VOICE ONE:
I'm Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Barbara Klein with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Aaron Copland, one of America’s best modern music composers.
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VOICE ONE:
Aaron Copland wrote many kinds of music. He wrote music for the orchestra, piano, and voice. He wrote music for plays, movies and dance. Copland also was a conductor, pianist, speaker, teacher and author.
Aaron Copland
Music critics say Copland taught Americans about themselves through his music. He used parts of many old traditional American folk songs in his work. He was influenced to do this after studying music in France. He said that composers there had a very French way of writing music. He said Americans had nothing like that in this country. So he decided to compose music that was truly American.
VOICE TWO:
Aaron Copland was born in nineteen hundred in Brooklyn, New York. He was the youngest of five children. His parents had come to the United States from eastern Europe. They owned a store in Brooklyn. Aaron began playing the piano when he was a young child. He wrote his first song for his mother when he was eight years old. His dreams of becoming a composer began when he was young. When he was sixteen, he urged his parents to let him study composing with Rubin Goldmark. Goldmark had taught the composer George Gershwin.
VOICE ONE:
When he was in his early twenties, Copland went to Paris where he studied music with Nadia Boulanger. She was one of the most important music teachers of the time. He returned to New York in nineteen twenty-four.
The famous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, learned about Copland's music. Koussevitzky led the orchestra for the first performance of Copland's early work, "Music for the Theater," in nineteen twenty-five. Koussevitzky also conducted Copland's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra" in nineteen twenty-seven. This work was unusual because Copland used ideas from jazz music in his concerto.
VOICE TWO:
Copland later wrote the music for two ballets about the American West. One was about the life of a famous gunfighter called Billy the Kid. Copland used music from American cowboy songs in this work. This piece from "Billy the Kid: Ballet Suite" is called "Street in a Frontier Town. "
