Aaron Copland

Brooklyn-born, Copland went to Paris in 1921 and studied with Nadia Boulanger — among the first American composers to do so — then came home and set about making a concert language out of hymn tune, jazz syncopation and cowboy song. The ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring fixed that idiom in the public ear; Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait carried it into wartime civic life. Appalachian Spring brought him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and the score for The Heiress an Academy Award. The Piano Quartet of 1950 and Connotations, written for the opening of Philharmonic Hall in New York, take up serial technique. He worked throughout as critic, teacher, pianist and conductor, and used every one of those platforms to argue the case for younger Americans. He died in 1990. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in France from 1921 to 1924, first at Fontainebleau and then in Paris. Born in New York on 14 November 1900 and raised in Brooklyn, he owed his lessons to a mother who played the piano rather than to a father indifferent to music, and settled on composing after hearing Ignacy Jan Paderewski in 1915. The Third Symphony, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony, was begun in 1944 and took nearly two years; the opera The Tender Land followed in 1954 and the Piano Fantasy in 1957. He largely stopped composing in the 1970s but went on lecturing and conducting into the mid-1980s, and died on 2 December 1990.