CULTURE WATCH : Uncommon American?

Composer Aaron Copland, upon going to France to study, noticed the “Frenchness” of the music there. He wondered why, he said later, he heard nothing of the Brooklyn streets from whence he came in American classical music.

Copland set out to change that and did so with ferocious success; his music worldwide became the quintessence of Great American Music.

The gifted composer created such music by breaking the confines of what most at the time considered “serious” music. Serious meant European. But Copland also wanted to incorporate some of the exciting new music called jazz coming out of the streets of New York, and some of the ragtime rhythms more typically heard in the smoky clubs of New Orleans. Copland’s compositions rattled the staid music Establishment, which considered jazz and untraditional music as low, unserious and common.

Yet the majestic horns of “Fanfare for the Common Man” are anything but common. The Shaker hymn influence heard in “Appalachian Spring,” his ballet for Martha Graham, is anything but unserious. And the vitality of the hoedown heard in “Billy the Kid” and the Mexican melodies of “El Salon Mexico” are anything but low. His fine lesser-known compositions are further testimony to his determination not to confine his music to others’ boundaries.

Aaron Copland died this week at age 90. The music he left is an everlasting gift, a music that reminds Americans in its very composition of our European-ness, our Western-ness, our African-ness, our Latin-ness, our common-ness.