Music Weblog

Aaron Copland [1900–1990] was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.  His older sister introduced him to the piano during his pre-teen years, and he eventually began formal music lessons at the age of 16.  After his attention turned more toward composing than performing, Copland’s parents were convinced to help him further those studies by engaging Rubin Goldmark—an American composer known primarily for his highly nationalistic musical style—as his teacher.  Copland wrote a piano sonata as his Goldmark “graduation piece” and then elected to try his luck in Paris instead of entering college, as his parents had wished.

Copland arrived in Paris during a culturally rich period, and not just musically.  Among his contemporaries were writers Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Sinclair Lewis, plus painters Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall, and French intellectuals Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre.  Upon settling there in 1920, Copland enrolled in a summer school for American music students, at Fontainebleau, but he later changed instructors and began studying with the famous Nadia Boulanger.  Through her, Copland was introduced to conductor Serge Koussevitsky, who engaged the young American to compose something for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where the Russian émigré was music director.  That piece turned out to be his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra [1925], the composition that helped launch Copland’s career back in the States.  He was quite enamored of jazz and infused its rhythms and harmonies in two follow-up compositions, Music for the Theater [1925] and Piano Concerto [1926].

Returning home in the mid-1920s, Copland managed to survive thanks primarily to two separate Guggenheim fellowships, as well as his lectures and music instruction.  His extensive foreign travels throughout the balance of the decade and well into the 1930s brought him into contact with a number of folk music idioms.  A brief stay “south of the border” inspired him to compose El Salón México [1935].  His greatest decade, however, was the 1940s, a period where he wrote his two incredibly popular ballets—Rodeo [1942] and Appalachian Spring [1944]—in addition to Fanfare for the Common Man and A Lincoln Portrait [both 1942], as well as the final of his three symphonies.

Copland has often been called the quintessential American composer, generally in recognition of his use of familiar folk themes—a Shaker hymn in Appalachian Spring, or decidedly Old West-style music in his ballet Billy the Kid [1938]—but also thanks to the film scores he wrote.  These include Of Mice and Men [1939], The North Star [1943] (both of which earned him Academy Award nominations), plus The Red Pony [1948], and The Heiress [1949], which finally gave him his Oscar.  Copland composed one opera, The Tender Land [1954], which relates a Depression-era story about a struggling midwestern family.

Bass Samuel Ramey sings “Shall We Gather by the River” by Aaron Copland (Warren Jones, pianist) [followed by a version scored by Charles Ives]:

John Corigliano [b.1938], the son of two noted musicians—his mother was a pianist, while his father was concertmaster (first-chair violinist) with the New York Philharmonic—is an American composer known primarily for his symphonic works.  Early in his career, he helped produce the Carnegie Hall series known as Young People’s Concerts that were the brainchild of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein.

Corigliano’s first achievement as a composer came in 1964, when he won the Spoleto [Italy] Festival’s chamber music competition—at the age of 26—for his Sonata for Violin and Piano.  He has gone on to write a number of concertos (eight to date), the most recent of which is Conjurer [2008] for string orchestra plus percussion.  Among his more unusual works is Vocalise [2000], a single-movement concerto that features a solo soprano singing a “wordless libretto” consisting simply of vocal sounds.

Three symphonies form the bulwark of John Corigliano’s compositional repertoire.  His Symphony No. 1 [1991] expresses his grief and angst over the loss of many of his colleagues to AIDS over the preceding decade.  Symphony No. 2 [2001] expands on the surrealistic themes he developed as part of an earlier string quartet.  Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus [2004] has been described alternatively as “extravagant,” “ambitious,” and “grandly barbarous.”  This piece is hardly one’s everyday symphony, as it is scored for a wind orchestra plus multiple smaller wind ensembles.

The Ghosts of Versailles is Corigliano’s sole opera.  Commissioned in 1991 by New York’s Metropolitan Opera— its first commission in 30-plus years, and in honor of the company’s one hundredth anniversary—the libretto by William Hoffman (loosely based on a play by the 18^th century French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais) is a satirization of comic operas in general.  It mashes together two incongruent story lines, a continuation of the “Figaro” history as previously explored by Mozart and Rossini, plus social commentary by the victims of “The Terrors” of the French Revolution, such as Marie Antoinette.

Today, Corigliano fulfills two pedagogic roles.  He is a professor of music at the City College of New York’s Lehman College (where a scholarship in his name has been established) and also a member of the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music.  Among his lifetime achievements are a Pulitzer Prize, three Grammy Awards and an Academy Award, the latter for the original musical score to the 1999 feature film, The Red Violin.

Northwestern University’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble performs the first part of Corigliano’s Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus:

Philip Glass [b. 1937] is an American composer whose voluminous output in multiple genres has made him one of the most prolific classical composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  A native of Baltimore, Glass’s early studies took place at Juilliard and the University of Chicago.  He also spent time in Aspen as a student of the French modernist composer, Darius Milhaud.

Glass was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1964 and used those funds to finance two years of study in Paris.  His composition teacher was the legendary Nadia Boulanger, but Glass admits to being influenced more by the New Wave movement in art, film and theatre that was sweeping out the older, more staid generation in those fields.  Prior to returning to the States in 1967, Glass spent time in northern India with sitarist Ravi Shankar—the pair had met in Paris and composed a film score together—where he identified strongly with the Tibetan exiles living there, as well as with their Buddhist religion.  This spiritualism would eventually become one of the most significant influences on his music.

He formed the Philip Glass Ensemble upon his return to New York City, a collection of seven keyboard and woodwind musicians who served as the ideal vehicle for disseminating his early compositions.  At this point considered a post-modernist, Glass began to solidify his sound as one of “repetitive structures,” a musical format that has continued to evolve throughout his career.  Several critical analyses have compared his compositions to “a wall of sound” and “a total immersion in musical notes.”

In 1976, Glass premiered his first major work.  His opera Einstein on the Beach opened in France at the Avignon Festival that summer, followed by a brief run at the Metropolitan Opera in November.  This was to be the first of his “portrait trilogy,” followed by Satyagraha (a biographical sketch of Mohandas Gandhi) in 1979 and Akhnaten (a story of the life of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV) in 1983.  The Gandhi opera was composed to a libretto entirely in Sanskrit—the Metropolitan Opera has revived it for its 2011–12 season—while Amenhotep’s story is sung in Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian and Ancient Egyptian.

His orchestral works include two violin concertos as well as concertos for cello, piano, and even one for two tympanis plus orchestra.  Glass weaves a number of outside musical influences into his music; for example, his Piano Concerto No. 2 [2004] is subtitled “After Lewis and Clark” and features a Native American flute as one of the prominent solo instruments.  He is also highly regarded as a composer of film scores, including Koyaanisqatsi [1982], a movie with no dialogue or narration that is simply a series of images from across the United States set against a typical wall-of-sound Glass score.  His more conventional film work has included compositions for several documentaries—The Thin Blue Line (about a man convicted for a crime he did not commit), Kundun (a biography of the Dalai Lama), and The Fog of War (an extended interview with former defense secretary Robert McNamara about the Vietnam War)—as well as feature films such as The Illusionist, The Truman Show, and No Reservations.

The composer performs the opening (piano) movement to his 1982 composition “Glassworks”:

George Gershwin [1898–1937] is one of the few American composers whose renown in popular and show music was matched by similar acclaim in the classics.  Despite a career cut regrettably short—he died of a brain tumor a few months shy of his 38th birthday—Gershwin is known for having created some of the most memorable orchestral and piano works of the 20th century.  He was perhaps the first (and certainly the most successful) classical composer to infuse his creations with the unique rhythms and tonality of jazz.

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Gershwin was born in Brooklyn as Jacob Gershowitz.  He took up the piano at age ten and studied the classics with several New York instructors.  He left school at 15 to play the piano for a local music publisher, taking the job of a “song plugger,” i.e., someone who demonstrates newly published songs so as to convince customers to buy the sheet music.  Surrounded by the talented musicians who populated Tin Pan Alley, Gershwin sold his first song two years later for the grand sum of five dollars.  In 1919, he composed his first national hit tune, “Swanee,” which not long thereafter became a huge hit for singer Al Jolson, the vaudeville actor who starred in America’s first talking picture.  After teaming up with his older brother, Ira, the pair embarked on creating a string of hit musicals from 1924 through 1931—Ira penned the lyrics to George’s music—that produced hit show after hit show.  Some of these songs remain incredibly popular today, including “Someone to Watch Over Me” [Oh, Kay!, 1926], “’S Wonderful” [Funny Face, 1927], and “I Got Rhythm” [Girl Crazy, 1930], plus dozens of others.

Gershwin wrote his first piece of classical music in 1924.  Rhapsody in Blue, a work for piano and orchestra, is generally considered to be his most popular composition, although Ferde Grofé—primarily known for his film scores—did the actual orchestration.  The young composer then traveled to Paris to learn composition, but several prominent teachers—Nadia Boulanger among them —declined to take him on as a student, allegedly because they feared such formalized instruction would negatively affect the jazz influences that made his classical music unique.  Despite the rejection, in 1928 Gershwin wrote An American in Paris, an orchestral piece that proved nearly as popular as his first.  A year earlier he had written Concerto in F for piano and orchestra, which shows strong influences of Maurice Ravel in the orchestration, although the piece is solidly jazz-oriented as well.

After returning to the States to team up once again with brother Ira for a string of Broadway hits, George embarked on his most ambitious classical project.  The opera Porgy and Bess was based on a novel by author DuBose Heyward, who also penned the libretto—although Ira Gershwin contributed some of the song lyrics.  The action takes place in an all-black neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1920s.  George called it “an American folk opera.”  Featuring an all African-American cast, each of whom was a classically trained singer, it premiered in 1935 at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.  Debate raged for decades as to whether or not Porgy and Bess deserved to be called an opera—critics generally considered it more of a Broadway musical—until Houston Grand Opera included it as part of its 1976 season.  In 1985, it enjoyed its debut on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  Considered a fusion of jazz and African-American music—including spirituals—Porgy and Bess possesses many of the characteristics of grand opera, including recitative and the use of leitmotifs.

Soprano Kathleen Battle sings “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, accompanied by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra [1994]: