Known primarily for his populist wartime ballets, Aaron Copland composed music that was diverse, eclectic, broad in scope and aided in the development of serious music in the Americas.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Aaron Copland was an unlikely musical pioneer. He grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, which he described as, “an environment that had little or no connection with serious music.” His older sister, Laurine, gave him his first piano lessons and introduced him to ragtime and opera. By the age of twelve, Copland’s interest in music was such that he began composing short works. After graduating high school, he decided to skip college and study theory and composition with Rubin Goldmark. It was here that he produced some of his first serious compositions, such as the piano piece The Cat and the Mouse (1920).

To truly develop as a composer, however, Copland, like many other Americans, went overseas to receive an education. Between 1921 and 1924, he stayed in Paris, studying piano with Ricardo Vines and composition with Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger’s influence on Copland, and other American composers like Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, and Roger Session, would prove vital to his musical progress. On completion of his studies, Copland returned to the United States where the premiere of his Organ Symphony, played by Boulanger herself, put the young composer on the musical map.

Copland next began experimenting with the incorporation of jazz in his works in an attempt to create an “American” style of classical music. At the time a popular compositional trend both in the United States and elsewhere, pieces such as Music for the Theatre (1925) and Piano Concerto (1926) show his attempts at this fusion. It was also in the 1920s that Copland became overtly connected with the establishment and promotion of American music through his involvement in the League of Composers, its magazine Modern Music, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts (1928-1931). 

The beginning of the following decade saw Copland turning towards the cool, intellectual style of composition known as neo-classicism, seen in the Piano Variations (1930) and Short Symphony (1933). A trip to Mexico in 1932 also developed a lifelong fascination with the country and its music, especially audible in El salon Mexico (1936). By the middle of the 1930s, Copland musical aesthetic shifted as he attempted to write accessible music for the masses. Of the people and his new philosophy, he writes, “It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. 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 populist period incorporated folksongs and popular tunes into his oeuvre and contained his most admired pieces such as A Lincoln Portrait (1942) and his three famous wartime ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944).

Copland also remained active outside of concert music during this period, composing film scores like Of Mice and Men, Our Town, and The Red Pony. By the end of the 1940s, however, he found himself under attack for his socialist political beliefs by the growing anti-communist campaigns raging in Washington. Surviving with his reputation intact, he became the first American composer to serve as Harvard’s prestigious Norton Professor of Politics (1951-1952). Musically, the works of this later period were less overtly accessible as Copland experimented with a variety of techniques, including Schoenberg’s serialism, evident in his Piano Fantasy (1957). After 1972, however, Copland composed very little and retired to his home in Upstate New York. Following long bouts with Alzheimer’s and other medical ailments, he died at the age of 90.