By the early 1970s, Aaron Copland stopped composing. As he wrote, “It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet.” He felt lucky to have been given so long to be creative, and was resigned to the

Aaron Copland can undoubtedly be counted among the most important American composers. He displayed a pronounced interest in music as a child, and his interest in music composition led him to Paris in 1920, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger.

The American tragedy these days is gun violence and how it has become a part of the familiar scene. It seems like most films from the US have a gun in the imagery and the news is filled with today’s

American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) only wrote one work for piano and orchestra, his 1926 Piano Concerto. To put this work in context, we need to listen to it not only as a work by the young American composer newly

Sometime in the late 1920s, American composer Aaron Copland went to a performance of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, a tale of pre-destined love and demonic possession. For a production of the play in Moscow in 1919, composer Joel Engel

Harris Morris Kaplan grew up in Lithuania, and before immigrating to the United States he lived in Scotland for a couple of years. It was in Scotland that he changed his family name “Kaplan” to “Copland.” He had no particular

When you think of the music of Aaron Copland, you think of light. Open vistas. Cowboys. Cowgirls. Pure Americanisms. But in the early 1920s, Copland was in Paris, starting to write his first orchestral music. He and his roommate, the

An old proverb states, “Traveling leaves you speechless, and then turns you into a storyteller. And that’s what happened to Aaron Copland after his first visit to Mexico City in 1932. His friend Carlos Chávez took him to a colorful