(New York, November 14, 1900 - 2 December 1990)
Copland was born in New York in 1900, the fifth son of Jewish immigrants of Lithuanian origin. He approached music when he was already a teenager, attending harmony and counterpoint courses, guided, among others, by Robin Goldmark. In 1921, he crowned his desire to study in France, becoming the first American student of the famous teacher and organist Nadia Boulanger. Thanks to this, he learned to appreciate ancient composers, such as Monteverdi and Bach, and modern, such as Ravel. On the occasion of the Boulanger concerts in the United States, Copland wrote one of his first works, a symphony for organ and orchestra.
In 1924, he returned to America and began a compositional phase influenced by jazz. He composed music for the theater and a piano concert during this period. In 1925, together with 14 emerging and deserving artists, he received the "Guggenheim Fellowship." In these years, he composed music in a more abstract style, drastically changing in the mid-thirties, when he composed music more accessible to a large audience.
With his friend Roger Sessions, he founded the Copland-Sessions Concert, approximately thirty years old, which would later become the American Festival of Contemporary Music festival.
From 1936 to 1946, he composed a series of songs that are to be counted among his most famous compositions: El Salon Mexico, An Outdoor Overture, Billy the Kid, Quiet City, Sonata for Piano, Danzon Cubano, Rodeo, in Lincoln Portrait, Sonata for Violin, Appalachian Spring and the third symphony. This particularly prolific period will be awarded in 1945 the "Pulitzer Prize" for music.
A friend and often mentor of significant music figures, such as Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, and Seiji Ozawa, he was a great supporter of young composers and their works, also as a teacher at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood.
He was awarded over 30 honorary degrees and Innumerable prizes in his long career.
Unlike many men of his generation, Copland was never tormented by his homosexuality. He accepted himself as homosexual as a young man, and he had lasting relationships with other men throughout his life. He was a lover and, at the same time, mentor of Leonard Bernstein, and also had relations with the dancer Erik Johns and the photographer Victor Kraft.
He knew how to create his own compositional style, outlined and well recognizable, affected by various influences: classical music, contemporary music, and jazz, with a critical, purely American folkloric component.
Copland died in 1990, at 90 years old, from the complications of Alzheimer's disease.
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Buckaroo Holiday - Allegro With Spirit
Corral Nocturne - moderate
Saturday Night Waltz - Slow Waltz
HOE Down - Allegro
The Rodeo ballet was commissioned to the choreographer Agnes de Mille and Aaron Copland from the Russian Ballet of Montecarlo for the 1942-43 season. The ballet is set in the southwest of the United States, where the Saturday afternoon rodeo represents a tradition. In the most remote Ranches, as in shopping centers and cities, cowboys gather to show their ability to use a lasso, riding atterious cattle and marking it. Often, in the most isolated Ranches, the Rodeo is held for a small audience, formed by a small group of work companions, women, and those closest neighbors who have perhaps made about eighty miles to participate. The afternoon show is usually followed by a Saturday night in which it is danced on the Ranch farm. The ballet has as its subject a fundamental theme, which has affected all American women throughout the country's history, from the most remote times of pioneers: how to conquer the ideal man. From the Ballet, Copland then extracted a suite that includes four dances. As already for Billy the Kid, the composer has used several popular themes to musically set the story, drawing them from the Our Singing Country collections by Alan Lomax and Traditional Music of America by Ira Ford. In the first episode, Buckaroo Holiday, the If He'd Be a Buckaroo by bis trade and Sis Joe recur, while in the last, Hoe-Down, the central theme derives from a melody of "Square-Dance" (street dance) entitled BonyParte. The two main songs, Corral Nocturne and the slow Walzer of Saturday Night Waltz, act as a lyrical-sentimental interlude to the two unleashed external panels, whose verve is enhanced by the incinerating orchestration. The first execution was directed on May 28, 1943, by A. Fiedler at the head of the Boston Pops Orchestra.
The fanfare of the common man and the Hoe down ballet were taken up by one of the best-known pianists in the history of rock, Keith Emerson, for his Emerson group, Lake & Palmer. It is said that when Copland was still alive, Emerson presented himself to Copland, being afraid that he would refuse the progressive arrangement He proposed. Still, Emerson showed that he appreciated it.
