Birthday: Aaron Copland preferred doing his own writing: "If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong."

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Composer, author, conductor

Recipient, The Guggenheim Fellowship (1925, 1926)

Academy Award nominee for best film score (Our Town, Of Mice and Men, 1939)

Recipient, The Pulitzer Prize for Music (Appalachian Spring, 1945)

Academy Award winner for best film score (The Heiress, 1949)

Recipient, The Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)

Recipient, The National Medal of Arts (1986)

Recipient, Congressional Gold Medal (1987)

Son of a New York family of Lithuanian Jews, Copland wrote his first musical composition at 11, and was mostly self-taught until he persuaded his parents- instead of sending him to college- to let him go to Paris. He spent four years there, mostly under the tutelage of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, whose eclectic style and rigorous methods he loved.

Returning to America in 1921, Copland decided to make his way as a composer. He set up in a cheap apartment near Carnegie Hall- he lived there nearly thirty years- and lived frugally. While his music, written in the latest modernist style, won critical favor, Copland was a practical man. He fell in with the artistic circle of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who argued the arts should express American ideas; Copland’s compositions evolved into just that, along with friends Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Roy Harris and Howard Hansen. Copland emerged from the pack, moving into composing for theater and radio, then film, then ballet. Billy the Kid (1939) and Rodeo (1942) established his reputation as in the popular culture. Later works like Appalachian Spring- written as the score for a Martha Graham ballet in 1944- A Lincoln Portrait, and Fanfare for the Common Man made him a household word. A prolific writer and music critic for decades, his three books on music are still in circulation.

The advent of LP records after World War II made Copland financially secure, then wealthy. He moved to upstate New York and picked up his interest in ideas like twelve-tone scales. His 1948 Clarinet Concerto, written for Benny Goodman, was one of a series the jazzman commissioned for explore the fusion of classical and popular music.

Studiously apolitical but always moving in liberal circles, Copland endured the shabby treatment meted out by congressional Republicans in their past-war witch hunts for Communists. He was called before Congress for interrogation, and- astonishingly- his Lincoln Portrait was withdrawn from the program of the 1953 Eisenhower Presidential Inaugural Concert in a furor over whether Copland was a sufficiently patriotic American.

Copland carried on, traveling widely. After 1960 his compositions were few. He thought he had run out of ideas, and switched to conducting- always a guest conductor, and almost never conducting his own work. His recordings were best sellers, and lived to see his McCarthyite detractors dead and discredited.

Copland also bravely bore one of the more tedious emblems of being a celebrity composer: from about 1965 on, every five years, American orchestras laid on trowels of his work in celebration of his milestone birthdays.

As openly gay as the times allowed, Copland treated American composers as his children, mentoring two generations with generous support and instruction. He died at 90, full of honors.