Aaron Copland

Just about everywhere in the U.S. Aaron Copland is one of America's most popular classical composers, judging by the continued popularity of his music.

His Fanfare for the Common Man has been played at sporting events and in sports broadcasting for decades (especially in the 1970s Emerson, Lake & Palmer art-rock version), and figures prominently at political events on both sides of the aisle (Obama's 2009 Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Capitol mall). It was also featured in the soundtrack of Saving Private Ryan. The final variation on the Shaker hymn tune "Simple gifts," from Appalachian Spring, seems to be especially emblematic of U.S. national pride, and used to be played behind a visual of a waving U.S. flag as the sign-off for some TV stations.

Copland's music has also been used in commercials: the "Hoedown" section of his Rodeo is archetypical Western/cowboy music, used in the background of the 1990s ad campaign, "Beef. It's what's for dinner," and the cut from Appalachian Spring mentioned previously accompanied the 1996 TV ad campaign introducing Oldsmobile's Aurora, which was heralded as the return of the unabashedly big American car.

Copland himself was known to branch out into non-traditional venues for classical music. He wrote on commission for radio orchestras during the live-studio era, and was a film composer as well. His scores for Our Town (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1940) are particularly notable, and he won an Oscar for his score of The Heiress (1949). Two of his popular ballets, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, were even adapted for TV on the 1952-53 Omnibus program.

Finally, you might also consider the impact of Copland on other composers. His "Western" sound in Billy the Kid and Rodeo turns up in classic Western-movie scores such as The Magnificent Seven and TV themes such as The Big Valley. The "wide open spaces" sound of Fanfare for the Common Man can be heard in the trumpet fanfare intros of such space-themed fare as the original Star Trek series, Superman (1978), and especially Apollo 13, which also references the "national pride" trope that grew out of Appalachian Spring.

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.