Aaron Copland

Copland was the youngest of five children born above his father's Brooklyn department store, to a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who had anglicized the family name from Kaplan. His sister Laurine gave him his first piano lessons, and by 1917 he was studying harmony and composition with Rubin Goldmark in Manhattan. In 1921 he sailed for France to attend a new summer school at Fontainebleau and stayed three years, studying under Nadia Boulanger, a teacher he later credited with giving him the confidence and the ear to hear his own music clearly. He came home in 1924 with two Guggenheim fellowships waiting and almost no American audience for what he had learned to write.

Copland spent the late 1920s writing in a dense, jazz-inflected modernist idiom before deciding, during the Depression, that concert music needed to speak to more people than it did. The pivot produced the open, spare orchestral sound most people mean when they say "Copland": El Salon Mexico in 1936, the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, which won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, and Fanfare for the Common Man, written in 1942 for wartime radio broadcasts and later borrowed by everyone from rock albums to presidential inaugurations. He scored five films, winning the 1950 Academy Award for The Heiress, and in the late 1940s began folding the twelve-tone method he had once resisted into pieces like the 1957 Piano Fantasy rather than abandoning melody for it.

The same populist patriotism that made Copland famous made him a target. He had backed the Communist Party ticket in 1936 and Henry Wallace's Progressive campaign in 1948, and the FBI placed him on a watch list of 151 artists with suspected Communist ties. Days before Dwight Eisenhower's January 1953 inauguration, organizers pulled Lincoln Portrait — built entirely from Lincoln's own words — from the concert program under political pressure, and that same month Copland was summoned to a closed Senate hearing and questioned by Joseph McCarthy. He was never charged with anything. He was also, across his adult life, a gay man who lived openly with a series of partners inside his own circle and never once said so in public, in a country where saying so would have cost him more than a concert program.

Copland died of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure on December 2, 1990, at 90, and his ashes were scattered at Tanglewood, where he had taught for decades. He had already collected the country's two highest civilian honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1987, and his estate now funds the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which distributes more than 600,000 dollars a year to living composers. His music became the default soundtrack for beef commercials, Olympic broadcasts, and any film needing to signify American open space, a use so complete that later composers had to work at sounding different from him rather than like him.

Aaron Copland's life against the full span of the corpus.

• El Salon Mexico song
  His first major popular success, drawn from a Mexico City dance hall 1936
• Billy the Kid song
  Ballet built from six cowboy folk songs 1938
• Fanfare for the Common Man song
  Written for wartime radio broadcasts, later adopted everywhere from rock albums to inaugurations 1942
• Appalachian Spring song
  Won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music 1944
• The Heiress film
  Won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Original Score 1949
• Piano Fantasy song
  A twelve-tone work written after he adopted serial technique 1957

• November 14, 1900 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 1921 aged ~21 Sails to France and begins three years studying under Nadia Boulanger
• 1925 aged ~25 Wins the first of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships
• 1944 aged ~44 Appalachian Spring premieres Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year.
• 1950 aged ~50 Wins the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Heiress
• January 1953 aged 52 Lincoln Portrait is pulled from Eisenhower's inaugural concert; questioned by Joseph McCarthy
• September 14, 1964 aged 63 Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• 1987 aged ~87 Awarded the Congressional Gold Medal
• December 2, 1990 aged 90 Dies at 90 in North Tarrytown, New York

• Leonard Bernstein 1918–1990
  Conductor, composer, and educator who brought classical music to mass audiences and reshaped American musical theater. mentored
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. compared to
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. barred by
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. investigated by