unusually openly, gay — biographer Howard Pollack describes him as one of the few composers of his stature to travel with acknowledged male partners, among them the photographer Victor Kraft, though he never publicly discussed his private life even after Stonewall.

Why Aaron Is Called a Genius

The case for Copland's genius is not raw melodic invention — he readily admitted borrowing folk tunes and hymn melodies wholesale rather than inventing his own — but a specific compositional intelligence: the ability to strip a musical texture down to almost nothing (open fifths, bare octaves, long silences) and have the result read, instantly and to non-specialist ears, as "American." Conductor Leon Botstein has argued that Copland's music "functioned as a mirror of America" and helped shape the country's sense of its own character, a claim rarely made about a composer's technical output rather than a novelist's or filmmaker's. Composer Ned Rorem put the mechanism plainly: "Aaron stressed simplicity: Remove, remove, remove what isn't needed." That is the honest core of the skill — Copland's genius was subtractive, an editor's genius, closer to knowing what to cut than to inventing new material from nothing. Critics in his own lifetime, including friends, accused him of trading modernist rigor for popular accessibility, and the accusation has some truth in it: the astringent 1930 Copland and the folksy 1944 Copland are nearly different composers. What survived the criticism is simply that the folksy version is the one that became, by wide consensus, the sound of the country.

Legacy

Copland taught only informally — at the New School and occasional Harvard and Tanglewood appointments — but mentored generations of American composers through advice rather than formal instruction; William Schuman recalled that "he didn't want to turn you into another Aaron Copland." He conducted his own catalogue extensively for Columbia Records into the 1970s, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and died of Alzheimer's disease on December 2, 1990, at ninety. His estate endowed the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which still distributes over $600,000 a year to American performing groups — a final decision entirely consistent with a man who insisted he only assembled what was already there.