Aaron Copland is one of those figures who gives a tincture of credibility to the American myth of the melting pot. A Brooklyn boy of Lithuanian-Jewish extraction (originally surnamed Kaplan), he grew up above his family’s department store. He studied in Paris and returned to the United States as an avant-gardist. Only later did he become the quintessential American populist on the concert stage, his compositions grounded in the country’s folk music but presented with a tremendous instrumental flair, learned from the Russian-born Stravinsky’s Parisian style. Only, as they say, in America.
Growing up where and when he did, Copland said he could not imagine how he ended up as a composer. As a child he had piano lessons from his sister. By age fifteen, from random encounters with assorted music, he had decided he wanted to compose. He took some lessons in New York and at twenty-one was accepted into the new Fontainebleau School of Music, near Paris. There he became the first student of the brilliant Nadia Boulanger, who steeped him in Stravinskian neoclassicism and introduced him to conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who later with the Boston Symphony became a powerful advocate for Copland and other American composers. (Boulanger went on to teach generations of Americans, among them Samuel Barber.)
Copland returned to the United States in 1924 with a commission for an organ concerto; Boulanger premiered it in Carnegie Hall. Then and for some time after, critics considered Copland a radical; he was writing fiercely experimental, sometimes political music. Searching for some kind of uniquely American voice, among his more austere works he also produced the jazzy, sardonic Music for the Theater.
In those years Copland was much involved in leftist politics, in 1935 winning a socialist song competition with his “Into the Streets May First.” By that point in the middle of the Depression, his politics were taking him away from mainstream modernism. In a famous statement he said, “During those years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer… 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.” This was the time of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic and other works that came to be called Americana. Copland became the standard bearer of that movement in music.
The new style began with a dazzling orchestral work based on Mexican folksongs: El salon México, from 1936. Here as if out of nowhere appeared the Copland sound: vivid orchestral colors founded on Stravinsky’s neoclassic style but with an individual voice; athletic, intricately syncopated rhythms based on jazz but with a singular effect; an apparently effortless absorption of folk material that was foreign to Copland’s background, but which he made his own. What he did should not have worked, but somehow it did.
There followed three legendary ballets, each on an American theme. Billy the Kid appeared in 1938. The story is based not on the real but the mythical outlaw. Copland’s music evokes that mythical sense of the west, integrating familiar cowboy songs, such as “Goodbye Old Paint” and “Git Along Little Dogies.” Try the suite Copland extracted from the ballet. The opening conjures grand drama and vast spaces. The “Mexican Dance” looks back to the jazzy syncopations of El salon México. After vivid bits of tone-painting in the “Card Game,” “Gun Battle,” and “Billy’s Death,” the conclusion returns memorably to the mythic voice. Here is American history on an epic tonal canvas that sounds timeless, but which Copland invented for himself. (After an early performance of the ballet, an old cowhand showed up backstage to say it was all grand except that he knew Billy, and he shot left-handed.)
Next came Rodeo, in 1942. Try the familiar four excerpts from the ballet: “Buckaroo Holiday,” “Corral Nocturne,” “Saturday Night Waltz,” “Hoedown.” This sort of thing was a formula for cliché and sentimentality, but the irresistible vivacity and freshness of Copland’s execution made it a classic. You don’t forget the sweet poignant grace of the waltz, the fiddle-tune ecstasy of “Hoedown.” As with his models in Stravinsky and Mahler, Copland’s iridescent handling of the orchestra is an indispensable part of the expression and excitement.
In 1944 came his masterpiece, a ballet on a commission from Martha Graham: Appalachian Spring. It is an unadorned story: a young couple marries and establishes a home in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. Copland always owned a distinctive strain of heart-tugging pathos, and it is on moving display here. Best known is the orchestral suite he extracted, but like many musicians I prefer the original chamber version as it was written for the ballet. Here the warmth and intimacy of the scoring matches the intimacy and spirituality of the music: a quiet affirmation of plain living and plain virtues. The spacious opening clarinet solo is unforgettable; like Mahler, Copland could write that kind of thing as if there had never been a clarinet solo before. For material for the latter part of the ballet he perused a collection of Shaker songs, with historic results: his variations on “Simple Gifts,” made an obscure tune from the collection famous. I suggest trying the original chamber version first, then go on to his full-orchestra arrangement, where he places the music in a plusher setting.
In the postwar years Copland became an icon. Having started as a musical and political radical of Russian descent, he ended up the Dumbledore of American music. He engaged in a great deal of outreach to classical audiences via radio programs and appreciation books, including What to Listen for in Music. He proselytized and performed as pianist and conductor, among other things giving historic premieres of Charles Ives. He wrote memorable music for films, including The Heiress and The Red Pony. He and Leonard Bernstein became the nucleus of a glittering group of gay composers and musicians, though in those days they had to keep their orientation under wraps. Copland downplayed his 1930s radicalism, though his pealing, pounding Fanfare for the Common Man, taken from his 1936 Third Symphony, echoed his political convictions.
After years of decline, Copland died in Tarrytown, New York, in December 1990. That his most celebrated music sounds so natural and inevitable is a testament to his artistry: he composed slowly and with great effort, somehow managing to forge from the variegated quilt of his experience a singular and enormously appealing voice.
More Copland: Third Symphony; Lincoln Portrait; The Red Pony Suite.