RECITAL CELEBRATES AARON COPLAND

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14
All Copland Recital
featuring students of the Shepherd School
8:00 p.m., Duncan Recital Hall

Celebrating the 104th anniversary of Aaron Copland's birth, Shepherd School students are performing an all Copland program on November 14th at 8:00 p.m. in Duncan Recital Hall at Rice University. A student of Brian Connelly, Levi Hammer will conduct and play a program that consists of Billy the Kid, the Piano Variations, Quiet City and Appalachian Spring.

Levi Hammer conducting a rehearsal of Copland's Appalachian Spring

Other performers include renowned Copland scholar Howard Pollack. Pollack is a professor of music history and literature at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and is the author of Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. The book is a full-length scholarly study of Copland's life and work. Pollack has written four books, including critical biographies of Walter Piston and John Alden Carpenter, and edited a fifth. His most recent book, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, has been described by the New York Times as "the definitive study of Aaron Copland’s life and work, no doubt for a long time to come". He is currently writing a critical biography of George Gershwin.

Pollack has lectured for numerous arts organizations and universities and has been interviewed widely on radio and featured in two film documentaries about Aaron Copland. He is active in a number of professional organizations, and currently serves on the Council of the American Musicological Society, the Advisory Board of the College Music Society, the editorial board of the journal, American Music, and since 1998 as associate editor for the Cambridge Opera Journal. In addition, he remains active as a pianist.

The son of immigrant Jewish parents from Poland and Lithuania, Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 and lived to be called the dean of American composers. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His wider popular reputation in the United States was founded on his thoroughly American ballets, Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, and, less overtly, on his film scores, while a great variety of other compositions won him an unassailable position in American concert-life.