It was during his three years in France, Copland said later, that he became aware that French music sounded distinctly French. He wrote a one-act ballet, “Grohg,” from which he later extracted three movements to form his “Dance Symphony,” subsequently winning with it a $5,000 prize in a 1930 contest sponsored by RCA Victor Co. In post-World War I Paris, where Copland went to study with Boulanger, he found himself caught up in the excitement over the experimenting European composers-Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg. He could afford to go there, Berger pointed out, because his immigrant father had a department store in New York and young Copland drew a “nice allowance” to supplement what he had earned working in the store and as a runner on Wall Street.Īt Fontainebleau, Copland met harmony teacher Nadia Boulanger and was overwhelmed by what he said was her enthusiasm and “clarity in teaching.” He became the first of several noted American composers who studied under her.
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That was an advanced age for a future professional composer to begin training, it was noted by Copland biographer Arthur Berger, “but his determination was such that things went rapidly.”Īfter studying piano with various teachers and learning composition under Rubin Goldmark, who believed some of his pupil’s efforts mere “modern experiments,” 20-year-old Copland went to France to enroll in a new music school for Americans at Fontainebleau.
His Academy Award came for the score for William Wyler’s 1949 “The Heiress.”Ĭopland, the youngest of five children of Russian Jewish immigrants, did not begin taking formal piano lessons until he was 12 or 13 and it was not until he was 15 that, he said, “the idea of becoming a composer seems gradually to have dawned upon me.” He did not consider himself above writing background music for films-"Of Mice and Men,” “Our Town,” “North Star” and “The Red Pony"-and for several years that work provided his main source of income. His “Fanfare for the Common Man” became an anthem played around the world and was heard in such disparate places as the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan in Washington. He reached a wide audience with his ballet compositions: “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring,” the last written for dancer Martha Graham. “He was The Leader, the one to whom the young always came with their compositions.”Įarly in his career, when he searched jazz and folk songs as well as Latin rhythms to find new musical forms, he was considered by many too avant-garde for the concert hall.
“He was the composer who would lead American music out of the wilderness,” Leonard Bernstein wrote in High Fidelity magazine for the occasion of Copland’s 70th birthday.
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