Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Aaron Coplandwas an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, in his later years he was often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers" and is best known to the public for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth14 November 1900
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Aaron Copland quotes about
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.
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.
For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it--even of my own music--with the same nuances forever.
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.
The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.
I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
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.
Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"
If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.