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Every so often - and I live for these moments, believe me - you hear something totally unlike anything you've heard before. It just hits you differently; it means something more than "I lost my girlfriend, my dog died, I drive an Escalade, et cetera." It goes past the standard and the stereotypical. It's more than just what's on the radio while you're stuck in the car for an hour and a half trying to get from point A to point B. You get the picture.

Aaron Copland was one heckuva composer. He's unique in that he's such a great AMERICAN composer. Yes, there's Gershwin and so forth, but Copland stands alone. From a very young age he was pursuing music and specifically music composition. As he dragged his way, grant by grant, through college shortly before World War II, he apparently decided to become a musical modernist, which is all about a particularly snotty sub genre of music that is only for people who have lots of money and pretend to understand noise masquerading as music. If you've heard a stack of dinner plates hit a tile floor, you've heard the best of, say, modernist/neoclassicist John Cage.

Believe it or not, people got sick of listening to neoclassical music because, well, it sucked. Copland hit on the idea of turning to Gebrauchsmusik, which strikes me as an unnecessarily German term that means music you can listen to and enjoy (literally, "music for use"). Inspired by the not-so-revolutionary notion, Copland decided that the key was to produce music people liked, that musicians could learn and that the new radio could utilize. Copland was a hit, and not an aloof one at that; his knack for constantly taking time to tutor aspiring composers gave him the nickname "The Dean of American Music."

Overwhelmingly, Copland's themes were all things American. Vistas were said to be particularly inspiring to him, but the urban life spoke to him the most perhaps since he grew up in it. In this, he had much in common with (once again) George Gershwin. He got swept up in the newness of Communism, the ever-so-cleverly named Progressive Movement (eugenics, anyone?) and Fascism. In his defense this was about as common in music and literary circles at this time (never mind the colleges) as chicken in a KFC, and it's not like they were the only ones duped by revolutionary promises and speeches; we had a statue of Benito Mussolini in Rockefeller Plaza for years, after all. Fascism apparently seemed like a swell idea until you had the whole Holocaust, and of course let's not forget friendly old Communism with the much less quoted 30-50 million Russians/Soviets killed in the name of politics plus Eastern Europe enslaved for half a century to boot. Hindsight, I know. Anyway, point being that Copland was certainly not anti-American, as occasionally has been postulated.

The real break came in 1942 during World War II when Copland was asked to write a fanfare. Basically, back during the First World War tradition said it was common to play a fanfare before a show in honor of the soldiers overseas. Nice, right? Well, Copland accepted but instead of any of the suggested names like "Fanfare for Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen," he went with "Fanfare for the Common Man." The work ironically appeared first on March 12 1943 - Income Tax Day. Copland would famously say, "I [am] all for honoring the common man at income tax time." It was a huge hit, and it still is widely performed. And why not? It's a damn fine piece of music.

(note: don't watch the movie, just listen to the music).

I'm a pretty narrow-minded person when it comes to music. I'm opinionated in the sense I have an opinion on just about anything you could think of, but while I'm almost always open to debate I don't have a whole lot of flexibility with music. Either a song hits me, or it can roll over and die figuratively speaking. This is one of the good ones.