LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Copland: New York
built 649 days ago
Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute, Mr. Copland was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York. He had earlier served as a law clerk for Hon. Ralph K. Winter on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has been a director of two privately held manufacturing companies since 1997.
Source:
Copland learned to play piano from an older sister. By the time he was fifteen he had decided to become a composer. 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 was the first American student of the brilliant teacher, Nadia 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 Madame Boulanger.
Source:
The Copland-Sessions Concerts appeared during the second wave of composer organizing that completely transformed the musical landscape of New York during the 1920s, setting in place models that continue to serve composers today. In 1921, the International Composers' Guild, led by Edgard Varèse and Carlos Salzedo, had begun presenting modern music, and two years later the League of Composers appeared. These, in turn, had been preceded by two less well known but important ventures, the Franco-American Musical Society (begun in 1920 and later renamed Pro Musica Society) and the American Music Guild (begun in 1921). While these early organizations paid some attention to the generation of American composers born around 1900, they focused most intensely on either importing European modernism or showcasing Americans who were then in their late thirties and forties (figures such as Louis Gruenberg, Frederick Jacobi, Carl Ruggles, and Emerson Whithorne). By contrast, Copland and Sessions sought to put the twenty-something crowd in the spotlight.
Source:
Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Lithuanian Jewish descent. Before emigrating to the United States, Copland's father had Anglicized his surname “Kaplan” to “Copland” while in Scotland. Throughout his childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn shop. At the age of fifteen he had already taken an interest in music and aspired to be a composer, even though his parents never encouraged him or directly exposed him to it. His musical education included time with Leopold Wolfsohn, Rubin Goldmark (who ... taught George Gershwin), and Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau School of Music in Paris from 1921 to 1924. He was awarded a Guggenheim in Fellowship in 1925 and again in 1926.
Source:
With the passage of time, the Copland-Sessions Concerts have increasingly been characterized as American-obsessed, with a special inclination toward composers who had studied with Nadia Boulanger. The repertory mentioned above shows this to have been at least partly the case. The music of Marc Blitzstein, Israel Citkowitz, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, and others with a significant experience in France was notably present. But overall a far greater breadth of styles turned up on these concerts than has generally been acknowledged. Copland and Sessions reached out to the so-called "ultra-moderns" of the day, including the music of Henry Brant (at age 17!), Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Dane Rudhyar, and Adolph Weiss and providing some of the earliest opportunities for these composers to have their music performed in New York. The refreshingly unclassifiable Carlos Chávez, who eventually became one of Copland's closest professional colleagues, enjoyed an inside track with the series.
Source:
Copland stopped composing at the end of the 1960s. Yet he continued to be active as a conductor and speaker. In 1982, Queens College of the City University of New York established the Aaron Copland School of Music.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
New York