CLASSICAL
Harmonizing America: The Life and Legacy of Aaron Copland
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egendary composer, educator, and musicologist Aaron Copland turns 123 this November 14th. A lifelong New Yorker (hailing from Brooklyn), Copland is often credited with “finding the American sound.” It’s clear from his music to anyone that it is extremely American, from Lincoln Portrait to Billy The Kid. But can we really credit this to Copland? His contributions to American music are immense, that much is undeniable, but to what can we really accredit the “The American Sound”—and if not Copland, who? Born in Brooklyn in 1900, Copland, the youngest of 5, had begged his father for music lessons after his four older siblings had failed and wasted the lessons. Aaron, however, showed strong commitment and promise. His father finally gave in, and there began Copland’s music career. In his adolescence, Copland traveled to Paris to study music at the Fontainebleau School, where he became familiar with the European tradition of classical music and learned how to compose in that convention. There as well, he studied with the famous Nadia Boulanger: a trailblazing composer and teacher, she taught virtually every 20th century composer we now revere, from Elliot Carter to Leonard Bernstein. Copland moved back to America after his
20 OnAir · November 2023
by Casey Lamb studies. It was clear that Copland had widely studied the academic tradition of composers, writing serialist pieces sounding much more like Webern or Schoenberg than anything he wrote otherwise. Somewhere throughout his career, however, his compositional philosophy changed. As he grew as a composer, Copland began to change his ideas, he began to write increasingly for the audience. He wrote pieces for young children, and began writing these programmatic pieces like Billy the Kid and El Salón Mexico. These pieces began his fascination with the American Frontier, and he began to write these Aaron Copland, 1962. recognizable pieces, which became distinctly associated with The American Sound. Turn on any one of his pieces from this era and they are just bursting with American Idealism, from Lincoln Portrait to Appalachian Spring and maybe the most characteristic of them all: Fanfare for the Common Man. Now, we can examine the characteristics we now associate with this American Sound. Key ones that come to mind with Copland are earnest but expansive brass solos, percussion (especially the snare drum and timpani), and— of course—the use of American Folk songs, most famously his use of the Shaker Melody in Appalachian Spring (more widely known as the
