He arrived a new solution, that of combining modern classical technique with American folksong.Ĭuriously enough, the first sign of this new style came in the form of a piece with decided Latin American overtones, the orchestral tone poem El Salon Mexico of 1936. 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.” Copland had already experimented with interbreeding classical technique and jazz and had found this too limited and constricting. In his words, “it made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist.
Copland realized that the new electronic media were fostering a new audience for music, one distinct from the traditional concert audience. But on a deeper level, there was also a need to modify his style. One of his means of doing so was to produce incidental music for new mass media like radio and movies. However, by the late 1930s, Copland desired to reach a broader public than was possible with his modernistic works. These works no longer sound shocking or troubling as they did to audiences a hundred years ago, but rather strike us as vintage early-20 th-century music. Such challenging, harmonically pungent pieces as the Piano Variations and Organ Symphony bear witness to this early phase of his career. His early work was imbued with European modernism, learned during his studies in Paris with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. Copland, however, did not start out with any intention of evoking Americana in his music. This sense of “open spaces,” evocative of pastoral life and the vastness of the American landscape, resulted from his particular use of musical texture, of the highs and lows of pitch, and his use of intervals like open fifths, redolent of the open strings of a fiddle. Much of his music is also said to embody a sense of Americana, a quality that is too rarely defined with any precision beyond the feeling of “wide open spaces” and the use of certain American folksongs as thematic material. Its greatness is not diminished by its widespread imitation by lesser talents in movies, television shows, and commercials, where it has served as a ready way to evoke the Far West, small-town life, or other phases of Americana.Īaron Copland (1900–1990) enjoys a reputation as America’s most esteemed composer of classical music. Billy's mother is killed by an outlaw, and Billy himself kills the murderer, and goes on the run.At its best, Aaron Copland’s Americana style is one of the great, ingenious, and enduring achievements in music. The action shifts to a small frontier town, in which a young Billy and his mother are present. It begins with the sweeping song "The Open Prairie" and shows many pioneers trekking westward. The ballet is based around the infamous outlaw cowboy William McCarty and was commonly known as ‘Billy the Kid’. The ballet is most famous for its incorporation of many cowboy tunes and American folk songs. Alongside Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid is one of Copland’s most popular and widely performed pieces. Billy the Kid was choreographed by Eugene Loring for Ballet Caravan. This ballet is set the Wild West of Country America. During Aaron’s composing career he wrote eight pieces for films-documentaries or versions of plays.īilly the Kid is a 1938 ballet written by the American composer Aaron Copland and commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein. After writing ballets Copland worked for the Cincinnati symphony when World War II began and wrote a patriotic piece, A Lincoln Portrait. In 1945, Aaron won a Pulitzer Prize for perhaps one of his best works which was Appalachian spring. Also his most successful ballets were Appalachian spring, Rodeo, El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid and Quiet City. His most famous pieces are Concerto of Piano, Fanfare for the Common Man, Symphony #3 and A Linclon Portrait. Mainly Copland wrote for piano, symphonies, ballets and movies. It was then when Boulanger inspired Copland to start writing for symphonies and ballets instead of short piano pieces. While studying he was taught by the greatest composer of the 20th Century, Nadia Boulanger. In 1921 he had received a scholarship to study at the music school for Americans at Fontainebleau near Paris.
After a year and a half of teaching himself he finally branched out to take formal lessons. As appose to other talented musicians he started learning music at a later stage of 12 where his sisters taught him how the play the piano. Aaron Copland was the son of two Lithuanian immigrants, Harris and Sarah Copland. After Copland’s death he was arguably the most famous American composer.
He was born on the 14th of November 1900 in Brooklyn, New York and died on the 2nd of December 1990. Aaron Copland was a very talented and famous composer of the 20th Century.
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