Aaron Copland

Works of American composer Aaron Copland include the ballets

Rodeo

(1942) and

Appalachian Spring

(1944), which won a Pulitzer Prize, any of several awards that, conferred annually for accomplishment in various fields of American journalism, literature, and music, Joseph Pulitzer established.

His musical works ranged from orchestral to choral and movie scores. For the better part of four decades, people considered Aaron Copland the premier.

From an older sister, Copland learned to play piano. He decided his career before the time he fifteen years in 1915. His first tentative steps included a correspondence course in writing harmony. In 1921, Copland traveled to Paris to attend the newly founded music school for Americans at Fontainebleau. He, the first such American, studied of the brilliant teacher, Nadia Juliette Boulanger. After three years in Paris, he returned to New York with his first major commission, writing an organ concerto for the American appearances of Boulanger. His "Symphony for Organ and Orchestra" premiered in at Carnegie Hall in 1925.

Growth of Copland mirrored important trends of his time. After his return from Paris, he worked with jazz rhythms in his "Piano Concerto" (1926). Neoclassicism of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky strongly influenced his "Piano Variations" (1930).

In 1936, he changed his orientation toward a simpler style. This made his music more meaningful to the large loving audience that radio and the movies created. American folklore based his most important works, including "Billy the Kid" (1938) and "Rodeo" (1942), during this period. Another work during this period, a series of movie scores, included "Of Mice and Men" (1938) and "The Heiress" (1948).

In later years, work of Copland reflected the serial techniques of the "12-tone" school of Arnold Schoenberg. People commissioned notable "Connotations" (1962) for the opening of Lincoln center.

Copland after 1970 stopped composing but through the mid-1980s continued to lecture and to conduct. He died at the Phelps memorial hospital in Tarrytown (Westchester county), New York.