By Betsy Schwarm

Frederic Chopin

Frederic Chopin was born in Poland in 1810 to a family with international roots. His mother was Polish and his father was French. Frederic learned to speak both Polish and French. His father ran a boarding school for wealthy boys and Frederic was allowed to attend the school, too, even though his family wasn't very wealthy. He became a wonderful pianist and wanted to earn his living as a musician. But he knew this would be hard in Poland, because Poland was not a very important country in the musical world. So at the age of twenty, Chopin decided to move to Paris.

In Paris, Chopin gave piano lessons and private piano concerts for wealthy and important people. He also wrote lots of piano music. In fact, almost everything he composed was for the piano alone, very rarely for piano with orchestra. Some of his piano pieces sounded like waltzes. Others were meant to sound like lullabies, and these he called "nocturnes." He even composed piano pieces that sounded like Polish folk dances, because these reminded him of home. Although Chopin never lived in Poland again, he always remembered the country where he had grown up.

His girlfriend throughout most of these years in Paris was a famous novelist, who went by the name of George Sand. George's real first name was Aurore, but she believed in writing about freedom for women, and felt that having a masculine name would better promote her interests. She helped Chopin to publish his music and promote his occasional public concerts. However, she never managed to convince him to give up his preference for those private concerts in wealthy homes. He gave far more of these private concerts than public ones.

His last years were troubled by declining health. When he died of tuberculosis in 1849, Chopin was so weak he could hardly sit at the piano, let alone play strongly. Yet his music survives him, with proof of the great variety of his works: some gentle and sleepy, others bold and exciting. There is no single Chopin style.

Aaron Copland

The American composer Aaron Copland was born in 1900 in Brooklyn. His parents had come to the United States from Eastern Europe, hoping to find better opportunities. Although it was never easy for immigrants to start a new life in a new land, the Coplands succeeded and by the time their children were born, they were doing well. They were able to afford piano lessons for young Aaron and he had the opportunity to attend classical concerts. Because of this exposure to music, Aaron decided that he wanted to become a composer. At the time, the best music schools were in Europe, so that's where he went: to Paris to learn to compose.

Copland came back to the United States in 1924. He started working with other young composers to present concerts of American-sounding music by American-born composers. This was a new idea. Until this time, most American composers had copied the sound of European music. But Copland and his friends wanted their music to sound like America. Some of his friends copied the sounds of jazz music. Copland was more interested in folk music, especially the songs and dance melodies of the Wild West. In such compositions as Billy the Kid and Rodeo, he used these old tunes to capture the spirit of the Wild West.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Copland was the most famous and successful composer in the Untied States. He even traveled to Mexico and Latin America to perform his music there. He also gave public lectures to help people better understand classical music. In these lectures, he explained how a composer goes about writing music and how people who have never listened to classical music before can begin to enjoy it. He helped many people discover the world of classical music.

Not only did he write music for orchestras to play, Copland also wrote movie music and even won an Oscar for one of these movies. He was the first American composer to write important ballets, too. His ballet Appalachian Spring tells the story of a young farm couple in Pennsylvania at the turn of the century. It won the important Pulitzer Prize that year, and is still one of his most popular compositions.

Copland lived a long life: ninety years. In that time, he tried many different musical styles. But the style that brought him the greatest success was the American-style music that he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. As one of the first composers to write this type of music, he showed Americans and the world that the American spirit has a place in the classical concert hall.

Claude Debussy

When the French composer Claude Debussy was born in 1862, his parents were running a china shop. Later, his father worked as a traveling salesman, a printer's assistant, and a store clerk. His mother became a seamstress and earned money by sewing clothes. Since neither parent was musical, their son might never have learned about music if it hadn't been for his Aunt Clementine. A great lover of music, she noticed that her nephew was fond of it, too. One day, when the boy came for a visit, she arranged for him to have a piano lesson. It was the beginning of his musical career.

By the time Claude was ten years old, he had become a good enough pianist to start studying at the most important college of music in Paris. His first lessons were in piano playing, but soon he was studying composition, too. His friends remembered that the handsome, dark-haired boy had already learned to have adult tastes: when his classmates would spend their allowances on large amounts of cheap candy, Claude would save until he had enough to buy a single fancy pastry. Another way in which he behaved like an adult was that he believed in his own ideas: he was determined to try new things in music, even though his professors said he shouldn't.

As a teenager, Debussy worked for a wealthy Russian widow, Madame von Meck, who hired him to teach piano to her children. When the Mecks traveled, they took their piano teacher along with them. This allowed the young composer to see Switzerland, Italy, and Russia, all by the time he was twenty years old. He also visited Germany, where he heard new and exciting styles of composition and met important composers. These composers encouraged him to continue with his new ideas.

The biggest influence upon the young composer was the Paris World Exhibition of 1889. At this international festival, Debussy heard music from China and other Asian lands. The music was performed on unusual instruments and featured combinations of notes that had never been heard in Europe before. Debussy thought this was wonderful, and began using these ideas in his own music. This confused some people, who didn't understand what he was trying to do. But gradually, people grew used to Debussy's new style and came to like it. They called it "Impressionism," because it reminded them of the "Impressionist" style of art, which featured gentle shapes and used soft colors. People thought Debussy's music was also gentle and soft-colored.

Debussy wrote many pieces of music with interesting and imaginative titles. Some of the best-known ones are Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Gardens in the Rain, and The Snow is Dancing. He also composed Clair de lune, which is French for Moonlight. Clair de lune is a soft and pretty piano piece that sounds just like moonlight reflected in a quiet lake. The most famous piece of all Debussy's compositions, called Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is meant to show a forest creature from Greek mythology waking up from an afternoon nap. Each of these pieces is written in the Impressionist style for which Debussy had become famous.

*****

Paul Dukas
This French composer was born in Paris in 1865. His father was a banker, but his mother loved to play the piano. Paul learned to play the piano himself with he was a child, and also began composing his own music. While he was at music school, he played not only the piano, but also the timpani: the large, copper-colored drums that stand at the back of the orchestra. Later, Dukas became a music professor at the college where he had studied, and also wrote articles about music for a newspaper in Paris. As the newspaper's music critic, it was his job to attend concerts and write reports about what compositions were played and how well the musicians had played it. Through these articles, he hoped to help people better understand classical music. Because of these jobs, Dukas was too busy to compose very much music of his own. Only fifteen compositions by him still exist. Of these, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is certainly the most famous. Although the piece is over one hundred years old, it is still a great favorite of music lovers of all ages.
Antonin Dvo?ák
The son of a village butcher, Antonin Dvo?ák [say "duh-VOR-zhak"] nearly became a butcher, too. He had even dropped out of school to help in his father's shop. But his uncle, who knew that the boy loved music, offered to pay for music lessons, giving Antonin the chance for a music career. Before long, the teenager was a professional musician, playing the violin and the viola in the big city of Prague. Yet his dream was to become a composer. So he worked hard on his compositions. He even entered his music in an important national contest. The judges liked his work so much that, in three out of four years, Dvo?ák earned the top prize. Winning this contest helped him to become an international star!

Dvo?ák became so famous that he was asked to be the director of a music school in New York City. This was far from the composer's home in Prague, but he thought it would be an interesting adventure. So, with his wife and children, he came to the United States. The family spent three years here, living in New York City during the school year, but spending summers in Iowa, where the farmland and the Eastern European immigrants who lived there reminded them of home. Dvo?ák was happy here, and composed wonderful music.

Some of Dvo?ák's compositions were inspired by his visit to the United States. But most were meant to sound like his homeland, especially the farms and villages in what is now the Czech Republic. Dvo?ák believed in showing his national pride in his music, and felt that every composer should make an effort to have his music sound like his own homeland. The lively dances and beautiful songs of the area known as "Bohemia" - where Dvo?ák grew up - are fondly remembered in his exciting compositions.

George Gershwin

Born in 1898, his Brooklyn-born son of immigrants learned about music when his older brother Ira began taking piano lessons in 1910. George was only twelve, but soon he played piano even better than Ira. He took a job playing piano in New York City music shops so customers could hear how the music they were buying should sound. After playing so much music, George began composing his own pieces. By the age of twenty, he had become a star composer, thanks to the popular song "Swanee." Together with his brother Ira, he began writing jazzy musical plays to be performed on Broadway. George would write the music and Ira would write the words. Their shows were very successful. Gershwin also wrote exciting music for orchestra and for piano. His last big composition was the opera "Porgy and Bess," which is a love story set in a poor black community in the American South. Gershwin was brave to choose this story, since blacks were not well-respected in the 1930s when he composed the piece. Not long after "Porgy and Bess" was first performed, Gershwin became ill with cancer. He was only thirty-eight when he died, but had already proven that he was a truly American composer.
Edvard Grieg
In the late 1800s, many composers began to write music inspired by their countries. They used folk songs and folk dances and folk stories to make their music sound like the country where they lived. A composer from Hungary might use Hungarian dances. A composer from Russia might take a Russian folk story and retell it through music. These composers were using their musical abilities to express their love of their country and to share that love with their audiences.

Edvard Grieg was one of these composers. He was born in 1843 in Norway in the town of Bergen on the coast of the North Sea. It is a very rugged area of Norway, with steep mountains dropping straight down into the cold, dark water. Many people in the area worked as fishermen, but not young Edvard's father. Grieg had a government job. His father and grandfather before him had had the same post. But Edvard would not follow in this family tradition. He learned piano from his mother, and soon was a good enough player that he was sent to study music at a famous college in Germany.

Edvard was only fifteen when he went away to college. He enjoyed studying music and was excited about the idea of becoming a pianist and composer. However, he became very homesick, not only for his family, but also for Norway itself. He loved the mountains and fjords of Norway. He missed hearing the Norwegian language and Norwegian folk music, and just didn't feel comfortable living in a German city. Once he was done with college, he would move back closer to home. He and his wife Nina eventually built a house right in Bergen, Grieg's hometown.

When a composer loves his homeland so much, it makes sense that he would write about his country in his music. That's what Grieg did when he grew up. He wrote compositions that described the country of Norway, its people, and its legends. For example, a composition called "Shepherd Boy" shows a young shepherd singing as he watches after his flock of sheep. "Evening in the Mountains" is a beautiful sunset scene. "March of the Trolls" portrays the imaginary trolls of Norwegian fairy tales. "The Little Brook" sounds happy and bubbly like a mountain stream. Other pieces of Grieg's music used the rhythms of country-dances so listeners would get an idea of what it would be like to go to a village dance. Listening to Grieg's music is a little like taking a trip to Norway, but in this case, it's a trip for our ears!

Grieg wrote many hundreds of compositions, including piano pieces, orchestra music, and songs. But his most famous music was written to be performed with a play called "Peer Gynt." This was in 1876 when Grieg was thirty-three years old. It was his responsibility to write music that could accompany the different scenes of the play, the way movie music goes along with the scenes of a movie. The idea is that the music should give listeners a sense of what is happening in the story. So Grieg's music tells the story of the play: how its hero Peer Gynt has many wild adventures, including an escape from the trolls, before finally returning home to his faithful wife who has waited for him all these years.

The "Peer Gynt" music became very successful, so successful that it was performed over and over. Mr. Grieg even got a little tired of it. He wished people would listen to some of his other pieces, instead. He thought the other compositions were being neglected and that "Peer Gynt" was getting too much attention. But at least the success of that music ensured that music lovers would always remember the name of Edvard Grieg.

Ferde Grofe

Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofe: that's the name he was given when he was born in New York City in 1892. It's a long and complicated name, which is why he always went by the shorter version: Ferde Grofe. His family, which had come to the United States from Germany, had always been interested in music. Both his mother and his grandfather had been professional cellists; his uncle was a violinist. Young Ferde learned to play the piano. Yet he almost didn't get the chance to be a musician, because his father died and his mother remarried. The new stepfather thought that music was a waste of time. He tried to stop his young stepson's interest in music. Determined to have his own musical career, young Ferde ran away from home at the age of fourteen.

The young musician traveled throughout the country, supporting himself by working as a newsboy, a theater usher, a milk vendor, a steel worker, a truck driver, and an elevator operator, among other jobs. He also earned a living as a pianist, playing concerts in the American Southwest, including the Grand Canyon area. Soon young Grofe learned to play the viola, too. As a teenager, he was a member of the Los Angeles Symphony. He also played piano for the movies. Later, he became interested in jazz music and even worked with the famous jazz composer George Gershwin.

Ferde Grofe wasn't only a musician. He also became a composer famous for his American-sounding compositions. Although "Grand Canyon Suite" is his most famous piece, he also composed music inspired by Niagara Falls, Death Valley, the Mississippi River, and other American places. For a composer whose family was from Germany, Grofe had certainly made a name for himself as a thoroughly American composer!