Aaron copland

Aaron Copland (Brooklyn, New York, November 14, 1900-Peekskill, New York, December 2, 1990) was an American classical music and film composer of Russian origin. -Jew. His work is influenced by impressionism and especially by Igor Stravinsky. He stood out alongside George Gershwin as one of the most important composers of America's musical identity of the 20th century .

Biography

Of Russian Jewish descent, he spent his childhood in his parents' store in Brooklyn. She attended public schools and graduated from Boy's High School in 1918. In the fall of 1917 she began studies in harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark. At his suggestion, she studied piano first with Victor Wittgenstein and from 1919 with the famed pedagogue Clarence Adler. After his graduation, she decided not to pursue her general studies and made a living as a pianist. In June 1921 he went to France to study at the newly established American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, near Paris. Between the fall of that year and 1924 she studied with Nadia Boulanger. Around that time he managed to sell his first score, the Scherzo Humoristique for piano, subtitled The Cat and the Mouse . In 1924 he returned to the United States and the following year he was the first composer to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he renewed in 1926.

First releases

On January 11, 1925, his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was premiered, which Nadia Boulanger herself performed accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Walter Damrosch. During the summer of 1925 she composed Music for Theater, a commission from the League of Composers that Serge Koussevitzki and the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered in November. On January 28, 1927, she performed her own Concert for Piano and Orchestra accompanied by that same ensemble. She began teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York. Between 1927 and 1929 he composed a Symphonic Ode for the 30th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and in 1929 received the $5,000 RCA Victor Competition for his Dance Symphony, which he had composed in 1925 on the basis of his unrepresented ballet Grohg.

The ballets

On October 16, 1938, the first performance of his ballet Billy The Kid took place and in 1942 Rodeo appeared and concluded Lincoln Portrait on texts by this American statesman. That is also the year of the Fanfare for the Common Man (Fanfare for the Common Man), commissioned by Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra which, premiered the following year, has ended up becoming the most popular of Copland's compositions. Also in 1942 he was elected a Fellow of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1945 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Award for his ballet Appalachian Spring.. His Third Symphony, composed between 1944 and 1946, won him the critics' award again in 1947.

Positions and teaching activity

Copland's interest in contemporary music led him to develop activities in many associations. He was the first director of the American Festival of Contemporary Music in Yaddo (Saratoga Springs) and also director of the Berkshire Music Center. He also chaired the Board of Directors of the League of Composers and directed the Edward MacDowell Association, the Koussevitzki Foundation, and the American Music Center.

He has taught contemporary music classes throughout the United States and South America and taught composition at Harvard University and the Berkshire Music Center. Beginning in 1941, he toured South America as a pianist, composer, and conductor commissioned by the Coordinator of Inter-American Relations and later by the State Department.

He is the author of the books: "What to Listen For in Music" (1939), "Our New Music" (1941) and Music and Imagination (1952). There is a Spanish version of the first of them (see bibliographic section) and the second was reissued in 1968 under the title The New Music: 1900-1960.

He also composed music for film. He was nominated several times for an Oscar, winning it in 1950 with the music for the film The Heiress (1949). Several of his songs have been collected in the suite, Music for Movies . The music from the film adaptation of the novel The Red Pony (by John Steinbeck) was also collected in a compilation.

After defending the United States Communist Party during the 1936 presidential election, Copland was investigated by the FBI during McCarthyism in the 1950s. On May 16, 1953, he appeared before the Committee on Un-American Activities of the US Congress. That same year, his music was removed from Eisenhower's inauguration concert for political reasons. The investigation was dropped in 1955 and closed in 1975, Copland's party membership could not be proven. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

He died in 1990 at his home in Peekskill, New York.

Works

Filmography

• 1961 - Something Wild
• 1949 - The heir (Download the best music)
• 1949 - The red pony
• 1945 - The Cummington story
• 1943 - The North Star (candidate to Oscar)
• 1940 - Symphony of life (candidate to Oscar)
• 1939 - Of Mice and Men
• 1940 - Our Town

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards