Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900. At age 21, after nine years studying piano and music composition, he received a scholarship to study in Paris. While in France, Copland began writing music for ballets and symphonies. These traditional formats provided Copland and other classically trained musicians ready arenas for their work. But Copland broke with custom when he incorporated folk styles into his compositions. He created sounds that listeners described as unlike anything that had been heard before in a concert hall. For example, in 1935, while traveling in Mexico, Copland became fascinated with mariachi music. His symphony, El Salon Mexico, which he hoped would capture the spirit of the country and the people of Mexico, combined seven different mariachi folk songs into a full orchestra piece. Copland used the same method of mixing musical styles to capture his sense of the American West in his famous ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo. Copland described the beginning of Billy the Kid in his “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet.” “The first scene,” he wrote, “is a street in a frontier town. Familiar figures amble by. Cowboys saunter into town, some on horseback, others with their lassoes. Some Mexican women do a Jarabe which is interrupted by a fight between two drunks.”

Copland later wrote the musical scores for several Hollywood films, including the screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (1949), a coming-of-age story set on a California ranch. Many other musicians adopted Copland’s style in their own musical scores for film. Today this style of music is often recognized as classic film music due to its association with big screen images of cowboys riding through the sagebrush and over red rock desert.

Copland died in 1990. In his lifetime, he received a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and a Congressional Medal for patriotism. Following his death, one writer described Copland in a way that would have made the public-spirited composer proud: “Only in America could the son of the president of a synagogue go to Europe to learn to write a ballet about Billy the Kid.”

1. Music scholar Howard Pollack has described Billy the Kid as “ a classic in portraying the mythic West” that Copland himself described as full of “familiar figures” like cowboys and outlaws. Look through the newspaper and see if you can find any images or stories that remind you of Copland’s image of the Old West. If you were to write a musical about the West today, what would an opening street scene look like?

2. Like Copland, Henry McClarty (Billy the Kid) was born in New York City before moving west as a child with his parents, yet he is one of the most famous ‘westerners’ of all time. What does it take to be western? How is being western different than being non-western? Can an “outsider” to the region like Copland come to a true and accurate understanding of the qualities that characterize the West?

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