This winter (January 26 to February 7) New York City Ballet premieres Copland Dance Episodes, a new ballet to the music of Aaron Copland, the dean of American composers, by Justin Peck, the Company鈥檚 Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor. Featuring sets by acclaimed painter and sculptor Jeffrey Gibson, lighting by Peck鈥檚 frequent collaborator Brandon Stirling Baker, and costumes by former NYCB dancer Ellen Warren, the ballet will be Peck鈥檚 first evening-length work.
What would American music be without Aaron Copland?
His music is played everywhere鈥攁t heartfelt memorials, inspiring commemorations, and raucous ball games. He wrote symphonies, ballets, operas, chamber music, songs, film scores. Copland鈥檚 life spanned nearly the entire twentieth century, from 1900 to 1990, and his art bridged the colloquial and the academic, the utterly specific and the widely enduring. How central is Copland? Spike Lee paired Copland鈥檚 music with songs by Public Enemy in his film He Got Game. Copland鈥檚 music鈥攕pacious, open, sweeping, propulsive鈥攅vokes American landscapes, democratic vistas, and changed how we think about this country.
Copland鈥檚 life story is a quintessential American one: how the child of immigrants (in his case, of Lithuanian origin), who grew up above a store in Brooklyn, creates artworks that come to define this country. And though Copland studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, visited Mexico to work with composer Carlos Chavez, and was fascinated by the vanguard music of European serial and twelve-tone composers, he remained a lifelong New Yorker. There鈥檚 a poetic irony here in that a guy who wrote music that is uniquely American spent most of his adult life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Copland lived for many years in the Empire Hotel, which鈥攖hough now much gussied up鈥攊s still right across the street from NYCB鈥檚 home at Lincoln Center. Copland spent a lot of time at his place upstate starting around 1960, before the then-New York State Theater opened. But you can鈥檛 help wondering if he and NYCB co-founder George Balanchine (another longtime Upper West Sider) ran into each other in the neighborhood, maybe in the coffee shop of the Empire Hotel, or at the pizza joint on Amsterdam Avenue that Balanchine liked. It鈥檚 a heady thought: two supremely sophisticated, completely unpretentious artists, schmoozing over a cup of joe.
Copland wrote all kinds of music for all kinds of settings, but he may be most closely associated with dance, and no wonder. Many of his works鈥攅ven the ones not written for ballet鈥攈ave an ineffable dansant quality. They make you want to move. And it took ballet to kick-start Copland鈥檚 career. In the 1930s, Copland had been on the new-music scene for a while, making the inevitable pilgrimage to study in Europe, forging connections, winning commissions from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and other groups, when Lincoln Kirstein invited him to compose a new ballet for choreographer Eugene Loring. Yes, that Lincoln Kirstein鈥攖he impresario who co-founded New York City Ballet with Balanchine. Kirstein and others had launched Ballet Caravan, one of New York City Ballet鈥檚 predecessor companies, to create ballets with American themes. Billy the Kid (1936) was an immediate hit. The success of that ballet and the lively, one-movement orchestral work El Sal贸n M茅xico (1937) put Copland on the map.
Though today we tend to know Copland for a certain kind of music鈥攖he aspirational Fanfare for the Common Man, the vibrant dance scores for Rodeo and Appalachian Spring鈥攈is range was large, he contained multitudes. He admired the insights and improvisation of jazz, experimented with serial methods, stayed up to date with musical and cultural trends. He championed new music by emerging composers, mentored generations of young musicians, talked about music to widely divergent audiences in academia and on television. And he kept experimenting: Copland鈥檚 later works embraced austere atonal methods.
For many of his works, Copland built on selections of folk tunes, giving them a new harmonic underpinning and context, and, not incidentally, advocating for the quality and value of vernacular American art. Over time, music that was written for specific contexts in the middle of the twentieth century has come to represent America鈥攐r how America would like to see itself. As familiar as Copland鈥檚 music might be, people keep discovering new riches, new mysteries in its open, spacious sonorities.
Robert Sandla is the editor in chief of Symphony, the magazine of the League of American Orchestras, and writes frequently on the arts.
