The work, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, was premiered in January 1925 with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch with Boulanger as the organ soloist. Copland returned to New York in 1924 and began work on a commission, obtained with the help of Boulanger. Under her tutelage he published his first work, a piano piece called The Cat and the Mouse. Copland only intended to stay in Paris for a year instead, he ended up spending three years studying with Boulanger. While there, he met Nadia Boulanger who would become his teacher. After graduation from Boys High School, Copland decide to forgo college and move to Paris.Ĭopland began his studies at the Summer School of Music for American Students at Fontainebleau.

Goldmark’s lessons gave Copland a good foundation, but he was more conservative and did not introduce Copland to more modern composers, whom he discovered on his own. He began piano lessons with a neighborhood teacher, Leopold Wolfsohn, at fourteen and began studying composition and theory with Rubin Goldmark at sixteen. Copland wrote his first songs at age eight-and-a-half and began sketches for an opera, Zenatello, at eleven.

His older sister Laurine was his first piano teacher and often brought opera scores home for him to study. Copland’s mother was an amateur singer and pianist who made sure that all her children had some musical education. His father owned a neighborhood shop in which all the children helped and the family lived above. He was lovingly referred to as the “Dean of American Music.”Ĭopland was born in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. as well as to his significant compositional legacy, Copland was also a conductor, author, educator, and mentor, who helped introduce many Americans to the world of classical music and inspired generations of American composers. Through the use of folk song, hymns, and jazz, he brought facets of American life into classical forms and styles. His works evoke the wide, open spaces of the American West, or transport us to a celebration in the hills of Appalachia. Aaron Copland’s music is quintessentially American.

Aaron copland compositions