68 Facts About Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music.

Aaron Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers".

Aaron Copland 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 the composer labeled his "vernacular" style.

Aaron Copland studied three years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste.

Aaron Copland shifted in the mid-1930s to a more accessible musical style which mirrored the German idea of, music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes.

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Unlike Schoenberg, Aaron 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.

Aaron Copland 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.

Aaron Copland was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins.

Aaron Copland was unaware until late in his life that the family name had been Kaplan, and his parents never told him this.

Aaron Copland attended Boys High School and in the summer went to various camps.

Aaron Copland began writing songs at the age of eight and a half.

At age 16, Aaron Copland heard his first symphony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Goldmark, with whom Aaron Copland studied between 1917 and 1921, gave the young Aaron Copland a solid foundation, especially in the Germanic tradition.

Aaron Copland's graduation piece from his studies with Goldmark was a three-movement piano sonata in a Romantic style.

In spite of that, in his early adult life, Aaron Copland would develop friendships with people with socialist and communist leanings.

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.

Aaron Copland's father wanted him to go to college, but his mother's vote in the family conference allowed him to give Paris a try.

Aaron Copland found her incisive mind much to his liking and found her ability to critique a composition impeccable.

Aaron Copland 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.

Aaron Copland remained in that area for the next 30 years, later moving to Westchester County, New York.

Aaron Copland helped found the Copland-Sessions Concerts to showcase these composers' chamber works to new audiences.

Aaron 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.

Toward this end, Aaron Copland provided musical advice and inspiration to The Group Theatre, a company which attracted Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.

Around 1935 Aaron Copland began to compose musical pieces for young audiences, in accordance with the first goal of American Gebrauchsmusik.

Aaron Copland formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chavez and would return often to Mexico for working vacations conducting engagements.

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Concurrent with The Second Hurricane, Aaron Copland composed "Prairie Journal" on a commission from the Columbia Broadcast System.

Aaron Copland 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, Aaron Copland helped form the American Composers Alliance to promote and publish American contemporary classical music.

Aaron Copland was president of the organization from 1939 to 1945.

In 1939, Aaron 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.

Aaron Copland's Four Piano Blues is an introspective composition with a jazz influence.

Aaron 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, Aaron Copland returned to Europe, where he found French composer Pierre Boulez dominating the group of post-war avant-garde composers there.

Aaron Copland 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.

In 1950, Copland received a U S -Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship to study in Rome, which he did the following year.

Aaron Copland 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 Eisenhower.

Nevertheless, beginning in 1950, Aaron Copland—who had been appalled at Stalin's persecution of Shostakovich and other artists—began resigning from participation in leftist groups.

Potentially more damaging for Aaron Copland was a sea-change in artistic tastes, away from the Populist mores that infused his work of the 1930s and 40s.

Aaron Copland revised his text "The New Music" with comments on the styles that he encountered.

In 1952, Aaron 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.

Aaron Copland's views were generally progressive and he had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular Front, including Odets.

Aaron Copland was close with Zionism during the Popular Front movement, when it was endorsed by the left.

Kraft fathered a child to whom Aaron Copland later provided financial security, through a bequest from his estate.

Aaron 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".

Aaron Copland was "insatiable" in seeking out the newest European music, whether in concerts, score reading or heated debate.

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Aaron Copland was exposed to Schoenberg and admired his earlier atonal pieces, thinking Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire above all others.

Aaron Copland named Igor Stravinsky as his "hero" and his favorite 20th-century composer.

However, Aaron Copland moved from this work toward more accessible works and folk sources.

Aaron Copland wrote El Salon Mexico between 1932 and 1936, which met with a popular acclaim that contrasted the relative obscurity of most of his previous works.

Aaron Copland derived his melodic material for this piece freely from two collections of Mexican folk tunes, changing pitches and varying rhythms.

El Salon prepared Aaron Copland to write the ballet score Billy the Kid, which became, in Pollack's words, an "archetypical depiction of the legendary American West".

Aaron 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.

Aaron Copland enhanced the tunes he used with contemporary rhythms, textures and structures.

When Hollywood beckoned concert hall composers in the 1930s with promises of better films and higher pay, Aaron 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.

Aaron Copland often avoided the full orchestra, and he rejected the common practice of using a leitmotif to identify characters with their own personal themes.

Aaron Copland instead matched a theme to the action, while avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis.

Aaron Copland had believed the atonality of serialized music to run counter to his desire to reach a wide audience.

Aaron 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 Aaron Copland]".

Aaron Copland used his rows not very differently from how he fashioned the material in his tonal pieces.

Aaron Copland 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.

Aaron Copland called his writing "a byproduct of my trade" as "a kind of salesman for contemporary music".

An avid lecturer and lecturer-performer, Aaron Copland eventually collected his presentation notes into three books, What to Listen for in Music, Our New Music, and Music and Imagination .

Aaron Copland would look at your music and try to understand what you were after [italics Schuman].

Aaron Copland 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.

Aaron Copland wrote a total of about 100 works which covered a diverse range of genres.

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Aaron Copland brought leanness to America, which set the tone for our musical language throughout [World War II].

Aaron Copland's music has served as the inspiration for a number of popular modern works of music:.

Aaron Copland's music was prominently featured throughout Spike Lee's 1998 film, He Got Game.