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Whenever a film or television score evokes America \u2013 the wide-open prairie or pastoral New England, the rowdiness of a Western frontier town or loneliness in a big city \u2013 the melodies<\/a><\/strong> and harmonies<\/a><\/strong> and orchestral colouring will inevitably owe a good deal to the music of Aaron Copland.<\/p> In a series of popular ballet, film and concert scores in the 1930s and \u201940s, Copland virtually created the sound of his nation. Yet in the 1950s he was identified as among the \u2018dupes and fellow-travellers\u2019 of Soviet Communism<\/strong><\/a>, and hauled before one of Senator Joseph McCarthy\u2019s notorious committees investigating \u2018un-American activities\u2019; his Lincoln Portrait was removed from the programme of President Eisenhower\u2019s inaugural concert; he even found it difficult to renew his passport.<\/p> <\/p> He was born in November 1900 in the New York borough of Brooklyn, the youngest child of shopkeepers of Russian Jewish origin. Having played the piano from an early age, he studied composition with the New York teacher Rubin Goldmark, a pupil of Anton\u00edn Dvo\u0159\u00e1k<\/a><\/strong> who also taught another Brooklynite, George Gershwin<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p> At the age of 20, however, Copland departed America for France where he became one of the first pupils of the great teacher Nadia Boulanger<\/a><\/strong>, and through her met Stravinsky<\/strong><\/a> and other leading figures in the artistic ferment of the 1920s.<\/p> Before his return to the States, Copland had begun to ponder how best to create \u2018immediately recognisable American music\u2019. His first answer was jazz<\/a><\/strong>, and jazz colours and clich\u00e9s permeate two of his works of the mid-1920s, the suite Music for the Theatre<\/em> and the Piano Concerto (written for himself as soloist). Thereafter, though, the jazz influence disappeared from his music, returning later in more sublimated form.<\/p>When was Aaron Copland born?<\/h2>