Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) invented what Americans hear as the sound of America — open fifths, wide intervals, folksy but never simple, vast spaces suggested by thin orchestral textures. He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and came home determined to write music that sounded like the American landscape rather than a European one. He succeeded so completely that his style became the default idiom for American film scores, commercials, and presidential inaugurations, often without anyone knowing where it came from.

The ballets of the late 1930s and 1940s are the center of his reputation: Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944). Appalachian Spring was commissioned by Martha Graham and won the Pulitzer Prize. Its closing section, based on the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, is among the most recognized passages in American music. But Copland’s catalog is wider than the ballets suggest. The Piano Variations (1930) are spare and almost brutal. The Third Symphony (1946) is his grandest statement. El Salón México (1936) is an affectionate portrait of Mexican popular music.

He was also a generous advocate for American music — as lecturer, teacher, conductor, and organizer — and a mentor to generations of composers. His two books, What to Listen for in Music (1939) and The New Music (1968), remain among the most accessible introductions to 20th-century composition. In his later years he stopped composing, plagued by memory loss, and spent his final decades conducting his own work.

StyleOpen, spacious, quintessentially American. Wide intervals, modal harmonies, borrowed folk and hymn material. The sound of plains and distances.

Listen: Appalachian Spring Suite (original chamber version, if possible). Then Rodeo. Then the Piano Variations — a completely different, harder Copland.