((Boosey & Hawkes Sacred Choral). Composed in the fall of ...)
(Boosey & Hawkes Sacred Choral). Composed in the fall of 1921 while Copland was studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Includes: I. Help Us, O Lord; II. Thou, O Jehovah, Abideth Forever; III. Have Mercy on Us, O My Lord; IV. Sing Ye Praises to Our King.
(Aaron Copland's "Scherzo Humoristique," written in 1920, ...)
Aaron Copland's "Scherzo Humoristique," written in 1920, is indeed musically humorous as it depicts the skittering rodent and sinister feline in a demanding, but very enjoyable etude setting, using complex 1/16 note patterns, glissando, grace notes, chromatic scale work, and a generous use of the entire keyboard. There are sudden shifts in tempo and dynamics, and the performer tells a definite story, albeit without narration. Large hand reaches, sometimes 9ths, are required on some of the full block chords. A Federation Festivals 2016-2020 selection.
Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. (Full Score). By Aaron Copland.
(Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. (Full Score). By Aaron ...)
Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. (Full Score). By Aaron Copland (1900-1990). For Orchestra, Organ (Full Score). Boosey & Hawkes Scores/Books. 56 pages. Boosey & Hawkes #M051092802.
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music.
Background
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900. He was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins. While emigrating from Russia to the United States, Copland's father, Harris Morris Copland, lived and worked in Scotland for two to three years to pay for his boat fare to the US. It was there that Copland's father may have Anglicized his surname "Kaplan" to "Copland", though Copland himself believed for many years that the change had been due to an Ellis Island immigration official when his father entered the country. Copland was however unaware until late in his life that the family name had been Kaplan, and his parents never told him this. Throughout his childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn shop, H. M. Copland's, at 628 Washington Avenue (which Aaron would later describe as "a kind of neighborhood Macy's"), on the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue, and most of the children helped out in the store. His father was a staunch Democrat. The family members were active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes, where Aaron celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. Not especially athletic, the sensitive young man became an avid reader and often read Horatio Alger stories on his front steps.
Copland's father had no musical interest. His mother, Sarah Mittenthal Copland, sang, played the piano, and arranged for music lessons for her children. Of his siblings, oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically, proficient on the violin. His sister Laurine had the strongest connection with Aaron; she gave him his first piano lessons, promoted his musical education, and supported him in his musical career.
Education
At age fifteen he decided he wanted to be a composer. While attending Boys' High School he began to study music theory beginning in 1917. Copland continued his music lessons after graduating from high school, and in 1921 he went to France to study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where his main teacher was the French composer Nadia Boulanger. During his early studies, Copland had been attracted to the music of Scriabin, Debussy, and Ravel. The years in Paris provided him an opportunity to hear and absorb all the most recent trends in European music, including the works of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Schoenberg.
Upon completion of his studies in 1924, Copland returned to America and composed the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, his first major work, which Boulanger played in New York in 1925. Music for the Theater (1925) and a Piano Concerto (1926) explored the possibilities of jazz idioms in symphonic music; from this period dates the interest of Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in Copland's music-a sponsorship that proved important in gaining a wider audience for his own and much of America's music.
In the late 1920s Copland turned to an increasingly abstract style, characterized by angular melodic lines, spare textures, irregular rhythms, and often abrasive sonorities. The already distinctive idiom of the early works became entirely personal and free of identifiable outside influence in the Piano Variations (1930), Short Symphony (1933), and Statements, and the basic features of these works remained in one way or another central to his musical style thereafter.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of intense concern about the limited audience for new (and especially American) music, and Copland was active in many organizations devoted to performance and sponsorship, notably the League of Composers, the Copland-Sessions concerts, and the American Composers' Alliance. His organizational abilities earned him the sobriquet of American music's natural president from his colleague Virgil Thomson.
Beginning in the mid-1930s through 1950, Copland made a serious effort to widen the audience for American music and took steps to change his style when writing pieces requested for different occasions. He composed music for theater, ballet, and films, as well as for concert situations. In the ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944; Pulitzer Prize, 1945), he made use of folk or folklike melodies and relaxed his previous highly concentrated style, to arrive at an idiom broadly recognized as "American" without the sacrifice of craftsmanship or inventiveness.
Copland's concern for establishing a tradition of music in American life was manifested in his activities as teacher at The New School for Social Research and Harvard and as head of the composition department at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, founded by Koussevitzky. His Norton Lectures at Harvard (1951 - 1952) were published as Music and Imagination (1952); earlier books, of similar gracefully didactic intent, are What to Listen for in Music (1939) and Our New Music (1941).
Beginning with the Quartet for Piano and Strings (1950), Copland made use of the serial methods developed by Arnold Schoenberg, amplifying concerns of linear texture long present in his music. The most important works of these years include the Piano Fantasy (1957), Nonet for Strings (1960), Connotations (1962), and Inscape (1967); the opera The Tender Land (1954) represents an extension of the style of the ballets to the opera stage.
Copland spent the final years of his life living primarily in the New York City area. He engaged in many cultural missions, especially to South America. Although he had been out of the major spotlight for almost twenty years, he remained semiactive in the music world up until his death, conducting his last symphony in 1983.
Achievements
Aaron Copland was one of the most important figures in American music during the second quarter of the 20th century, both as a composer and as a spokesman who was concerned about making Americans conscious of the importance of their indigenous music. He is remembered as a man who encouraged young composers to find their own voice, no matter the style, just as he had done for six decades.
On September 14, 1964, Aaron Copland was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
In honor of Copland's vast influence on American music, on December 15, 1970, he was awarded the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit.
Copland was awarded the New York Music Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in composition for Appalachian Spring. His scores for Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), and The North Star (1943) all received Academy Award nominations, while The Heiress won Best Music in 1950.
He was a recipient of Yale University's Sanford Medal.
In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
He was awarded a special Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in 1987.
He was made an honorary member of the Alpha Upsilon chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1961 and was awarded the fraternity's Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award in 1970.
While Copland had various encounters with organized religious thought, which influenced some of his early compositions, and was close with the Zionist movement during the Popular Front movement, when it was endorsed by the left, he personally remained an agnostic.
Pollack writes,
"Like many contemporaries, Copland regarded Judaism alternately in terms of religion, culture, and race; but he showed relatively little involvement in any aspect of his Jewish heritage. At the same time, he had ties to Christianity, identifying with such profoundly Christian writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins and often spending Christmas Day at home with a special dinner with close friends. .. . In general, his music seemed to evoke Protestant hymns as often as it did Jewish chant. Copland characteristically found connections among various religious traditions. But if Copland was discreet about his Jewish background, he never hid it, either. "
Politics
Copland never enrolled as a member of any political party. Nevertheless, he inherited a considerable interest in civic and world events from his father. His views were generally progressive and he had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular Front, including Odets. Early in his life, Copland developed, in Pollack's words, "a deep admiration for the works of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, all socialists whose novels passionately excoriated capitalism's physical and emotional toll on the average man." Even after the McCarthy hearings, he remained a committed opponent of militarism and the Cold War, which he regarded as having been instigated by the United States. He condemned it as "almost worse for art than the real thing". Throw the artist "into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he'll create nothing".
Membership
He was a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society.
He was made an honorary member of the Alpha Upsilon chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1961.
Personality
Copland was a gay. The composer came to an early acceptance and understanding of his sexuality. Like many at that time, Copland guarded his privacy, especially in regard to his homosexuality. He provided few written details about his private life and even after the Stonewall riots of 1969, showed no inclination to "come out." However, he was one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his intimates. They tended to be talented, younger men involved in the arts, and the age-gap between them and the composer widened as he grew older. Most became enduring friends after a few years and, in Pollack's words, "remained a primary source of companionship. "
Quotes from others about the person
According to Pollack, Copland "had perhaps the most distinctive and identifiable musical voice produced by this country so far, an individuality ... that helped define for many what American concert music sounds like at its most characteristic and that exerted enormous influence on multitudes of contemporaries and successors."
Composer Ned Rorem states, "Aaron stressed simplicity: Remove, remove, remove what isn't needed. Aaron brought leanness to America, which set the tone for our musical language throughout (World War II). Thanks to Aaron, American music came into its own."
As biographer Howard Pollack points out,
"Copland observed two trends among composers in the 1930s: first, a continuing attempt to "simplify their musical language" and, second, a desire to "make contact" with as wide an audience as possible. Since 1927, he had been in the process of simplifying, or at least paring down, his musical language, though in such a manner as to sometimes have the effect, paradoxically, of estranging audiences and performers. By 1933 he began to find ways to make his starkly personal language accessible to a surprisingly large number of people."
Interests
Writers
Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair
Connections
Among Copland's love affairs were ones with photographer Victor Kraft, artist Alvin Ross, pianist Paul Moor, dancer Erik Johns, composer John Brodbin Kennedy, and painter Prentiss Taylor.
Victor Kraft became a constant in Copland's life, though their romance might have ended by 1944. Originally a violin prodigy when the composer met him in 1932, Kraft gave up music to pursue a career in photography, in part due to Copland's urging. Kraft would leave and re-enter Copland's life, often bringing much stress with him as his behavior became increasingly erratic, sometimes confrontational. Kraft fathered a child to whom Copland later provided financial security, through a bequest from his estate.
