Biography (read more)
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn on 14 November 1900, youngest of five children of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, and studied composition first with Rubin Goldmark, then in Paris as Nadia Boulanger’s first American composition student — an apprenticeship that marked everything after it. Back in New York he set about building an American concert idiom, organising concerts, writing criticism and mentoring younger composers. He conducted his own music widely in later decades, composed little after 1970, and died in North Tarrytown on 2 December 1990.
Copland defined what American concert music sounds like: the open harmonies of Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, the plain-spoken Fanfare for the Common Man, and a leaner modernist strain in the Piano Variations, Piano Sonata and Piano Fantasy that pianists prize as the hard core of the American repertoire. On this site he appears twice over — as the composer of those keyboard works, and in his own recordings conducting his music, which give the comparisons an authorial baseline.
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Repertoire
8 Poems of Emily Dickinson: No. 1 Nature, the gentlest mother— Thomas Hampson
Performed by Thomas Hampson