Aaron Copland

• 1. Introduction

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  Aaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to afford the boat fare to America. His father had no interest in music. His mother played piano and arranged lessons for the children. And yet from that corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue, above what Aaron himself called "a kind of neighborhood Macy's", came the man his peers would eventually call the "Dean of American Music".

  By age 15, a concert by Polish composer-pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski convinced Copland he wanted to be a composer. By his early thirties, he had studied in Paris, befriended Mexican and European avant-garde composers, and was reimagining what American music could sound like. By the 1940s, his ballets were playing to packed houses and his Fanfare for the Common Man had become a patriotic standard.

  But Copland's story is not simply one of success. He was investigated by the FBI, called before Joseph McCarthy, and watched as the very style that made him famous was labeled, by intellectuals, as embarrassingly middlebrow. He later found himself unable to compose entirely and turned to conducting. And through all of it, he never stopped asking what American music should be and who it should speak to.

• 2. Paris and Boulanger

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  Nadia Boulanger was 34 years old when Aaron Copland switched to studying with her at the Fontainebleau School of Music. He had arrived at Fontainebleau after letters from his friend Aaron Schaffer and an article in Musical America about the program drew him to France. His original teacher there, Paul Vidal, struck him as too similar to his American teacher Rubin Goldmark. A fellow student pointed him toward Boulanger.

  His first reaction was hesitation. "No one to my knowledge had ever before thought of studying with a woman," he later admitted. She interviewed him and recalled the meeting simply: "One could tell his talent immediately."

  Boulanger ran a demanding operation, with as many as 40 students at once. Copland found her judgment precise and her range extraordinary. He wrote to his brother Ralph that she was "familiar with all music from Bach to Stravinsky" and called her "this intellectual Amazon". In the same letter he added, with apparent surprise, "A more charming womanly woman never lived."

  He had planned to stay one year. He stayed three. Her emphasis on what she called "la grande ligne" -- "a sense of forward motion... the feeling for inevitability" -- shaped how Copland would think about musical structure for the rest of his life. The confidence she showed in him, he wrote, was "crucial to my development at this time of my career".

  Outside Boulanger's studio, Copland took classes at the Sorbonne, frequented Shakespeare and Company, and moved through a Paris cultural circle that included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall. He named Andre Gide as his favorite and most-read writer. He also began publishing musical critiques, starting with one on Gabriel Faure.

• 3. Building American Music

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  Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was perhaps the second most important figure in Copland's career after Boulanger. Beginning with the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in 1924, Koussevitzky performed more of Copland's music than that of any of his contemporaries, at a time when most conductors were programming only a handful of Copland's works.

  Copland returned from Paris in the early 1920s determined to make a living as a composer. He rented a studio apartment near Carnegie Hall in the Empire Hotel on New York City's Upper West Side and survived on two $2,500 Guggenheim Fellowships in 1925 and 1926, along with lecture-recitals, teaching, small commissions, and personal loans.

  He was drawn to the ideal that American artists should reflect "the ideas of American Democracy", a conviction he encountered through the circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Looking for a "usable past" in American classical music, he found only Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. He turned instead to jazz and popular music, at a moment when Gershwin, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong dominated American popular culture.

  From 1927 to 1930 and again from 1935 to 1938, Copland taught at The New School for Social Research. His lectures there were eventually collected into two books: What to Listen for in Music, published in 1937 and revised in 1957, and Our New Music in 1940. He also wrote regularly for The New York Times, The Musical Quarterly, and other journals. He helped found the Copland-Sessions Concerts with Roger Sessions to showcase chamber works by his generation of composers -- a group that included Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston -- and referred to internally as a "commando unit".

  The Depression changed his approach. Avant-garde music was costly to program and difficult to sell. Copland observed two trends among composers around him: a move to simplify musical language and a desire to reach wider audiences. He began to shift in the mid-1930s toward what he called his "vernacular" style, something he associated with the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik -- music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes at once.

• 4. The Great Populist Works

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  El Salón México, completed in 1936, grew out of Copland's vivid memory of visiting a Mexico City dancehall. He drew its melodies freely from two collections of Mexican folk tunes, varying the rhythms and changing pitches throughout. The work's popular reception stood in stark contrast to the relative obscurity of most of his earlier pieces and marked a new approach: a folk tune set within a symphonic context, with variations that shifted the emphasis from formal structure to rhetorical effect on the audience.

  Billy the Kid, the ballet that followed in 1938, became what biographer Howard Pollack called "an archetypical depiction of the legendary American West". Based on a Walter Noble Burns novel, with choreography by Eugene Loring, it used six cowboy folk songs to establish period atmosphere. Copland recalled: "I cannot remember another work of mine that was so unanimously received." Along with Rodeo, it became, in the words of musicologist Elizabeth Crist, "the basis for Copland's reputation as a composer of Americana".

  Copland's handling of folk material differed from European composers like Bela Bartok, who tried to preserve folk tunes as close to the original as possible. Copland enhanced his borrowed tunes with contemporary rhythms and textures. The result, according to musicologist Elliott Antokoletz, rested on "the conservative handling of open diatonic sonorities", which gave the ballets what he called "a pastoral quality".

  Appalachian Spring followed in 1944. In its opening, the harmonizations remain, in the words of one musicologist, "transparent and bare, suggested by the melodic disposition of the Shaker tune". The work won Copland the Pulitzer Prize in composition and the New York Music Critics' Circle Award.

  Not everyone was pleased. Music critic Paul Rosenfeld 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". Composer David Diamond went further, telling Copland directly: "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 answer was that reaching mass audiences was itself his artistic response to the Depression. "The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience," he said, "is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art."

• 5. The McCarthy Years

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  Aaron Copland had voted for the Communist Party USA ticket in the 1936 presidential election and campaigned strongly for Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace in 1948. During the Red scare of the 1950s, the FBI placed him on a list of 151 artists thought to have Communist associations.

  The most concrete consequence came in 1953, when A Lincoln Portrait was withdrawn from the inaugural concert for President Dwight Eisenhower. Later that year, Copland was called to a private hearing at the United States Capitol and questioned by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn about his foreign lectures and organizational affiliations. McCarthy and Cohn ignored his body of work, which had spent the previous two decades making a virtue of American democratic values. Outraged members of the musical community responded by holding up Copland's music as a demonstration of his patriotism.

  The investigations were closed in 1975, having not seriously damaged Copland's international artistic reputation, though they taxed his time, energy, and emotional state. Even before the hearings, he had begun resigning from leftist organizations after being appalled by Stalin's persecution of Dmitri Shostakovich and other artists. In a 1954 Norton lecture at Harvard, he asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet Communism deprived artists of "the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong".

  A longer-lasting threat to his reputation came not from the government but from the cultural critics. Beginning with writings by Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald for Partisan Review in the late 1930s, intellectuals attacked Popular Front culture as, in cultural historian Morris Dickstein's words, "hopelessly middlebrow, a dumbing down of art into toothless entertainment". The very qualities that made Copland's ballets beloved -- their accessibility, their connection to radio, film, and mass audiences -- were precisely what the anti-Stalinist critical establishment disdained.

• 6. Serial Experiments

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  Pierre Boulez showed Copland something in 1949 that changed his thinking about serial composition. In Paris after the war, Copland found Boulez dominating the postwar avant-garde. What Boulez demonstrated was that twelve-tone technique could be separated from the "old Wagnerian" aesthetic Copland had always associated with it. Subsequent exposure to the late music of Anton Webern and twelve-tone pieces by Frank Martin and Luigi Dallapiccola confirmed this.

  Copland came to see serialism as "nothing more than an angle of vision. Like fugal treatment, it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking." He began what became the Piano Fantasy in 1951, on a commission from young virtuoso pianist William Kapell. He labored over the piece until 1957. During that period, in 1953, Kapell died in an aircraft crash. When the Fantasy was finally premiered, critics called it "an outstanding addition to his own oeuvre and to contemporary piano literature" and "a tremendous achievement". One critic, Jay Rosenfield, wrote: "This is a new Copland to us, an artist advancing with strength and not building on the past alone."

  Copland's approach to serial technique differed sharply from Schoenberg's. Where Schoenberg used his tone rows as complete structural statements, Copland used them as sources for melodies and harmonies, much the same way he handled tonal material. He described himself as choosing a path toward "a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism". The result allowed him to incorporate, as he described in discussing the Piano Fantasy, "elements able to be associated with the twelve-tone method and also with music tonally conceived".

  He never abandoned tonal composition entirely. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he moved back and forth between tonal and non-tonal works, and his final composition, Proclamation, was started in 1973 and completed in 1982.

• 7. The Private Man

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  Victor Kraft entered Copland's life in 1932, when the composer met him as a violin prodigy. At Copland's urging, Kraft gave up music to pursue photography. Their romance may have ended by 1944, but Kraft remained a constant presence in Copland's life, re-entering it repeatedly and bringing, in Pollack's account, increasing stress as his behavior grew erratic and sometimes confrontational. Kraft fathered a child to whom Copland later provided financial security through a bequest from his estate.

  Copland was gay, and biographer Howard Pollack writes that he came to an early acceptance and understanding of his sexuality. He guarded his privacy in the way many men of his era did, and even after the Stonewall riots of 1969, showed no inclination to come out publicly. He did, however, live openly and travel with his partners, who tended to be talented younger men involved in the arts. Most became enduring friends. Among his 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.

  Religiously, Copland remained agnostic, though his family had been active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes in Brooklyn and he had studied under Israel Goldfarb for his bar mitzvah. He identified with such profoundly Christian writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins and often spent Christmas Day at home with close friends. His music, as Pollack observes, seemed to evoke Protestant hymns as often as it did Jewish chant.

  Copland's method of composition, according to his collaborator Vivian Perlis, was to keep notebooks of musical fragments, what he called "gold nuggets", and turn to them when he needed a piece. He himself put it more directly: "I don't compose. I assemble materials." He tended not to work from beginning to end of a piece but to write whole sections in no particular order and discover their sequence later. He considered composition "the product of the emotions", embracing both "self-expression" and "self-discovery".

• 8. Legacy and Last Years

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  From 1960 until his death, Copland lived at Cortlandt Manor, New York, in a home known as Rock Hill. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.

  From the 1960s onward, composition fell away. Copland described the experience himself: "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 primarily for Columbia Records. He eventually recorded nearly all his orchestral works with himself conducting. Leonard Bernstein, who occasionally joked that Copland could conduct his own works "a little better", also noted that Copland improved over time and considered him a more natural conductor than Stravinsky or Hindemith.

  Copland's health deteriorated through the 1980s. He and Vivian Perlis completed a two-volume autobiography: Copland: 1900 Through 1942, published in 1984, and Copland Since 1943, published in 1989. By the time the second volume was being assembled, the advanced stage of his Alzheimer's disease had made first-person narrative increasingly difficult, and the book relied more heavily on old documents and letters. He died on the 2nd of December 1990, of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure, in North Tarrytown, New York, now known as Sleepy Hollow.

  His ashes were scattered over the Tanglewood Music Center near Lenox, Massachusetts. Much of his estate was directed toward the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which bestows over $600,000 per year to performing groups. Conductor Leon Botstein argued that Copland "helped define the modern consciousness of America's ideals, character and sense of place", and that his role was "not a subsidiary but a central role in the shaping of the national consciousness". Composer Ned Rorem put it more concisely: "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."