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Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland

1900 CE1990 CE · Composer · Brooklyn, New York

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was an American composer, pianist, teacher, conductor, and writer often called the "Dean of American Composers." Born in Brooklyn to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he studied in France in the 1920s with Nadia Boulanger before returning to the United States. He developed an accessible, distinctly American idiom in works such as the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, as well as Fanfare for the Common Man, A Lincoln Portrait, and the Third Symphony. Appalachian Spring received the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Copland also composed film scores, championed contemporary music, taught at Tanglewood, and conducted internationally. After giving up his Manhattan quarters in 1947 he lived in the lower Hudson Valley, spending his final three decades at Rock Hill in Cortlandt Manor, New York.

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Brooklyn, New York

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