Aaron copland brief biography of mozart

His tact served him well in his private life and in his public life as a moderator, committee man, and teacher.^[73] Copland was a constant and diligent worker and a night owl, who composed primarily at the piano and at a relatively slow pace. But Copland’s music also carved out a new American sound through compositional devices such as widely spaced chords, which suggested the far horizons of Western landscapes and the fresh beginnings of pioneer life.

That same year, Copland was called before Congress, where he testified that he was never a communist.^[64]

Despite the difficulties that his suspected Communist sympathies posed, Copland nonetheless traveled extensively during the 1950s and early 1960s, observing the avant-garde styles of Europe while experiencing the new school of Soviet music.

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Composer

Main article: List of compositions by Aaron Copland

Influences

Copland's earliest musical inclinations as a teenager ran toward Chopin, Debussy, Verdi and the Russian composers.

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By the age of 15, after attending a concert by composer-pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Copland decided to become a composer.^[12] After attempts to further his music study from a correspondence course, Copland took formal lessons in harmony, theory and composition from Rubin Goldmark, a noted teacher and composer of American music (who had given George Gershwin three lessons).

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Demonstrating his broad range, Copland in the 1930s began composing music for ballet, including his highly successful Billy the Kid (1939), the second of four ballets he scored (after Hear Ye!

Hear Ye! (1934)).^[48] Copland's ballet music established him as an authentic composer of American music much as Stravinsky's ballet scores established him with Russian music.^[49] Copland's timing was excellent; he helped fill a vacuum for the American choreographers who needed suitable music to score their own nationalistic dance repertory.^[50]

In keeping with the wartime period, Copland's "Piano Sonata" (1941) was a piece characterized as "grim, nervous, elegiac, with pervasive bell-like tolling of alarm and mourning." It was later adapted to "Day on Earth," a landmark American dance by Doris Humphrey.^[51]

Copland started to publish some of his lectures in the 1930s, "What to Listen for in Music" being one of the most notable of his writings.^[46] He also took a leadership role in the American Composers Alliance, whose mission was "to regularize and collect all fees pertaining to performance of their copyrighted music" and "to stimulate interest in the performance of American music."^[52] Copland eventually moved over to rival ASCAP.^[53] Through royalties and with his great success from 1940 on, Copland amassed a multi-million dollar fortune by the time of his death.^[54]

The decade of the 1940s was arguably Copland's most productive, and it firmly established his worldwide fame.

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