Aaron Copland (1900-90)

American composer. Like Stravinsky, Aaron Copland achieved his fame on the strength of three successive ballets, each of which was in its own way a turning point in the history of dance: the two cowboy ballets, Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), and the exquisite Appalachian Spring (1944) for the great dancer/choreographer Martha Graham. His Third Symphony (1946) contains the familiar "Fanfare for the Common Man." He also wrote several film scores, including Of Mice and Men (1939). Owing to his success at incorporating elements of American folk music, jazz, and patriotism (e.g., A Lincoln Portrait, 1942) into a prevailingly classical rhetoric, he became something of a national hero.

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