Copland, Aaron

COPLAND, AARON (1900–1990). Composer and self-styled “good citizen of the Republic of Music,” Aaron Copland devoted his talent as both composer and musical commentator to the cause of political music in the mid-1930s. He spent a comfortable childhood in Brooklyn that included piano study at an early age. By 1917 he had begun to define his personal sensibility as a modernist in response to the more traditional aesthetic of his teacher, Rubin Goldmark. Between 1920 and 1924, Copland studied with Nadia Boulanger at the American Academy at Fontainebleau. The years after his return from Paris saw the flowering of Copland’s talent as an advocate for modern American music. He was a member of the League of Composers and a major contributor to Modern Music. A founder (with composer Roger Sessions) of the Copland-Sessions Concerts, he helped to bring new music to New York, and he lectured on music at the New School for Social Research from 1927 to 1937. In the late 1920s, Copland was among a group of American modernist composers who incorporated the sounds and technical features of jazz into his works for the concert hall.

In the mid-1930s, Copland was associated with left-wing musical activists as a participant in the Composers Collective and a writer for New Masses. He asserted the importance of mass singing as a vehicle for communicating the “day-to-day struggle of the proletariat” as part of the development of a working-class movement in the United States and asserted that American workers needed a music appropriate to their own struggles. In 1934, Copland’s setting of “Into the Streets, May First!” (text by Alfred Hayes) won a song competition sponsored by New Masses and was subsequently published in the collective’s second Workers Songbook (1935). A year later, Copland composed an opera for children, The Second Hurricane, that includes a chorus of parents. This work, along with the “Outdoor Overture,” written in 1938 for New York City’s High School of Music and Art, serve as examples of Copland’s commitment to making concert music accessible to wide audiences and groups of performers.

During the following decade, Copland’s explicitly political activity was transformed into an effort to incorporate American folk and popular music along with regional settings into many of his concert and stage works. His ballet scores for Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1943–1944) all reflect the composer’s interest in portraying regional history in music and in treating songs that might be familiar to American audiences as materials for motivic development. The Lincoln Portrait, for speaker and orchestra (1942), utilizes popular tunes of the famous president’s time as well as his speeches and writings. While Copland’s concern with class struggle as reflected in art did not continue beyond the period of the mid- to late 1930s, he made a significant contribution to music on the Left and helped to bring the popular music of the American people into the concert hall.

Copland, Aaron, and Vivian Perlis. Copland: 1900 through 1942. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984.

Christ, Elizabeth. Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Reuss, Richard A. “American Folklore and Left-Wing Politics.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1971.

Tischler, Barbara L. An American Musk: The Search for an American Musical Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Zuck, Barbara Ann. A History of Musical Americanism. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1980.

Aaron Copland Collection, 1841-1991. Finding Aid. Library of Congress, Musical Division.
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