Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is best known and loved for the hugely popular compositions he wrote from 1936-49, such as Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo. He was one of the first to capture the sense of American life in sound. Together with Gershwin, Ives and Bernstein, he created music that mirrored the world in which he lived. This documentary looks at how a sassy New Yorker of Russian-Jewish background came to write the infectious and accessible music that established a distinctive American idiom. The program surveys his life and career. Both archive film and specially-shot footage recall his childhood in Brooklyn; his formative trip to Paris 1921-24, where he continued his music studies with Nadia Boulanger, absorbed the city's amazing avant-garde cultural milieu and met Stravinsky, a lasting influence on his work; and his return to the United States with an energetic determination to create a distinctly American sound, one that would express the "pep and zip", the optimism and directness of life in the New World, with its multi-racial mix. His life in New York as an obscure young composer is evoked, a time when he lived very simply and worked with great discipline, soaking up the jazz and ragtime that was all the rage and relishing being where the action was, even if he rarely participated in what was going on. And, finally, it arrives at his years of success, which brought him a degree of popularity seldom achieved by a contemporary classical composer.