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What schools did Aaron Copland attend?
Grove's Dictionary of Music says that he graduated from the Boys' High School, Brooklyn, New York, in 1918. Other than that they don't mention formal schooling. Almost… all of his musical training was under private teachers and through practical experience. In his youth he studied piano with his mother, then Leopold Wolfsohn, Victor Wittgenstein, and Clarence Adler. For a couple of years following high school he studied composition with Rubin Goldmark (Goldmark taught at Juilliard, but Juilliard does not claim Copland as an alumnus, so it must have been a private arrangement). At age 20 Copland flew the coop for Paris, where the neoclassical compositions of Stravinsky and the French circle of Milhaud, Poulenc, Honegger et al. were opening up a new direction for American composers, previously so dominated by German Romanticism. Copland had the further good fortune to study with Nadia Boulanger of the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. Boulanger had a circle of students that reads like a Who's Who of early 20th-century American composers, including Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson. She also encouraged Copland to spend time in Vienna and Berlin as well, where he heard such diverse composers as Hindemith and Webern. His education as a composer seems to follow the classic pattern: he needed the formal instruction in the basics, but beyond that his development depended most on one-on-one relationships with excellent teachers, and on listening to other composers and studying their works on his own. (MORE)
