50 years ago, Aaron Copland conducted the Minnesota Orchestra for the U.S. Bicentennial

The United States will celebrate its 250th anniversary as a nation on July 4, 2026. Fifty years ago, the U.S. marked its 200th during a national celebration called The Bicentennial. There were speeches, community celebrations, fireworks displays, even a commemorative quarter from the U.S. Mint — and naturally, there were concerts.

In Minneapolis, the Minnesota Orchestra did something remarkable: It invited none other than Aaron Copland, the composer-conductor known as the Dean of American Music, to conduct three concerts spanning July 3, 4 and 5, 1976, at Orchestra Hall.

The 20th Century had already been dubbed “The American Century” when Copland visited Orchestra Hall in 1976, and, having been born on November 14, 1900, Copland’s life paralleled that timeline. Four months shy of his 76th birthday when he visited Minneapolis, “I certainly don't feel 76," Copland told The Minneapolis Star. "Of course, conducting is a big help in that regard. You come off the stage all wet, like an athlete. You keep your mind busy. So I recommend conducting to anyone over 70."

For its part, the Minnesota Orchestra dubbed the Bicentennial concert series, “Copland on America,” and the program across the three nights variously included Leonard Bernstein's Overture to Candide, Charles Ives' Decoration Day, William Schuman's New England Triptych, and Copland's own works, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (featuring the Boston Symphony's organist Berj Zamkochian) and Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes. Copland approved the program but was less taken by the concert name. "Why ‘Copland on America’?” he mused aloud to The Minneapolis Star. “I can understand 'Copland' and I can understand 'America,' but why 'on'?"

The Minnesota Orchestra rolled out the red carpet — or more accurately, it invited the audience to sit on the carpet. Advertisements for the concerts promoted "informal rug seating on the main floor — bring your own pillows,” priced at $4.50 for adults ($26.50 in 2026 dollars), and $2.50 ($14.75) for kids.

Moreover, audio engineers from Minnesota Public Radio were at Orchestra Hall for the July 4 concert, which was broadcast live on MPR and shared nationwide on public radio stations. A camera crew from Twin Cities Public Television also captured the concert, and it was televised on channel 2 in the Twin Cities on July 7.

In preparation for the broadcast, MPR’s Dennis Rooney had a chance to interview Aaron Copland. The interview aired during the intermission of the July 4, 1976 broadcast. Thanks to MPR Archives, you can listen to that interview using the audio player above, and read a transcript below.

Copland’s insights on American music and what he saw as the over-availability of music are interesting to hear in 2026. It’s also endearing to hear him talk about fellow composers Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Of particular note is Copland’s descriptor for his genre; specifically, he refers to it as “serious music,” only once conceding, “classical, so called.” But overall Copland is affable and self-effacing, and the interview has aged well.

Interview Transcript

Dennis Rooney: Aaron Copland will be celebrating his 76th birthday on the 14th of November of this year, and at 75, is known as the dean of living American composers. He must hate this title very much, but even so, he seems to wear it very lightly, and is our special guest during intermission on this Minnesota Orchestra Bicentennial holiday concert, as well as being the concert's conductor. Mr. Copland, on this July 4, our nation's bicentennial, have you any feeling about the health of the creative arts in this country, particularly with regard to how they relate to the life of the nation? That's kind of a good question to get off with here.

Aaron Copland: Well, I think considering the fact that I've been around for the last half-century as a mature practicing artist, I have a very definite sense of the development of the arts in our country during these past 50 years. And I must say, it's a very impressive picture from where I sit. If I think back to the [19]20s, we didn't have the number of orchestras we have, just to confine our remarks to the musical field, and the number of schools that now occupy themselves with the teaching of music, I'm thinking now of our universities and colleges, has increased enormously in these last 50 years, so that I think it makes a very optimistic picture. I think we're on our way now, and don't have to look to Europe anymore for our artistic musical life. We have a highly developed one right here.

Dennis Rooney: Well, to a certain extent you anticipated a later question, because I wanted to ask you, since your life and this century do coincide, what are some of the most significant ways in which the world of music would appear different to a child of, let's say, age 10 or so, living today than they did — or it did — to Aaron Copland at the age of 10 or so?

Aaron Copland: Well, it's the enormous availability of "serious," as we call it — classical, so called — music. Just imagine, when I was a kid at, let's say, 15, it would have been very difficult to find recordings of even the major works, and when you listen to them, they sound rather tinny and uninviting. The availability of serious music, or classical music, however you want to call it, is so much greater. I mean, anybody who owns a radio, by mistake might hear a symphony nowadays; that was absolutely unheard of when I was a child. So that the spread of the more serious kinds of music, not only in America but all over the world, is really unthinkable without the development of these non-concert situations where you're at home by yourself and are able to either, through the radio or through recordings that you own, take personal contact, so to speak, with these great works.

Dennis Rooney: Much in the way that this broadcast has been tuned into, either on purpose or by accident, by people all across the country.

Aaron Copland: Exactly.

Dennis Rooney: In what way, though, has the benison [i.e. benefit] of these electronic developments been a mixed one? Is there any way in which they have served, in your opinion, to debase music?

Aaron Copland: Well, I suppose there is a danger in over-availability. I mean, you can get blasé if you forget to turn off your radio or whatever in your car, and it just goes on and on and on. You're debasing the art. I tell people, "If you don't want to listen to music, shut the darn thing off!" Don't just keep it in the background just to make pleasant sounds without anybody listening to it. We composers feel very strongly about that. If you want to listen to our music, we want you to give us your full attention. We don't like the idea of our music being used merely to dress up the silence with pleasant sounds that you're not really listening to. I can see that that could be a pleasant sensation for some less musical people, but those of us who really love music don't want to have it on just for pleasant sounds. We want to listen to it when we have it on, and we want to take contact with it in an important way.

Dennis Rooney: It's often very hard for some of us who want to listen to music under controlled circumstances, simply to get away from it in certain public ...

Aaron Copland: That's a great danger nowadays. It's really too — there's too much of it around! And I would like to encourage everybody to turn the darn thing off if you're not in a musical mood, and if you don't really want to listen to what's going on.

Dennis Rooney: You mentioned earlier the fact that you felt that America no longer depended on Europe for its artistic direction or its creative nourishment, and your generation of American composers certainly is recognized now as the first to end a dependence on European norms and to succeed in finding a uniquely American style of musical expression, but in the light of an increasingly internationalist tendency in the world of creative music in recent years, do you still think that it's important for American composers to sound American?

Aaron Copland: Well, I don't think it's important for them to think about it consciously, like I used to 50 years ago. But I think it's rather nice to have the artistic expression anywhere in the world somehow reflect the country of its origin. It gives a little more local-color feeling. A Russian novelist sort of has a Russian feeling to the novel; though the emotions expressed may be universal, it gets a Russian tinge. I don't see why our music, our serious music, can't have a little bit the same effect on our audiences. It's sort of pleasant to feel you're listening to a work which somehow reflects the life that we live here, and our serious music, I think needs that, since it hasn't really been firmly established. After all, it was Ives, Charles Ives, who was generally credited with having written the first recognizably American-flavored music. I suppose you could find some of McDowell's pieces that may sound more American than others, but Ives really did it in a very original and special way.

Dennis Rooney: When you were a young man, how aware were you and how aware were others in your same discipline, aware of the music and the influence of Charles Ives?

Aaron Copland: Well, I knew his name as a man who had occasional performances at the modern music series that Edgar Varese ran in the '20s in New York City. But I didn't have any idea of the range, the artistic range, creative range of the man, until one morning I got a package in the mail, opened it, and it was 114 songs by Charles Ives, which he had published at his own expense, privately, and was nice enough to send me a copy. I had never met him and didn't know the man, and I was enormously impressed that anybody could write 114 songs. That's a lot of songs! And of the greatest variety, from the baby-simple ones to the wildly modern and avant-garde ones, so that the range was enormously impressive. I was so impressed that I wrote an article about those 114 songs and published it in the Modern Music magazine. Got a very nice letter in reply from Ives, thanking me, but we never did meet. I'm sorry to say.

Dennis Rooney: When you read so much of his writing has been made available to a large audience in recent years, and when you read it today, it's almost as if there was some streak in Ives that made him think that — or made him equate sensitivity or poetry with weakness or with sentimentality.

Aaron Copland: Yes, I know.

Dennis Rooney: Do you feel that that may have injured him in terms of his full artistic development?

Aaron Copland: I don't think so. It gives him a rather special quality of his own. And there's a quite a lengthy discussion of that in a new book about Ives by, I believe it's Frank Rossiter.

Apparently, in a small New England town like the one he was brought up in, it was sort of shameful for a little boy to take piano lessons. Only girls took piano lessons. So that he must have been frightened of being sissy-ish, because he was interested in music. And some of the later stuff that carried over into his manhood, I think had its origin there. According to Rossiter's book, he definitely had his origin in the small-town atmosphere where music was thought to be a thing that ladies occupied themselves with.

Dennis Rooney: He's always making reference to the nice ladies.

Aaron Copland: Yes, he is.

Dennis Rooney: And to Rollo, the simple...

Aaron Copland: That's right. See, he really had a case on that. It's slightly Freudian!

Dennis Rooney: You would talk about the way that you consciously thought half a century ago about how you were going to make your music sound American. And that was apparently a preoccupation of many young composers at that time, and to a very large extent, you succeeded, particularly in works composed in the '30s and '40s, which are still to this day, thought of as the most American sounding of, if you will, mature American orchestral or instrumental pieces. And yet that tradition, just at the point where it seemed to have really taken root, vanished, and we have not had a continuation of it. What do you think, looking back, is the reason why no younger composers seemed interested in continuing in this vein?

Aaron Copland: Well, perhaps because of the fact that we had done that and were interested in that, they thought it didn't have to be done again and they could do something else. It is, in a certain sense limiting, of course, if you're going to write in the 12-tones method, naturally, it's harder to suggest an American atmosphere than if you quote American folk tunes. So that I can understand a lack of interest, if they think an older generation has kind of taken care of that particular aspect of our music, and they go on to other things. But when I was in my 20s, I was very interested in the latest thing, which was Debussy and Ravel and Stravinsky.

Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky

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Debussy and Ravel were very French in my mind, and Stravinsky was very Russian. And that put it into my head that I'd like to be quite American in my serious music. After all, our jazz composers and Ragtime composers had accomplished exactly that; the whole world recognized their music as having been invented in America. I wanted to apply that to the serious field, and the fact that I spent three years in Paris as a student in the early '20s reinforced that notion: If the French can do it in the French way, why can't we Americans do it in our way?

Dennis Rooney: Now we heard just before intermission, your organ symphony, which was composed for Nadia Boulanger, your teacher, and when it was first performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra, certainly was viewed as the work of a very avant-garde composer. Did you ever think of yourself as an avant-garde composer?

Aaron Copland: Oh yes, I wanted to be an avant-garde. I didn't want to be in the rear guard! Well, we were using harmonies that you didn't find in the textbooks, and we got some pretty bad writeups in the New York papers in the '20s and '30s as "wild guys." But that was part of the fun. I mean, a young fellow starting out doesn't want to be approved of all the time. He wants to really startle people.

Dennis Rooney: Was there any point at which you wanted approval, where your attitude changed? Or were you at least, if you didn't want approval, no longer thought of yourself as avant-garde?

Aaron Copland: Well, it depends on who's doing the approving. You know, if you get an approval from the mob, that's a little dangerous. It might not be so good 20 years later. If you're approved of by people you respect, that's very satisfying.

Dennis Rooney: You were the first American composer to be the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the last 25 years or so, that relationship between the foundations and the creative artists has become more and more commonplace. Do you think that that's been good by and large in terms of the kind and the quality of music that's resulted from that sort of association?

Aaron Copland: By and large, I certainly think, I certainly do think it's good. Yes, I think the fact that so many composers have been helped in the early stages of their career by fellowships or prizes of one kind or another has been a great stimulus and a great aid. I profited by that. And I don't know what I would have done if the Guggenheim people hadn't founded their foundation in 1925. I was really hard up for it. I could take a job in Wall Street, I suppose, but that wasn't what I was thinking about doing. So to be freed at that point in your career, before you are known, and when just a few people believe in you, and a board says, "OK, we'll give them a fellowship," that's very important and a great help in the arts.

Dennis Rooney: One of your colleagues and contemporaries whom you knew well, George Gershwin, had, however, succeeded in carving out, certainly, a great monetary success in the marketplace, and was on the way to, at least seemingly, the attainment of true eminence as an American composer when he died. And yet, no one else in this century seems to have had that kind of magic, that kind of key to success in that fashion. Was that uniquely the result of Gershwin's genius, or was that just a temporary aberration in the world of the composer and the public?

Aaron Copland: No, I think you can put it down to Gershwin's great gift. It was rather special, the fact that there wasn't a second Gershwin around; hasn't been really in that sense, it shows how special it was. He filled a niche, a place in the musical world, that nobody else seems to have been able to rival. And I knew him slightly. We spent an afternoon or two together, but we didn't really speak the same language. And he was thinking about show business and popular songs. I was thinking about the symphonic field.

Dennis Rooney: Were the serious composers who were about his same age a little disdainful or a little envious of his success, would you say, looking back?

Aaron Copland: I don't think so, because we weren't really trying to appeal to the same public. He really, in our minds, was a popular composer who occasionally wrote something for the concert hall, but by and large, he was busy doing shows — I mean, musical shows — and occasionally films, so that he wasn't primarily writing for the concert hall, and therefore he didn't see ... he certainly didn't bother me, and I don't think the other composers in my field were thinking about him too much.

Dennis Rooney: On the Fourth of July, 1976, we naturally tend to think of big questions, questions that range over decades and centuries, rather than just the course of months or years. We talked earlier about the influences that formed Charles Ives' musical character, the way in which in the small New England milieu of his boyhood, music had not really taken roots in terms of its meaningfulness to everyone, but rather seemed to be some sort of applique that young ladies had added to their trousseau. After the last 30 years, with all of the changes in technology and all of the things that have happened to music in your lifetime, do you think that music has taken, in truth, deeper roots in this country in terms of its impact on the population as a whole? Is it still a nice accomplishment, or is it still something that can be enjoyed and taken part in, without shame, without any kind of second thought or guilt or twinge that somehow this is a waste of time or is in any way un-American?

Aaron Copland: No, I think that's a thing of the past. I really do. In the first place, the availability of the serious field of music has been so enlarged through the use of phonograph and stations around the country that broadcast serious music, the accessibility of the serious field of music is so much greater to the ordinary citizen who, in his car might, by a mistake, turn on his radio and hear a Beethoven symphony. That fact alone, you see, makes for a completely unprecedented situation, as far as I can see, if you compare it to the 19th century in music. So that we're living really in a very special time, speaking from a musical standpoint. And obviously you can overdo it. I mean, there can be an over availability; too many performances of Beethoven's Fifth can use the old thing up too fast. So I would advise music lovers to go easy on it, to watch what they listen to. Don't overdo the listening to certain special pieces, and spread their tastes as much as they possibly can, especially into the contemporary field where we need their interest.

Dennis Rooney: Well, you've done much to make music understandable and meaningful to the layman in a series of books, your lectures at the New School in New York in the '30s, and your own music itself. How ... What are Aaron Copland's tips to the music lover in order to develop that discrimination that you find so all important?

Aaron Copland: Well, I don't have any secret tips to give. My advice, of course, is to listen to the stuff. Listen to it as much as you can. Read about it. It doesn't hurt to read a book about music. And I try to be helpful in writing what to listen for in music. The other title of my book. I would like to encourage people to think of their contact with music as a developing thing, not as a thing that you casually turn on and listen to or don't listen to. We're interested in listeners who are more deeply involved than that, and who want to enlarge their understanding of the art through actual contact with it, and reading an occasional book and going out to a concert. The casual music listener who can take it or leave it doesn't interest us much. But there are enormous numbers of people in our country who basically, I think, are more musical than they think themselves. And I would like to involve those people more and encourage them to make contact in a field where they can get great enjoyment if they lend their ears more seriously and not so casually.

Dennis Rooney: Well, I hope we've made contact with a few people tonight for whom your comments and the opportunity to talk with you has been of great value to them. It's been of great value to me and to millions of other people as well. And I am looking forward to the remainder of this concert, which you'll be conducting in just a moment. Thank you very much. Aaron Copland.

Aaron Copland: Thank you, sir.

Contributing to this feature were Senior Digital Producer Reed Fischer, who provided newspaper research, and Scott Adamson of the MPR Archives, who provided the Copland interview audio.