Aaron Copland

Copland was born in Brooklyn and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris for three years. His career has three phases: modernist, jazz-influenced works in the 1920s; from the mid-1930s an accessible style drawing on folk material, as with the cowboy songs in Billy the Kid and the Mexican tunes in El Salón México; and from the late 1940s twelve-tone techniques, used as a source of melody and harmony. His harmony is open and slowly changing, often heard as a picture of the American landscape.

Appalachian Spring began as a ballet for Martha Graham, commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and composed in 1943 to 1944. It was first played in October 1944 at the Library of Congress by 13 instruments, and it won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize. The 1945 orchestral suite leaves out the three conflict episodes. The Interlude has variations on the Shaker tune "Simple Gifts". Fanfare for the Common Man was requested by Eugene Goossens for the Cincinnati Symphony and first played on 12 March 1943. It uses only brass and percussion: four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum and tam-tam.

The Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by the jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman in 1947 and written between 1947 and 1949. Its two movements run together, joined by a clarinet cadenza. The first is slow and lyrical in A-B-A form, and the second is a playful free rondo with Latin American and jazz influences. The accompaniment is strings, harp and piano.