Cultural Influence and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring >>> Andrea Marie Keil Aaron Copland is often cited as one of America’s most enduringly successful and popular composers.1 In the words of Leonard Bernstein, he was “the best we’ve got.”2 A number of Copland’s works have become standards in American orchestral repertory, including his ballet score Appalachian Spring. The problem of creating music that was at once “serious” and “American” presented a unique compositional problem for Copland in the first part of the twentieth century. During the 1930s, thanks in part to the emergence of a “popular front” in American politics, Copland became appreciative of the distinctive qualities of American folk music. This led Copland to create a distinctly American sound and aesthetic style. “Aaron Copland holds a unique place…when it comes to music that summons up images of America in the minds of American listeners.”3 Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. The youngest of five children, Copland was especially close to his sister Laurine, who he credited with introducing him to ragtime and opera, and teaching him the fundamentals of piano playing in the years before his parents consented to pay for lessons with a professional teacher. At the age of eleven, confronting the indifference of his parents to his own musical education, he arranged for his own piano lessons from Leopold Wolfsohn.4 From 1917 to 1921, Copland studied theory and composition with Rubin Goldmark, an eminent composer and teacher famous for having studied with the Antonín Dvořák. Goldmark gave Copland a solid training in nineteenth-century German practice which Copland both assimilated and rejected. Copland later described this time as “the impressionable years of exploration.”5 Copland left for France in June 1921 to enroll in the American Conservatory of Music, a new summer school located at Fontainebleau. The summer course proved significant for Copland’s musical development, as it was there that he first met the renowned music pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger, with whom he would study for the next three years in Paris. She would prove to be one of the major influences in his life, introducing him to outstanding musical figures of the time.6 That autumn, after his stay at Fontainebleau, Copland settled in Paris where modernism was in its glory. By this time, Copland had already thoroughly absorbed a modernist aesthetic that sought to shock the public. After playing his own musical composition in a school concert, Copland wrote to his parents, “Sad to say, it made quite a hit; I say it is sad, because I can’t get over the idea that if a thing is popular it can’t be good.” 7 After three years in Paris, Copland left for New York in June 1924. Copland later made it clear that it was in France that he first grasped “the idea that my personal expression in music ought somehow to be related to my own back-home environment.”8 Although his own personal background and his music had previously seemed separate, he now sought to reconcile them, taking one of his earliest steps towards his later, more nationalistic style. Works from this period, like Music for the Theatre written in 1925, begin showing the influence of jazz forms and rhythms. Copland was also inspired by other nationalistic compos-
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