In his words, “it made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. Copland realized that the new electronic media were fostering a new audience for music, one distinct from the traditional concert audience. But on a deeper level, there was also a need to modify his style. One of his means of doing so was to produce incidental music for new mass media like radio and movies. However, by the late 1930s, Copland desired to reach a broader public than was possible with his modernistic works. These works no longer sound shocking or troubling as they did to audiences a hundred years ago, but rather strike us as vintage early-20 th-century music. Such challenging, harmonically pungent pieces as the Piano Variations and Organ Symphony bear witness to this early phase of his career. His early work was imbued with European modernism, learned during his studies in Paris with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. Copland, however, did not start out with any intention of evoking Americana in his music. This sense of “open spaces,” evocative of pastoral life and the vastness of the American landscape, resulted from his particular use of musical texture, of the highs and lows of pitch, and his use of intervals like open fifths, redolent of the open strings of a fiddle. Much of his music is also said to embody a sense of Americana, a quality that is too rarely defined with any precision beyond the feeling of “wide open spaces” and the use of certain American folksongs as thematic material. Its greatness is not diminished by its widespread imitation by lesser talents in movies, television shows, and commercials, where it has served as a ready way to evoke the Far West, small-town life, or other phases of Americana.Īaron Copland (1900–1990) enjoys a reputation as America’s most esteemed composer of classical music. At its best, Aaron Copland’s Americana style is one of the great, ingenious, and enduring achievements in music.
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