American composers wrote with a German accent in the 19th century, and adopted a more fashionable French accent early in the 20th century.
Only with the 1930s work of Aaron Copland did American music find its own loping voice. Copland's music just before, during and after World War II defined the American style. Great Americana film scores from Elmer Bernstein's ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' and ``The Magnificent Seven'' to Randy Newman's ``The Natural'' are homages to the Copland sound and attitude.
Copland himself wrote eight film scores, including ``Of Mice and Men,'' ``The Red Pony'' and ``The Heiress.'' But he really launched the Americana movement not on the silver screen but in the concert hall and on the ballet stage.
His greatest strength as a composer was his simplicity of expression, his ability to make a musical point memorably but without fuss. That's why three of his six ballet scores - ``Rodeo,'' ``Billy the Kid'' and ``Appalachian Spring'' - are loved even by people who hate modern music.
Copland's first works, in the 1920s and '30s, were self-consciously avant-garde for their time, with brashly dissonant harmonies. Copland was committed to tonality, but primitivism had been in vogue since Stravinsky's ``The Rite of Spring'' premiered just before World War I.
Furthermore, primitivism was in the process of being urbanized to reflect the clashing sounds of factories and automobiles.
In these early works, the rhythms changed every couple of bars, and were in strange, difficult meters. Copland was writing some of the first jazz-classical fusion music, rowdy and vital but very hard to play.
Then, toward the end of the '30s, Copland decided it was time to create a truly American music, something down-to-earth that would reflect the rhythms of American speech and life, and the values of an idealized rural America.
Not coincidentally, he also hoped to find a wider audience. He'd gotten enough kicks frightening the blue-haired matrons at New York Philharmonic subscription concerts. Tired of being the bad boy of American music, he was ready for a little respect and popularity.
Copland reached his professional peak in the 1940s, the period of his most plain-spoken and folklike scores. This was when he wrote the ballet `` Appalachian Spring'' for dancer Martha Graham. The suite from that score garnered him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for music and planted him straight in the firm prairie sod of American culture.
Copland did not invent the Americana sound for which he was famous. The open harmonies and clear scoring of ``Appalachian Spring,'' the earlier cowboy ballets ``Billy the Kid'' and ``Rodeo'' and the slightly later third symphony were already employed by Virgil Thomson and others.
But Copland made that sound his own, and by extension America's own.
Clarity and balance were essential to his new style. They were fundamentally French qualities he picked up during studies with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s.
Copland was, in fact, the first American pupil of this famous composition teacher, who would eventually instruct nearly every important American composer who came of age between the 1920s and 1970s.
Still, there was more to Copland's music than these two French preoccupations. The harmonies, the rambunctious rhythms, the way of building a mighty climax then stepping back, brushing the dust off his hands and getting right down to the next job-taken together, these are the characteristics that set Copland apart from his contemporaries.
The American public welcomed these sounds as something fresh, something relevant to the grand potential and often hardscrabble reality of life on this continent. By the 1950s he was commonly referred to as ``the dean of American composers.''
``That just means I'm the oldest,'' he later quipped.
Copland stopped composing in the early 1970s and devoted his final active years to conducting his older works around the world. By his own admission unable to come up with fresh ideas, he declined commissions rather than repeat himself. Perhaps he was also disappointed by public reaction to his use of serialism in the 1950s and '60s.
He hoped serialism would be a wellspring of fresh ideas. ``I need more chords. I've run out of chords,'' he told conductor Leonard Bernstein in defense of his stylistic switch. But his audience thought serialism was a stagnant pool, and young American composers were beginning to regard it as a declining European style, anything but refreshing.
Copland was booed at the 1957 premiere of his ``Piano Fantasy,'' which avant-garde composer Morton Feldman thought hopelessly conservative, and booed again at the 1958 premiere or his ``Orchestral Variations,'' which the Louisville audience thought too advanced - even though it was an orchestration of a 25-year-old piano work.
But by then Copland was an American institution. His middle-period scores were loved almost patriotically, as if they'd been chipped from Mount Vernon, washed in Potomac water and set out to dry on a Kansas field.
Copland could stop composing, but he had become an icon of American culture.
Copland listening suggestions
Approach Copland through those famous middle-period ballets - ``Rodeo,'' ``Billy the Kid'' and ``Appalachian Spring.'' Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony have made beautiful digital recordings of these three scores, each complete, on two separate CDs from Angel/EMI.
Leonard Bernstein is probably the finest conductor of Copland's music on disc, and any of his versions on CBS/Sony or Deutsche Grammophon are worth hearing for their vigor and insight.
Copland brought a certain authority to the scores in his own recordings, although he worked with underrehearsed orchestras.
CBS/Sony has reissued all Copland's recording of his own orchestral music, filling in the gaps with Bernstein readings.
One of this series' multidisc boxes, selling at a reduced price, contains Copland's most famous middle-period music - the ballets, the third symphony, and assorted shorter works, all in good performances.
Another box in this series collects Copland's earlier orchestral scores, including the symphony for organ and orchestra and a jaggedly jazzy piano concerto. This would be the second stop for the serious Copland fan.
Only after becoming thoroughly familiar with the Copland sound should one approach the later works, like the ``Piano Fantasy'' and the orchestral piece called ``Inscape.'' These knotty works will be much more accessible once you're adept at recognizing the essential elements of Copland's style, which can be detected even in the 12-tone music.