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

Aaron Copland, son of Polish and Lithuanian emigrants, was born in Brooklyn in 1900 and by the time he was 24, his compositions were already gaining interest. He was Nadia Boulanger’s first American pupil in Paris, laying the groundwork for

In 1967, Aaron Copland wrote a commissioned work for the New York Philharmonic’s 125th anniversary. The twelve-tone piece Inscape opens with a bang – with 11 of the 12 tones of the scale sounding at once.