Community Musicians, building a worldwide Community Music.
Scores
for all instruments: 15,000+
(active and growing),
over 231,000 pages.
All genres and levels: Jazz & Blues, Rock & Pop, Classical & Contemporary, Film & Musicals;
books & biographies; methods, études, play-along tracks (MP3) for Jazz & Rock.
Access & benefits: US$15.99 one-time payment, valid for lifetime, full Library access.
Table of Contents
Copland: 6 piano works (with sheet music)
Aaron Copland Four Piano Blues for Piano with sheet music
The best Sheet Music download from our Library.
Four Piano Blues (1926-48)
Though published in 1949, these brief pieces, exploiting various jazz-derived rhythmic features, date from different periods of Copland's career. Each is dedicated to a well-known pianist.
“For Leo Smit” (1947). “Freely poetic.” A pastoral piece mixing beats of two and three eighth notes.
“For Andor Foldes” (1934). “Soft and languid.” When the falling thirds of the opening material return, they are combined with the “graceful, flowing” melody of the contrasting central section.
“For William Kapell” (1948). “Muted and sensuous.” The two contrasting ideas, louder and softer, of the beginning are gradually brought closer together.
“For John Kirkpatrick” (1926). “With bounce.” The earliest, and the most aggressively syncopated, of the set. Note the pauses that interrupt the rhythm in the second statement of the material.
(Andor Foldes is an eminent Hungarianborn pianist, who came to the United States in 1949. William Kapell, born in New York in 1923, was an extremely talented pianist who was tragically killed in an airplane crash at the age of thirty one.
John Kirkpatrick [b. 1905], who like Copland also studied with Nadia Boulanger in the mid-twenties, has long been active in the promotion of American music, especially that of Charles Ives.) The first performance of all four pieces was by Leo Smit at a League of Composers concert in New York on March
13, 1950.
Please, subscribe to our Sheet Music Library.
If you are already a subscriber, please, check our NEW SCORES' page every month for new sheet music. THANK YOU!
Aaron Copland Danzón cubano with sheet music
Danzón Cubano (1942)
In 1942, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the League of Composers, Copland wrote this impression of a Cuban dance style that he had observed during his tour the preceding year.
Danzón is not the familiar hectic, flashy, and rhythmically complicated type of Cuban dance. It is more elegant and curt, and is very precise as dance music goes. The dance hall itself seemed especially amusing to me because it had a touch of unconscious grotesquerie, as if it were an impression of “high-life” as seen through the eyes of the populace—elegance perceived by the inelegant…. I didn't actually intend the piece to be grotesque, but, of course, there is that element in the original dance itself. Similar to that style, Danzón Cubano is very secco, very precise and elegant. It contrasts strong, rhythmically marked sections with a rather sentimental tune following immediately after, but not quite mixing with the dryness of the preceding part. (From liner notes to Columbia record M-33269.)
The first performance, by the composer and Leonard Bernstein, of the original two piano versions took place at New York's Town Hall on December 17, 1942. Two years later, Copland made an orchestral version, which was introduced on February 17, 1946, by the Baltimore Symphony, Reginald Stewart conducting. Both Copland and Bernstein have conducted recordings of the orchestral version.
Aaron Copland The Cat and the Mouse (with sheet music)
Aaron Copland - Piano Fantasy with sheet music
Aaron Copland - El Salón México Piano solo with sheet music (partitura)
Aaron Copland "Three Moods" - with sheet music
Browse in the Library:
Or browse in the categories menus & download the Library Catalog PDF:
Who was Aaron Copland?
Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist, and conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Music". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many consider the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which he called his “vernacular” style.
Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera, and film scores.
After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark, Copland traveled to Paris, where he first studied with Isidor Philipp and Paul Vidal, then with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He studied three years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste. Determined upon his return to the U.S. to make his way as a full-time composer, Copland gave lecture-recitals, wrote works on commission and did some teaching and writing. But he found that composing orchestral music in a modernist style, which he had adopted while studying abroad, was unprofitable, particularly in light of the Great Depression. He shifted in the mid-1930s to a more accessible musical style that mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik ("music for use"), music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes. During the Depression years, he traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico, formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, and began composing his signature works.
During the late 1940s, Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenberg's use of twelve-tone (serial) techniques. After he had been exposed to the works of French composer Pierre Boulez, he incorporated serial techniques into his Piano Quartet (1950), Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations for orchestra (1961), and Inscape for orchestra (1967). Unlike Schoenberg, Copland used his tone rows in much the same fashion as his tonal material—as sources for melodies and harmonies, rather than as complete statements in their own right, except for crucial events from a structural point of view. From the 1960s onward, Copland's activities turned more from composing to conducting. He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and the UK and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records.
List of compositions by Aaron Copland
Film
- Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait (1985). Directed by Allan Miller. Biographies in Music series. Princeton, New Jersey: The Humanities.
- Appalachian Spring (1996). Directed by Graham Strong, Scottish Television Enterprises. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the Humanities.
- Copland Portrait (1975). Directed by Terry Sanders, United States Information Agency. Santa Monica, California: American Film Foundation.
- Fanfare for America: The Composer Aaron Copland (2001). Directed by Andreas Skipis. Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in association with Reiner Moritz Associates. Princeton, New Jersey: Films for the Humanities & Sciences.
Written works
- Copland, Aaron (1939; revised 1957), What to Listen for in Music, New York: McGraw-Hill, reprinted many times.
- —— (1941; revised 1968), Our New Music (The New Music: 1900–1960, rev.), New York: W. W. Norton.
- —— (1953), Music and Imagination, Harvard University Press.
- —— (1960), Copland on Music, New York: Doubleday.
- —— (2006). Music and Imagination, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.