Copland, Aaron Books

Aaron Copland: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN UNCOMMON MAN (Music in American Life)

Howard Pollack

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Opening with a 12-page chapter that gives a sharper impression of the great American composer's personality than many full-length books, this superb biography goes from strength to strength as it elucidates Aaron Copland's background, beliefs, affiliations, and achievements. Music historian Howard Pollack depicts Copland (1900-90) as a man whose inner serenity and self-confidence enabled him to encompass "startling dichotomies" in his life and work. "A participant in the avant-garde, he wrote works of popular appeal," comments the author. "A Jewish, homosexual, liberal New Yorker, he became a national hero." Moving forward in a generally chronological manner, the narrative mixes two kinds of chapters. Some pursue themes over time: his feelings about European music (he adored Stravinsky, was ambivalent about Mozart), his political commitments (which got him into trouble during the McCarthy era), and his relationships with fellow composers and a host of nonmusical artists all equally determined to give America its own distinctive culture. Others concentrate on describing and analyzing groups of compositions: perennial favorites like Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid, of course, but also the concertos and symphonies respected by his peers. In either mode, Pollack writes with a clarity and dignity eminently suitable to his subject, who seems as warmly appealing as his music. --Wendy Smith

Aaron Copland (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderful Book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Venezia's love and respect for music shine through in another of the books in his World's Greatest Composers series. The story of Aaron Copland's life is told in an interesting and amusing fashion and shows children how Copland discovered his own style through his experiences over the years. While Venezia's artwork is comical as ever, the choice of artwork is also wonderful, showing how music as well as art changed as the times were changing. Children will appreciate how Copland looked to change his musical style when he realized that many people weren't understanding it. Venezia really brings Aaron Copland to life in this wonderful little book.

Editorial Review:

The author/illustrator of the highly successful Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series lends his creative talents to another fun, informative series, this one featuring world-famous composers.

The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland

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Editorial Review:

This is the first book devoted to the correspondence of composer Aaron Copland, covering his life from age eight to eighty-seven. The chronologically arranged collection includes letters to many significant figures in American twentieth-century music as well as Copland’s friends, family, teachers, and colleagues. Selected for readability, interest, and the light they cast upon the composer’s thoughts and career, the letters are carefully annotated and each published in its entirety.
Copland was a gifted and natural letter writer who revealed much more about himself in his letters than in formal writings in which he was conscious of his position as spokesman for modern music. The collected letters offer insights into his music, personality, and ideas, along with fascinating glimpses into the lives of such other well-known musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Carlos Chávez, William Schuman, and Virgil Thomson.

Copland: 1900-1942

Aaron Copland, Vivian Perlis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

This is a gem of a book. 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Copland not only gave us insight into his life, but the lives of the modern classical composers. Through this book you can learn the "family tree" of modern American and European composers.

Editorial Review:

Aaron Copland is one of America's most beloved musical pioneers, famous for Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Lincoln Portrait, as well as the movie scores for "Our Town" and "Of Mice and Men," and numerous orchestral and chamber works. This candid, colorful memoir begins with Copland's Brooklyn childhood and takes us through his years in Paris, the creation of his early works, and his arrival at Tanglewood. Rich with remembrances from Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, and Nadia Boulanger, as well as a trove of letters, photographs, and scores from Copland's collection, this is one of our most vivid musical autobiographies, and an enduring record of an American maestro's explosively creative coming of age.

Copland: Since 1943

Aaron Copland, Vivian Perlis

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Editorial Review:

Hailed as important, entertaining, and revealing, Copland: Since 1943 is composer Aaron Copland's irresistible account of the latter half of his career--a career that brought us such pioneering works as Appalachian Spring and Lincoln Portrait, the movie scores for Of Mice and Men and Our Town, and numerous other orchestral and chamber works. It tells the story of how a self-described "brash young man from Brooklyn" went on to become one of the founding fathers of "serious" American music. Featuring cameos by luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, Benny Goodman, and other peers of Aaron Copland during this explosively creative period, Copland: Since 1943 is an invaluable memoir that charts the crescendo of one of the most accomplished careers in the modern canon.

Aaron Copeland

Berger

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Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War

Elizabeth B. Crist

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Editorial Review:

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals. Much as been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, but very little on concert music of the era. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.

Aaron Copland's America: A Cultural Perspective

Gail Levin, Judith Tick

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Perhaps best known for "Appalachian Spring" and "Fanfare for the Common Man", Aaron Copland is widely recognized for helping to create a distinctive American presence in world music. What is less well known is that throughout his long career as a composer, Copland came to know some of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century - among them painters Charles Demuth, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis; photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand; composers Virgil Thomson and Darius Milhaud; choreographers Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille; and writers Hart Crane, e.e. cummings and Gertrude Stein. This volume, in conjunction with an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, Long Island, documents some of these little-known friendships and the direct exchange of ideas they engendered, and examines aesthetic parallels between Copland's music and the work of visual artists who were contemporaries. At the same time, it looks at how Copland's fascination with folk and popular culture, native and so-called primitive arts, jazz, cinema, and the search for an American national art gave form to his work, which represents not only his personal talent but powerful concerns that shaped the times.

Aaron Copland and His World (The Bard Music Festival)

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Editorial Review:

Aaron Copland and His World reassesses the legacy of one of America's best-loved composers at a pivotal moment--as his life and work shift from the realm of personal memory to that of history. This collection of seventeen essays by distinguished scholars of American music explores the stages of cultural change on which Copland's long life (1900 to 1990) unfolded: from the modernist experiments of the 1920s, through the progressive populism of the Great Depression and the urgencies of World War II, to postwar political backlash and the rise of serialism in the 1950s and the cultural turbulence of the 1960s.

Continually responding to an ever-changing political and cultural panorama, Copland kept a firm focus on both his private muse and the public he served. No self-absorbed recluse, he was very much a public figure who devoted his career to building support systems to help composers function productively in America. This book critiques Copland's work in these shifting contexts.

The topics include Copland's role in shaping an American school of modern dance; his relationship with Leonard Bernstein; his homosexuality, especially as influenced by the writings of André Gide; and explorations of cultural nationalism. Copland's rich correspondence with the composer and critic Arthur Berger, who helped set the parameters of Copland's reception, is published here in its entirety, edited by Wayne Shirley. The contributors include Emily Abrams, Paul Anderson, Elliott Antokoletz, Leon Botstein, Martin Brody, Elizabeth Crist, Morris Dickstein, Lynn Garafola, Melissa de Graaf, Neil Lerner, Gail Levin, Beth Levy, Vivian Perlis, Howard Pollack, and Larry Starr.

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland - A Listener's Guide: Parallel Lives Series, No. 1 Their Lives and Their Music

Daniel Felsenfeld

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Editorial Review:

The title of this book is a misnomer: there are no parallels between these two composers' lives except that both were Americans and musical innovators. They were as different as they could be. Copland was an open-hearted, open-minded cosmopolitan New Yorker, who, actively engaged in human and social affairs, wrote mainly accessible music and books for the people. Ives was an embittered, idealistic, secretive recluse who wrote mainly inaccessible music and books for himself while selling insurance for a living. Yet, as Daniel Felsenfeld shows in this thoughtful, enlightening book, each in his own way laid the foundation for what came to be defined as the "American" sound and spirit in music. Convinced that a composer's work is inseparable from his life and personality, Felsenfeld divides his book into three inventively organized sections. Beginning with a brief biography and ending with a discussion of some of his subjects' striking characteristics, he shows how their training and experiences influenced their work and careers and then devotes the central part to analyzing their music. Guidance for listening and understanding is aided by a CD of their most familiar compositions in excellent performances.

Copland, son of Jewish Polish-Lithuanian immigrants, studied with Nadja Boulanger, but being surrounded by French music and culture only strengthened his resolve to become an "American" composer. Despite a brief flirtation with serialism, he was determined to close the gap between composer and audience, and he succeeded admirably: his colorful scores, often suffused with folk and jazz idioms, speak to everyone; he became not only one of the most popular, but most respected composers of his time. Ives, whose musician father opened his ears to unheard-of musical combinations, was born into a New England family steeped in transcendental philosophy. His music, eccentric and deliberately perverse, is an acquired taste. Any composer who feels impelled to write a long, linguistically and philosophically impenetrable essay explaining his "magnum opus" can hardly expect to capture a large audience. Felsenfeld makes the best possible case for it, but one senses admiration rather than love. The author's style is not always felicitous (Copland's teacher "feared that Ives' influence might improperly influence the talented young man"), but having obviously read all of Copland's popular and Ives' indigestible writings, he was perhaps improperly influenced himself. --Edith Eisler