Aaron copland compositions8/6/2023 The quintessential American composer accused of being ‘un-American’: that’s the startling paradox of Copland’s career. The best versions of Gershwin's Summertime.Six of the best landmark jazz recordings.Thereafter, though, the jazz influence disappeared from his music, returning later in more sublimated form. His first answer was jazz, and jazz colours and clichés permeate two of his works of the mid-1920s, the suite Music for the Theatre and the Piano Concerto (written for himself as soloist). Having played the piano from an early age, he studied composition with the New York teacher Rubin Goldmark, a pupil of Dvorák who also taught another Brooklynite, George Gershwin.Īt the age of 20, however, Copland departed America for France where he became one of the first pupils of the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, and through her met Stravinsky and other leading figures in the artistic ferment of the 1920s.īefore his return to the States, Copland had begun to ponder how best to create ‘immediately recognisable American music’. He was born in November 1900 in the New York borough of Brooklyn, the youngest child of shopkeepers of Russian Jewish origin. Yet in the 1950s he was identified as among the ‘dupes and fellow-travellers’ of Soviet Communism, and hauled before one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious committees investigating ‘un-American activities’ his Lincoln Portrait was removed from the programme of President Eisenhower’s inaugural concert he even found it difficult to renew his passport. In a series of popular ballet, film and concert scores in the 1930s and ’40s, Copland virtually created the sound of his nation. Whenever a film or television score evokes America – the wide-open prairie or pastoral New England, the rowdiness of a Western frontier town or loneliness in a big city – the melodies and harmonies and orchestral colouring will inevitably owe a good deal to the music of Aaron Copland.
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