Aaron Copland Biography

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Aaron Copland Quotes

 

•The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.' .

• Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

• So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

• Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

• A melody is not merely something you can hum.

• If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

• You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

• To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

• There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

• Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes

• I'm really glad I came. I feel a lot more connected now.

• You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down ... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

• I heard these guys play at St. George earlier this year, and they mentioned they do educational programs

• Here were the tart herbs of plain American speech, the pasture, without the flowers of elocution... the clean rhythms... the irony and the homespun tenderness that, in a fine perforation, reached a sustained exaltation.

• When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

• Don't ever let him near a microphone.

 

 

Aaron Copland Selected Works

 

1920 - Scherzo Humoristique: The Cat and the Mouse
1922 - Four Motets
1922 - Passacaglia
1924 - Symphony for Organ and Orchestra
1925 - Music for the Theater
1925 - Dance Symphony
1926 - Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
1927-1929 - Symphonic Ode
1930 - Piano Variations
1925-1932 - Grohg
1932-1935 - Statements for orchestra
1936 - The Second Hurricane, play-opera for high school performance
1936 - El Salón México
1938 - Billy the Kid
1940 - Quiet City
1940 - Our Town
1939-1941 - Piano Sonata
1941 - An Outdoor Overture
1942 - Fanfare for the Common Man
1942 - Lincoln Portrait
1942 - Rodeo
1942 - Danzon Cubano
1942 - Music for the Movies
1943 - Sonata for violin and piano
1943 - Appalachian Spring
1944-1946 - Third Symphony
1947 - In the Beginning
1948 - The Red Pony
1947-1948 - Clarinet Concerto
1950 - Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson
1950 - Piano Quartet
1952 - Old American Songs
1954 - The Tender Land
1955 - Canticle of Freedom
1957 - Orchestral Variations
1957 - Piano Fantasy
1962 - Dance Panels
1962 - Connotations
1962 - Down A Country Lane
1964 - Music for a Great City
1964 - Emblems, for wind band
1967 - Inscape
1971 - Duo for flute and piano
1972 - Three Latin American Sketches

 

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