Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn on 14 November 1900 to a family of Russian-Jewish émigrés. He began playing piano with his sister at the age of eleven, continuing to perfect his playing with Ludwig Wolfsohn. In 1918, he graduated from the Boys’ High School in Brooklyn, but did not go on to pursue university-level studies. From 1917 to 1921, he studied harmony and counterpoint privately with Rubin Goldmark and piano with Victor Wittgenstein (1917-1919), and then with Clarence Adler (1919-1921). From 1921 to 1924, he travelled to France, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger (harmony, composition) at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and then in Paris. He also studied piano with Ricardo Viñes and conducting with Albert Wolff (1921). Returning to the United States, he embarked on a brilliant career as a pianist, composer, orchestra conductor, and teacher.

In 1925, his Symphony for organ and orchestra (1924) premiered in a performance with Walter Damrosch and Nadia Boulanger as piano soloist. He also composed Music for the Theater and wrote his first reviews for Modern Music at this time (he would go on to be a regular contributor to the magazine between 1936 and 1939). In 1927, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting (who would go on to become a major figure in Copland’s career), Copland premiered Concerto for piano (1926), whose jazz inspirations were considered to be quite scandalous. At this time, he also began a lecture series at the New School for Social Research in New York, which continued until 1938. The lectures were ultimately published in two volumes titled What to Listen for in Music (1939, revised in 1957) and Our New Music (1941, revised and reissued in 1968 with the title The New Music: 1900-1960).

In 1928, along with Roger Sessions, Copland founded the Copland-Sessions Concerts (1928-1931) to promote modern American music. That same year, he joined another major formation of the musical avant-garde, the League of Composers, remaining a member until 1954 and serving as its director from 1948 to 1951. Copland continued to play a key role in American musical institutions and organizations, notably as director of the Yaddo Festival of American Music (1932-1933), a member of the American Composers Alliance (1939-1945), and a co-founder of the American Music Center in 1939.

In 1930, he composed Variations for piano (orchestrated in 1957), which rapidly became one of the masterpieces of the American piano repertoire. In 1932, he traveled to Mexico, where Carlos Chávez conducted the first concert entirely dedicated to Copland’s compositions. The folk music of Mexico – a country he visited frequently – inspired El Salón México (1932-1936). Copland’s socialist convictions grew stronger during the Great Depression, inspiring him to support the Composer’s Collective, the Young Composers Group, and the Group Theater, all of which had ties to the Communist Party. In 1935, he gave his first courses at Harvard University, where he would teach until 1944. He returned to Harvard in 1951 to hold the prestigious one-year post of Norton Professor of Poetics. His Norton Lectures were published the following year in a book titled Music and Imagination.

In 1937, Copland wrote his first opera, The Second Hurricane. The following year, he composed Billy the Kid for Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, which brought him wide recognition. That year was also the one in which he met Leonard Bernstein, with whom he would develop a deep friendship and who would play a crucial role in the world renown of Copland’s music. In 1939, he composed his first film score, The City (O. Sterlin) and (L. Milestone); twenty years later, he won an Oscar for best film score for The Heiress (W. Wyler).

From 1940 to 1967, Copland directed the music department of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, where he also taught composition. The 1940s was the most productive decade of his career. He became the United States’ most beloved composer of classical music. His compositions from this period include wildly popular ballets such as Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian spring (which won the 1944 Pulitzer prize), in addition to the orchestral works A Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), whose patriotic sound reflect his participation in “the war effort,” as well as Symphony n° 3 (1944-1946), In the Beginning (1947), his most ambitious choral work, and Concerto for clarinet (1947-1948), commissioned by Benny Goodman.

In 1949, he returned to Europe after a 12-year absence and grew interested in the young generation of avant-garde composers working there, in particular Pierre Boulez, the leader of the serialist movement. He used serial composition techniques in Piano Quartet (1950) and in Piano Fantasy (1952-1957). In this same period he also composed Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950) for voice and piano, and two sets of folk song arrangements called Old American Songs in 1950 and 1952.

In 1951, he received a Fulbright fellowship for a residency at the American Academy in Rome, and travelled to Israel for the first time. In Jerusalem, he gave a lecture on Jewish composers in which he affirmed his conviction that a composer could hold a strong national identity while remaining deeply Jewish. In 1952, he began composing his opera The Tender Land, which premiered at the New York City Opera in 1954. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, he was briefly blacklisted and summoned to testify in a closed hearing before Senators Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn in 1953 about his activities and affiliations. The investigations ended in 1955. In 1958, he conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time. As his career as a conductor, which included multiple international tours, grew more intensive, his composing slowed significantly. He composed two serialist pieces for orchestra, Connotations, in 1962, for the inaugural concert at the new Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall in New York and Inscape, in 1967, for the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

By the early 1970s, Copland had stopped composing almost entirely, devoting himself to his conducting, which he continued until 1983. Afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease, his health began deteriorating, and he died on 2 December 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York, of respiratory failure.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Copland toured the world, particularly Europe and South America, and received numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964) and a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986).