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Congressional Gold Medal.com |
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Congressional
Gold Medal Recipient
Aaron Copland
In recognition of Aaron
Coplands contribution to American musical composition. Approved
September 23, 1986 (P.L. 99-418, 100 Stat. 952- 953).
Aaron
Copland
(1900
- 1990)
As much as anyone,
Aaron Copland established American concert music through his
compositions, polemics, promotions, and just plain hard work. He
belongs to a generation of composers - along with Virgil Thomson,
Roy Harris, and Walter Piston - which not only raised our native
music to a thoroughly professional level, but put it on an equal
footing with contemporary developments in European modernism. As
Stravinsky once remarked, "Why call Copland a great American
composer? He's a great composer."
Copland's music,
after his juvenalia, falls into three large periods. In the first
two, he concerns himself with, among other things, trying to find a
serious style which sounds American, rather than European. His main
teacher, Nadia Boulanger, encouraged him in this, usually pointing
out (to her) odd rhythms in his work. Copland had not noticed them
before, because they were part of him. As Leonard Bernstein noted,
they were the rhythms of someone who had grown up with jazz and
American pop, although not necessarily jazz rhythms. As a young man
in his 20s, he composes a ballet Grohg (later reworked as
the Dance Symphony) to an Expressionist libretto by the
theater critic Harold Clurman. The rhythms in the faster sections
gave some very well-known European conductors fits. Again, they
weren't precisely the jazz of the time, but they would have fit
right into be-bop. In his first period during the 1920s, he tries
out his own brand of symphonic jazz in such works as Music for
the Theater and the massive Piano Concerto. However,
he soon gives it up because he feels it emotionally
"limited" to either blues or "snappy numbers."
Never mind that his own example disproves this. He then starts
casting about for something else, and the works of this time betray
to some extent a lack of artistic direction, even as they show an
increase in technical skill. This culminates in the highly
Stravinskian Short Symphony and the craggy Piano
Variations, two masterpieces in which I can find not a single
wasted note.
To a great extent,
Copland seems the product of two milieus: Paris and the United
States. The States give him something not always at the front of his
conscious mind - an imaginative landscape of expression, more than
anything else. Along with
Gershwin,
his music conveys the energy of New York and the visual power of
skyscrapers (the folk-like Copland comes later). Paris gives him a
Stravinskian orientation and technique, as well as an elegance of
expression - the ability to say the most with the fewest notes. The
same can also be said of his colleagues and fellow Boulangerian
alumni Thomson and Piston, although each has his own musical
identity.
Shortly after this
transitional period, the artistic populism of the thirties begins to
affect Copland's artistic direction. He wants his work to reach
people who don't normally go in for Horrid Modern Music. He writes
for popular venues: Outdoor Overture for high-school
orchestra, the "school opera" The Second Hurricane,
and music for theater, ballet, and films. His collaborators, also
affected by 30s populism, choose well-known American mythic
subjects, and Copland responds (with the help of Virgil Thomson) by
simplifying his musical materials and incorporating folk influences.
This results in his most popular works: the ballets Billy the
Kid, Rodeo (incidentally, pronounced ROH-dio by the
composer. Don't worry, I don't say it that way either), the
incidental music for Irwin Shaw's play Quiet City, and the
film scores Our Town and The Red Pony. The period
also produced the "tourista postcards" of El Sal&ocute;n
Mxico and Danzon Cubano, a clarinet concerto for
Benny Goodman, the full-length opera The Tender Land, Fanfare
for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait for speaker and
orchestra, the Old American Songs, Symphony No. 3, and his
mega-hit Appalachian Spring.
In addition to all
of the above, he became an impressario of modern-music concerts,
established the composition department at Tanglewood, helped publish
modern American works, found patrons for young, promising composers,
wrote and lectured on a wide range of modern music (many of these
essays became landmarks of musical criticism), and even managed to
produce a music-appreciation book for the general reader, What
to Listen for in Music. He assiduously attended the major
modern music festivals, always on the lookout for something new.
Although very influenced by the modern French school, he listened
perceptively to the Schoenberg camp, especially Webern, and
characteristically tried to give others a way in. He probably had
absorbed as much as anyone on the music of Europe and the Americas.
He opened up North Americans to such composers as Chvez, Revueltas,
and Ginastera. He excelled at spotting new talent: Schuman, Diamond,
Herrmann, Mennin, Bernstein, and Del Tredici, among others.
In the 1950s,
Copland felt that his American Pastoral idiom had lost its interest
for him. He turned to serialism to recharge and came up with serial
Copland. The new methods don't turn him into Schoenberg. One can
still identify these works as coming from Copland and remain among
my favorite pieces in his output: the Piano Quartet, Music
for a Great City, Connotations (not, strictly
speaking, serial), and Inscapes, his last major orchestral
work.
Copland, to all
intents and purposes, retired from composition in 1965, although
short pieces occasionally came from the shop. This was a combination
of the public's rejection of his latest works (including Inscapes,
one of the great postwar American scores) and of the Oedipal acting
out of younger composers, who essentially ignored him. He decided to
conduct, specializing in his own scores, to a great extent to make
money (even with his popularity, he was hardly raking in bucks from
composition at this point) and had a nice, lucrative career. The
"American" works keep their hold in the popular repertory,
and at least he lived to see the young Turks come back for a long,
appreciative look.~ Steve Schwartz
Aaron Copland - The
Life And Work Of An Uncommon Man
The Music of Aaron
Copland
The inaugural online presentation of
the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress
celebrates the centennial of the birth of the American composer Aaron
Copland (1900-1990). The multiformat Aaron Copland Collection from which
the online collection derives spans the years 1910 to 1990 and includes
approximately 400,000 items documenting the multifaceted life of an
extraordinary person who was composer, performer, teacher, writer,
conductor, commentator, and administrator. It comprises both manuscript
and printed music, personal and business correspondence, diaries,
writings, scrapbooks, programs, newspaper and magazine clippings,
photographs, awards, books, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
The first release of the online collection
contains approximately 1,000 items that yield a total of about 5,000
images. These items date from 1899 to 1981, with most from the 1920s
through the 1950s, and were selected from Copland's
music
sketches,
correspondence,
writings,
and
photographs.
Time Line for Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
1900-1920 |
1921-1944
|
1945-1960 |
1961-1990
1900-1920
Back to Top
1900
November 14:
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five
children born to Harris Morris Copland, a department store owner, and
his wife, Sarah Mittenthal Copland.
Aaron
Copland's parents, Harris and Sarah Copland, 1922.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland and Clarence Adler at Lake Placid, 1925.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
1914
Began his
formal musical training by taking private piano lessons with Leopold
Wolfsohn in Brooklyn, New York. He continued to study with Wolfsohn
until 1918.
1917
In the fall
of 1917, began his study of harmony and counterpoint with
Rubin
Goldmark, who had studied at the Vienna Conservatory and later in
New York with Dvok and became head of the Composition Department at
the Juilliard School of Music at its founding (1924). At Goldmarks
suggestion, Copland subsequently studied piano with Victor
Wittgenstein and in 1919 began piano lessons with the well-known
pedagogue Clarence Adler. During the four years of his studies with
Goldmark (until the spring of 1921), Copland composed numerous short
pieces of musical juvenilia for piano or piano and another instrument
or voice.
1918
Graduated in
June from Boys High School, Brooklyn, and decided not to go to
college. Instead, he found jobs playing piano: first at the Finnish
Socialist Hall and then during the summers in the Catskill Mountains
of New York until his departure for France.
1921-1944
Back to Top
1921
In June,
Copland took the pivotal step in his development as a musician when he
left to study in France at the newly established American Conservatory
at Fontainebleau, near Paris. There he met Nadia Boulanger, who was to
become his and many other American composers world-renowned
teacher. He began to study composition and orchestration with
Boulanger in the fall of 1921 and remained her student until 1924.
Aaron
Copland and his landlady, Fountainebleau, early 1920s.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Nadia
Boulanger and her class, Paris, 1923.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland at his piano, Rock Hill, 1978.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland with car; probably at Yaddo, ca. 1932.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland with Walter Piston, 1960.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Billy
the Kid: production shot, 1938.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, Tanglewood.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland, Agnes DeMille, and Oliver Smith at Tanglewood, 1942.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
In the fall of
1921, he sold his first piano piece,
Scherzo
Humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse), to the publisher Durand.
1925
Wrote the
first of many articles for Modern Music.
January 11:
his
Symphony
for Organ and Orchestra (1924) was performed by the New York
Philharmonic, with Nadia Boulanger as soloist and Walter Damrosch as
conductor. It was later performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, who had originally suggested the
composition.
Summer:
Coplands first stay at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New
Hampshire, where he worked on
Music
for the Theatre, commissioned by the League of Composers. Its first
performance took place in November with Serge Koussevitzky conducting
the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Received a
Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1925-26), the first awarded in music,
which was renewed for the 1926-27 season.
1927
January 28:
performed his
Concerto
for Piano and Orchestra (1926) with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.
Began
lecturing at the New School for Social Research, New York.
1927-29
Wrote
Symphonic
Ode, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra in 1930; later revised it for the orchestras
seventy-fifth anniversary in 1955.
1928
Joined the
League of Composers, of which he remained a member until 1954; began
serving on its board of directors in 1932.
Assisted Alma
Morgenthau Wertheim in establishing the Cos Cob Press, which later
became Arrow Music Press.
With Roger
Sessions, co-founded the Copland-Sessions Concerts of Contemporary Music
(1928-32), New York.
1929
Awarded
$5,000 prize from the RCA Victor Competition for
Dance
Symphony (1925), which was based on portions of the
unperformed ballet
Grohg.
1930
Wrote his
first extended piano work,
Piano
Variations.
1932
Organized
the first Festival of Contemporary Music at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs,
New York, and the second the following year.
1935
Taught
composition at Harvard University while Walter Piston was on leave of
absence.
1937
Co-founded
the American Composers Alliance.
1938
Co-founded
Arrow Music Press, which incorporated the former Cos Cob Press; served
as its treasurer until 1972.
October 16:
First performance of his first ballet,
Billy
the Kid, written for Lincoln Kirstein and the Ballet Caravan.
1939
Published
his first book, What to Listen for in Music, based on lectures
he had given at the New School for Social Research.
October 13:
Elected president of the American Composers Alliance. Resigned as
president in 1945 to continue his membership in ASCAP.
1940
At the
request of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, taught composition during
the first season of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood,
Massachusetts; when Tanglewood reopened after the war (1946), Copland
assumed many administrative positions in addition to teaching until
his retirement in 1965.
1941
Published
the book Our New Music, based on lectures he had given at the
New School for Social Research.
Toured Latin
America to lecture, perform, and conduct on a grant made possible by the
Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations.
1942
Completed
Lincoln
Portrait, commissioned by Andre Kostelanetz, with text created
by Copland from speeches and letters of Abraham Lincoln.
Composed the
ballet
Rodeo,
commissioned by Agnes de Mille.
Completed
Fanfare
for the Common Man, which he wrote at the request of Eugene
Goossens; Goossens conducted the premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra in 1943.
May 8: Elected
a member in the Department of Music of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters.
1945-1960
Back to Top
1945
Copland was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize and New York Music Critic's Circle Award
for the ballet he wrote for Martha Graham,
Appalachian
Spring (1944), commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
Music Foundation at the Library of Congress.
Set
and cast for the first production of Appalachian Spring. Left
to right: Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins, May O'Donnell, Merce
Cunningham, the four followers. A posed picture rather than a
still from the dance, 1944.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Martha
Graham and Erick Hawkins in the first production of
Appalachian Spring, 1944.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Set
and cast for the first production of Appalachian Spring. Left
to right: Martha Graham, May O' Donnell, the four followers,
Merce Cunningham (back to camera), Erick Hawkins, 1944.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland in front of the State Department, 1947.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
Aaron
Copland conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Benny
Goodman.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
The
Tender Land, production shot, 1954.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
1946
January 24:
Elected a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and
Publishers (ASCAP).
1947
Received
Music Critic's Circle Award for his
Third
Symphony (1944-46).
Again toured
Latin America to lecture, perform, and conduct, under the sponsorship of
the State Department.
1947-48
Wrote
Clarinet
Concerto, commissioned by Benny Goodman and later
choreographed by Jerome Robbins for the ballet Pied Piper
(1951).
1950
Won an
Academy Award ("Oscar") for the music score to the film
The
Heiress (1949).
Finished
composing
Twelve
Poems of Emily Dickinson.
1951
Appointed
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetics at Harvard University, where
he delivered a series of six lectures (1951-52); he was the first
American composer to receive this honor.
1952
Published Music
and Imagination, a book based on the Charles Eliot Norton lectures
he had given at Harvard University.
1953
May 26:
Appeared before the Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of the
U.S. House of Representatives.
1954
April 2:
Premiere of his full-length opera,
The
Tender Land, by the New York City Opera Company.
December 3:
Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1956
Received
Gold Medal in Music from the National Institute and American Academy
of Arts and Letters.
Received first
of many honorary Doctor of Music degrees, from Princeton University.
1960
Published
his fourth book, Copland on Music, which included reprints from
previous publications as well as new material.
1961-1990
Back to Top
1961
Copland
received the MacDowell Colony Medal from the Edward MacDowell
Association for distinguished service in the field of music.
Began seven
years (until 1968) as president of the Edward MacDowell Association.
1962
Premiere of
his composition
Connotations,
commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for the opening of
Philharmonic Hall (later Avery Fisher Hall) at Lincoln Center, New York.
1964
Received
the
Medal of
Freedom, the "highest civil honor conferred by the President of
the United States for service in peacetime," from President Lyndon
B. Johnson.
1965-1966
Wrote,
conducted, and hosted a series of twelve television programs, Music
in the 20s, for National Educational Television.
1967
Composed
Inscape,
which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to
celebrate its 125th anniversary.
1968
Revised and
enlarged his earlier book Our New Music and published it under a
new title, The New Music: 1900-1960.
1970
Awarded the
Howland Memorial Medal by Yale University.
1975-1976
Vivian Perlis
began interviewing Copland for an oral history project in American music
at Yale University. The project became the foundation for their
collaboration on Coplands two-volume autobiography, Copland: 1900
through 1942, first published in 1984, and Copland: Since 1943,
first published in 1989.
1979
Received the
Kennedy Center Honors from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts in Washington, D.C., along with Martha Graham, Henry Fonda, Ella
Fitzgerald, and Tennessee Williams.
1986
Received
the National Medal of Arts from U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the
Congressional Gold Medal from the U.S. House of Representatives.
1990
December 2:
Aaron Copland died at North Tarrytown, New York.
Aaron Copland - Musician
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