January 22, 2010
If you study music and the history of music, there are composers who emerge from the names and dates and facts and become whole human beings instead of biographical sketches on the page. Sometimes our imaginations are aided by biographical films like Amadeus or Immortal Beloved. Documentaries may provide enough information to give a historical figure flesh and blood. Sometimes, we feel closest to the composers who were born in our hometowns or who referenced the folk songs of our youth. Or perhaps we relate best to the ones with similar life stories, or those who accomplished what we have only wished.
As for me, I feel like I know Aaron Copland. He was born in New York, in the boroughs, like me. His borough was Brooklyn, and mine was Queens. The places where he played as a kid, where he sat reading on his front steps (what we would call a “stoop”), where his family ran a business, are so similar to places that I played and where my parents spent their childhoods, and where my grandfather had his butcher shop. Like me his was not a particularly musical family. We were born into families of music lovers, not composers or professional musicians. To me, he was a walking breathing person who walked the same streets that I walked, and knew the same kind of family life as I did. (Jewish families like Copland’s and Italian families like mine, share remarkable similarities. I always joke that only the food is different, the guilt from Grandma is the same.)
You don’t have to be from the boroughs to feel close to Aaron Copland, however. In fact, despite being a first generation American and a Brooklyn-ite, Copland managed to capture a sound that many feel is truly pan-American, if I can use that term. His ballets especially, like Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid, feature music that evokes the Great Plains, the southwest, the countryside. With these works, Copland showed that he was able to use his influences—among them the Jewish music of his upbringing, his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and Jazz—to create something truly unique. My theory is that the diversity of his influences mirrors the diversity of the American experience, hence his distinctly “American” music.
Copland achieved much in his life and career. He composed film scores and an opera, conducted orchestras in the U.S. and Europe, wrote pedagogical texts, and helped young American composers in their careers. He’s known as the “Dean of American Music” for that last one. Someone with humble beginnings grew up to do amazing things. It’s something we can all aspire to, and something that makes him a real person for me. Not bad for a boy from Brooklyn, right?
—Christine Lee Gengaro, Ph.D.