His singer-pianist mother prescribed a healthy diet of opera, ballet and orchestral concerts in addition to piano and violin lessons, but it was not until he saw the great Polish pianist-composer Paderewski give a sensational recital in that he fixed his sights on becoming a composer.
Two years later he began lessons with Rubin Goldmark, who ensured that Copland was brought up to speed with the music of the great Romantic masters. However, Copland was already hankering after something more stylistically adventurous, as witness the Debussyian heartbeat of his first published composition, The Cat And The Mouse for solo piano. Now there was simply no holding him back. Between and Copland bathed in the artistic hot-spring that was post-war Paris, under the intellectually bracing guidance of Nadia Boulanger.
Having absorbed everything from Ravel and Satie to Proust and Picasso, Copland returned home determined to put the United States on the musical map once and for all. At first things did not go at all well. The decade that followed saw the production of the scores that would spread Copland's fame throughout the world.
The following year Copland won the Pulitzer Prize for the piece. Copland was a renowned composer of film scores as well, working on Of Mice and Men , Our Town and The North Star —receiving Academy Award nominations for all three projects. He eventually won an Oscar for The Heiress And more than a decade later, Copland composed a stark, unsettling score for the controversial Something Wild In his later compositions, Copland made use of a European derived tonal system.
By the s, he had ceased crafting new works, focusing on teaching and conducting. American composer, conductor and author. Copland helped define a twentieth-century American sound. His influence on his contemporaries and students has been tremendous. Aaron Copland seems at first to be an odd person to create a musical style that combined the myths of the American West and the styles of Latin American music into a populist music that spoke to a large segment of American society.
Copland was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York, and found his musical voice in the international, avant-garde atmosphere of Paris in the s. In New York, he was part of a musical elite, championing the cause of modern music. At the same time, he had ties to the political and social left with its reformist agenda.
Yet it could be argued that all of these elements were important ingredients, not just in the fabric of America in the s and s, but in the creation of a distinctly American aesthetic. During the late s Copland felt a need to compose works of greater emotional substance than his utilitarian scores of the late s and early s. In his personal style, Copland began to make use of twelve-tone rows in several compositions. He incorporated serial techniques in some of his later works, including his Piano Quartet , Piano Fantasy , Connotations for orchestra and Inscape for orchestra He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.
For Copland, the biggest impact came, not from the music of the people dancing, but from the spirit of the environment. Copland said that he could literally feel the essence of the Mexican people in the dance hall. This prompted him to write a piece celebrating the spirit of Mexico using Mexican Themes. Copland derived freely from two collections of Mexican folk tunes, changing pitches and varying rhythms.
The use of a folk tune with variations set in a symphonic context started a pattern he repeated in many of his most successful works right on through the s.
Copland achieved his first major success in ballet music with his groundbreaking score Billy the Kid , based on a Walter Noble Burns novel, with choreography by Eugene Loring.
0コメント