Aaron Copland's America

"Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York, Aaron Copland's America is a collaboration between two well-known and highly esteemed scholars, art historian Gail Levin and musicologist Judith Tick, whose complementary essays focus on, respectively, Copland's interactions with the art world (visual and otherwise) and on his music. The book documents Copland's friendships with painters such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Diego Rivera; photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand; composers Virgil Thomson and Igor Stravinsky; choreographers Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille; and writers Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, exploring the direct exchange of ideas these relationships engendered and examining esthetic and intellectual parallels between their work and Copland's. At the same time, it looks at how Copland's fascination with folk and popular culture, native arts, jazz, cinema, and the search for an American national art gave form to his music, which sprang not only from his personal talent but also from connections to the powerful creative forces around him."--BOOK JACKET.