... Copland was an ardent progressive, even before going to Paris to study with the great Nadia Boulanger, where he met many of the leading Leftists of his time from Picasso to Gide to Hemingway to all the French Composers. An advocate of Roosevelt and the New Deal, Copland was blacklisted in the McCarthy era — they didn't even allow his Lincoln at the White House.
It's not just us here that love his work. Classical Music's verdict is in, he is one of the greats and THE master teacher of the succeeding generation, as Schoenberg was before him….
— Tippy and Dad
<big>Anthony McGill, New York Philharmonic, playing Aaron Copland's “Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, with Harp and Piano” , January 24, 2019 David Geffen Hall Lincoln Center New York, NY </big>
Please join us Thursday, July 3, 4pm leftkost/7pm east, starting with Fanfare for the Common Man, as we enjoy together some magnificent gifts to the world of music, with some biography as well to bring into focus Copland’s irreplaceable contribution to the best of American character and culture.
For tonight, some just-for-fun videos with exerpts of his music, including from the Denzel Washington film He Got Game, Emerson-Lake-&-Palmer, a bit of ballet, Woody Woodpecker, and a crater on the planet Mercury.
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<big>*Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) 29 September 2009. Scale: Copland crater has a diameter of 208 kilometers (129 miles). Projection: This image is a portion of the NAC approach mosaic from Mercury flyby 3. It is shown in a simple cylindrical map projection with a resolution of 500 meters/pixel (0.31 miles/pixel). Of Interest: Visible in the center of this image is the crater Copland, recently named in honor of the American composer and pianist Aaron Copland. He and this crater are both unquestionably worthy candidates for named features on Mercury, but how this specific crater came to be known as Copland has an interesting back-story. Amateur astronomer Ronald Dantowitz and his colleagues Scott Teare and Marek Kozubal used the Mt. Wilson 60-inch telescope in 1998 to observe a very bright feature on this portion of Mercury's surface, and they assumed that the bright feature was an impact crater. Mr. Dantowitz expressed his wish that the crater be named "Copland" once better images of the area were obtained from spacecraft. Surprisingly, MESSENGER images from Mercury flyby 3 revealed that the small bright feature, seen at the left edge of this image, is not an impact crater but more closely resembles a volcanic vent! No convention for naming volcanic vents on Mercury has yet been adopted, because none were identified prior to MESSENGER's first Mercury flyby. However, even if a convention for naming volcanic features on Mercury is adopted in the future, the naming rules will likely differ from those for impact craters, and thus "Copland" would probably not be an acceptable name for the bright volcanic feature. A MESSENGER team member corresponded with Mr. Dantowitz and suggested that the name Copland be proposed instead for a large crater nearby. He agreed, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved the name Copland on March 3, 2010. Copland crater is flooded with volcanic smooth plains material that could be related to the activity that formed the bright vent. -- NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington — US Public Domain.</big>
See you on Thursday!
