Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland invented the sound Americans think of as American, and did it deliberately, having decided in the 1930s that modern music had lost its audience. He was born in Brooklyn to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants above the family store, studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and came back writing spiky jazz-inflected modernism that critics admired and nobody hummed. The turn came around 1936: open fifths, wide spacing, folk and hymn tunes, and a deliberate plainness - El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid, Rodeo for Agnes de Mille in 1942, Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham in 1944, and the Fanfare for the Common Man, written for an orchestra that wanted wartime curtain-raisers. Appalachian Spring won the Pulitzer. He also wrote film scores, books explaining music to general readers that stayed in print for decades, and taught at Tanglewood, where a generation of American composers passed through him. He was homosexual and lived openly enough that his circle knew, and he was a left-winger who was called before Joseph McCarthy in 1953 and had Lincoln Portrait pulled from the inaugural concert. He conducted widely in his later years and stopped composing around 1970, saying the ideas had stopped arriving. Fanfare for the Common Man has been used at Olympic ceremonies, in rock records and at state funerals, and Copland took the title from a speech by the vice-president Henry Wallace. What to Listen for in Music has never been out of print since 1939. He shared a long relationship with the photographer Victor Kraft. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

• Lived: 1900 CE – 1990 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist