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
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.
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."
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.
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.
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.
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
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.
If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
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.
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.
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.