Aaron Copland helped hundreds of young composers

Person: Aaron Copland
Lived: 1900–1990
Field: Music
From: American

The story

Aaron Copland had himself been shaped by great teaching. In Brooklyn he studied harmony and composition with Rubin Goldmark from 1917 to 1921, and in Paris he spent three years with Nadia Boulanger, whose wide-ranging approach and confidence in his talent he later described as crucial to his development. When he settled in New York in the mid-1920s, determined to make his living as a composer, he set out to pass on that kind of encouragement.

Over his long career he met and helped hundreds of young composers, who were drawn to him by his constant interest in what was new. Very little of this help came through a formal classroom. His biographer Howard Pollack notes that only a small number of composers actually studied with him, and then only briefly; most received intermittent advice, introductions and practical aid. His teaching posts were limited to many summers at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, the summer academy linked to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, about a decade of teaching and curating concerts at The New School in New York, and a few semesters at Harvard and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

What made his guidance valuable was its focus. Copland steered younger composers towards expressive content rather than purely technical display, and towards a voice of their own. The composer William Schuman recalled that Copland tried to understand what each writer was aiming for instead of turning them into copies of himself, asking questions that led them to question their own choices, while still being ready to criticise firmly when needed.

He also held together his own generation. Copland, Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and Walter Piston formed a circle of mutual support and rivalry that he kept united until after the Second World War. Later, as a busy conductor, he gave programme space to twentieth-century music and lesser-known composers, and he kept up contact with musicians abroad, including a decade-long correspondence with the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

This generosity is why his peers and critics called him the Dean of American Music. Pollack judged that Copland exerted enormous influence on multitudes of contemporaries and successors, and the composer Ned Rorem credited him with giving American music a lean, direct language of its own. Even after his death the support continued, because his bequest created the Aaron Copland Fund, which still helps ensembles perform new American music, extending the help he once gave in person.