This Day in American History November 14
The Library Of Congress
The Library Of Congress
Aaron Copland
American composer Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Copland had decided by age fifteen to become a composer. After graduating from high school, he did not go to college: instead, he played the piano at venues in New York’s Catskill Mountains, among other places, before journeying to Paris in 1921 to study with the great composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Returning to the United States in 1924, Copland embarked on a life as an independent composer, working on commissions and writing, lecturing, teaching, and conducting, nurtured by his association with other artists in creative ventures such as the Macdowell Colony and Tanglewood.
In his compositions Copland sought to fashion a distinctively American voice with a simplicity and clarity that appealed to ordinary listeners as well as to musical connoisseurs. His greatest achievements include Billy the Kid (1938), Quiet City (1940), Rodeo (1942), A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), and film scores such as The Red Pony (1948), as well as his remarkable collaboration with Martha Graham.
In his later years Copland composed little, and practically nothing after 1970, although he continued to lecture and conduct into his ninth decade. By that time, he had long since been recognized as the foremost American classical composer of his generation. He died on December 2, 1990, at a hospital in North Tarrytown, New York, near his longtime home.
One of Copland’s most important works is closely connected to the Library of Congress. In 1942, Copland began working with the pioneering modern-dance choreographer Martha Graham on Appalachian Spring, a ballet that eventually won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize in music. The Library of Congress’ Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation commissioned the work from Graham and Copland. Between mid-1942 and mid-1943, Graham sent Copland four scripts. Copland drew on the last three in writing the music now known as Appalachian Spring.
Hearing the music, Graham revised the action yet again:
I have been working on your music. It is so beautiful and so wonderfully made. I have become obsessed by it. But I have also been doing a little cursing, too, as you probably did earlier over that not-so-good script. But what you did from that has made me change in many places. Naturally that will not do anything to the music, it is simply that the music made me change. It is so knit and of a completeness that it takes you into very strong hands and leads you into its own world. And there I am.
In the end, no script accompanied what Copland called Ballet for Martha and Graham retitled Appalachian Spring. A splendid collaboration between American masters of music and dance, the ballet premiered at the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Auditorium on October 30, 1944.
Hearing the music, Graham revised the action yet again:
I have been working on your music. It is so beautiful and so wonderfully made. I have become obsessed by it. But I have also been doing a little cursing, too, as you probably did earlier over that not-so-good script. But what you did from that has made me change in many places. Naturally that will not do anything to the music, it is simply that the music made me change. It is so knit and of a completeness that it takes you into very strong hands and leads you into its own world. And there I am.
In the end, no script accompanied what Copland called Ballet for Martha and Graham retitled Appalachian Spring. A splendid collaboration between American masters of music and dance, the ballet premiered at the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Auditorium on October 30, 1944.
