Modernist composer from Brooklyn, known for his open fifths, his cowboy dances and a slow fanfare for brass.
The Copland family lived above and beside their department store on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn. Aaron, born on 14 November 1900, was the youngest of Sarah and Harris Copland’s five children. His parents were Russian-born Jewish immigrants, and everyone in the family helped in the shop. His sister Laurine gave him his first piano lessons. When he wanted professional lessons, his parents let him find a teacher and agreed to pay. By 1917 he was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to study harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark.
At Fontainebleau in 1921 a friend persuaded him to sit in on Nadia Boulanger’s harmony class. She became his composition teacher, and the year he had planned to spend abroad stretched to three. In Paris he encountered Stravinsky’s music and heard the latest concert works. Boulanger took him to meet Serge Koussevitzky, who was about to take over the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After the visit Koussevitzky commissioned a symphony with Boulanger herself as organ soloist.
Copland returned to New York in 1924 with that commission and no salaried post. Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony gave the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra its first performance in 1925; Koussevitzky conducted it in Boston. Later that year came Music for the Theatre, five movements for piano, percussion and a small orchestra, commissioned by the League of Composers. Its Dance and Burlesque use jazz rhythms. The work was not written for a play.
With Roger Sessions, Copland organised concerts of new music in New York from 1928 to 1932. He was also writing difficult piano music. The Piano Variations of 1930 open with a short theme spread across two octaves, with hard chords between its notes. Twenty variations and a coda are built from the same four-note cell. The young Leonard Bernstein learnt the piece before he met Copland in 1937.
In 1932 Carlos Chávez invited Copland to Mexico and took him to the dance hall El Salón México. Its name became the title of an orchestral piece, completed in 1936, built around Mexican melodies. Chávez also conducted the first performance of the fifteen-minute Short Symphony in Mexico City in 1934. Copland dedicated El Salón México to the photographer Victor Kraft.
At the New School he lectured about music, and those classes led to What to Listen for in Music in 1939. In the same year he scored the documentary The City and the feature film Of Mice and Men. In 1940 Koussevitzky brought him to the new Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, where he taught young composers each summer until 1965. During those years his own music was heard in cinemas and ballet theatres.
In 1938 Lincoln Kirstein and the choreographer Eugene Loring invited Copland to write Billy the Kid. He used cowboy songs in the score, among them Git Along Little Dogies and Goodbye Old Paint, and opened and closed the ballet with slow music representing the open prairie. The first Chicago performance used two pianos. Four years later Agnes de Mille asked him to write Rodeo, which the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo presented in New York on 16 October 1942.
De Mille’s Rodeo ends with Hoe-Down, its fiddle tune enlarged for the orchestra. That year Copland also assembled Lincoln’s words for a narrator in Lincoln Portrait and wrote Fanfare for the Common Man for Eugene Goossens in Cincinnati. When Goossens proposed a première at income-tax time, Copland replied that he was “all for honoring the common man at income tax time.” Bass drum, tam-tam and timpani open the fanfare, and the trumpets enter after them.
Martha Graham’s commission was on a more intimate scale. Her scripts for Appalachian Spring described a pioneer wedding, a house and a community facing the future. Copland worked to her timings. By June 1944 he had a piano score; before leaving for Mexico, he and Leo Smit recorded it for Graham to rehearse with in Vermont. The finished ensemble numbered thirteen: flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and nine strings.
Graham danced the Bride at the Library of Congress on 30 October 1944, with Merce Cunningham as the Revivalist. In the ballet the Shaker song Simple Gifts is the subject of a set of variations. Copland had found it in Edward Deming Andrews’s collection The Gift to Be Simple. The ballet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and the New York Philharmonic played his shortened suite for full orchestra that October.
The Third Symphony, first played in Boston under Koussevitzky in 1946, uses the Fanfare in its finale. Copland then wrote a concerto for Benny Goodman, made up of a slow clarinet song, an unaccompanied cadenza and a quick second movement that ends in a jazz smear. Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1949–50) is scored for voice and piano. The first song opens with trills and the fluttering of birds, and the second sets a wind like a bugle.
In Washington in 1953, Copland’s support for left-wing causes brought him before a Senate investigation associated with Joseph McCarthy, and engagements were cancelled. He was then still working on The Tender Land, which New York City Opera staged in 1954. The first act ends with The Promise of Living, an ensemble in which the voices join in a song about harvest and shared labour. The song quotes the revivalist tune Zion’s Walls.
In 1960 he bought Rock Hill in the town of Cortlandt, north of New York. Two years later Bernstein conducted Connotations at the opening of Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center. The score uses Copland’s own approach to twelve-note composition, with a large percussion section and a piano solo. Inscape followed in 1967; its material is drawn from two twelve-note series.
Copland conducted his own scores more and more often. He recorded his orchestral music and conducted works by other American composers. At home, Vivian Perlis began interviewing him in 1975–76, and their conversations became two volumes of memoirs, published in 1984 and 1989. He lived at Rock Hill for thirty years. Copland died at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown on 2 December 1990, shortly after his ninetieth birthday. His ashes were scattered at Tanglewood.
Born to Sarah and Harris Copland; the family lived above and beside its Washington Avenue department store. The coordinates mark Brooklyn; the house itself has not been independently geolocated.
Copland House: timeline compiled by Michael Boriskin · Vivian Perlis: The Man Behind the Music
Crossed from Brooklyn for lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark. The point marks New York in general and does not show where Goldmark taught.
Copland House: timeline, 1917–21 · Vivian Perlis: Goldmark lessons across the Brooklyn Bridge
Attended the new American Conservatory and discovered Nadia Boulanger’s harmony class.
Studied composition with Nadia Boulanger; through her met Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the organ symphony.
Returned from France in 1924. Kept his New York apartment and loft studio until moving to Sneden’s Landing in 1947; travel and summer residencies interrupted this base.
Vivian Perlis: return to New York in 1924 · Copland House: timeline, 1947 move
Visited the Yaddo artists’ colony and completed Piano Variations there. Coordinates mark Saratoga Springs. Piano Variations.
Copland House: timeline, first Yaddo visit · Stephen Hough: Piano Variations, Hyperion booklet note
First Mexican visit, arranged by Carlos Chávez; visited the dance hall that inspired El Salón México. El Salón México.
Carlos Chávez conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica de México in the première of Short Symphony. Short Symphony.
Taught at the Berkshire Music Center in its summer seasons, from its first season in 1940. The post was seasonal.
Eugene Goossens conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of Fanfare for the Common Man. Fanfare for the Common Man.
Martha Graham danced the première of Appalachian Spring in the Coolidge Auditorium; Louis Horst conducted thirteen instrumentalists. Appalachian Spring.
Aaron Copland Fund: complete ballet catalogue · Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett: Appalachian Spring at 75 · Commons institution record: Library of Congress coordinates
Bought his first house, Shady Lane Farm, and lived there for eight years. The point marks Ossining.
Bought Rock Hill, his home for the remaining thirty years of his life. Coordinates mark the town of Cortlandt, not the house.
Died at Phelps Memorial Hospital Center. The point marks the village, which was later renamed Sleepy Hollow.
Teachers, encounters and borrowed music, each with its account and sources in the Web of Influence.
Octaves and open fifths leave space between the notes. In the rural dances of The Tender Land, this spacing lets a piano or orchestra imitate the open strings of a fiddle. A chord built this way has a firm root but leaves out the third, which would make it major or minor.
In Music for the Theatre the syncopation, with accents placed between the expected beats, comes from jazz. In the Piano Variations, notes from the short theme are displaced and reversed, so that the same pitches unsettle the pulse in a new way.
Hoe-Down uses the version of a tune played by a Kentucky fiddler, William Hamilton Stepp; Appalachian Spring uses a Shaker song from a printed collection. Copland kept the melodies and changed their setting, including the instrumentation, register, dynamics and accompaniment.
The Fanfare is scored for brass and three kinds of percussion, without strings. The original Appalachian Spring has thirteen players: nine strings with one flute, one clarinet, one bassoon and a piano, so each wind instrument can be heard on its own.
The Dickinson songs ask the singer for leaps of the kind usually written for an instrument. Why do they shut me out of Heaven? covers a wide range; in Nature, the gentlest mother, piano trills imitate birds before the voice enters. These songs use no borrowed folk tunes.
Inscape draws on two twelve-note series; Connotations applies serial technique to a large orchestra that includes metal sheet, conga drum and piano. Copland’s late concert music keeps the sharply separated sounds of his earlier piano writing.
A selection from the composer’s works.
Short examples, engraved and playable.
Evans photographed Burroughs in Hale County, Alabama. The photographs in his and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men supplied the world from which Erik Johns developed The Tender Land. Copland’s opera moves the setting to a Midwestern farm, and it has a harvest celebration.
Ross’s arm crosses Graham’s shoulders, and both faces are turned upwards. For Appalachian Spring, Graham sent Copland scripts and timings, then changed her choreography in response to his score. This portrait is later.
The first two stanzas in the public-domain text of Poems: Second Series (1891). Copland opened his Dickinson cycle with this poem, under its first line, Nature, the gentlest mother. The piano plays trills and fluttering figures for the birds in the poem.
Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic collection brings together the orchestral suites from all three ballets, including the four dance episodes from Rodeo. The programme includes music for a frontier-town street and a corral at night, and the Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts’.
The Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts’ appears here in Copland’s scoring for symphonic band, with saxophones and euphonium among the winds. Hamilton’s Army Field Band recording presents the variations from Appalachian Spring as a self-contained piece.
These recordings are under copyright, so the Hall cannot play them; the links go to the labels’ and artists’ own uploads and to streaming services.
Boulanger taught him; Chávez brought him to Mexico and conducted the Short Symphony; Stepp’s fiddle playing reached Hoe-Down through transcription. Bernstein was a younger friend and an informal pupil, then a conductor who gave the première of Connotations and recorded the music. His piano arrangements of El Salón México were among his first published works.
Copland’s account of his decisions, teachers and collaborators. The two memoir volumes are brought together with Perlis’s commentary and a postlude on his last years.
A detailed study of the life and works, covering the private life, political commitments and individual compositions, with the context of the familiar ballets.
Crist connects the musical choices of El Salón México, the ballets and the wartime works with the left-wing cultural politics of the 1930s and 1940s, and asks whose America they represent.
Traces how a wartime commission for Graham, Copland and Noguchi became an emblem of American life: the ballet’s making, choreography, performances and later meanings.
Annotated letters record what Copland said at the time of composition, separately from his later memoirs.
Contrapunctus. “Aaron Copland.” Accessed 20 October 2026. https://mottopanikeiku.github.io/contrapunctus/composers/copland.html.
@misc{contrapunctus-composers-copland,
author = {{Contrapunctus}},
title = {Aaron Copland},
howpublished = {\url{https://mottopanikeiku.github.io/contrapunctus/composers/copland.html}},
note = {Accessed 2026-10-20}
}