Born to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900, Aaron Copland eventually became the most distinctive voice in American music. Today, Copland is best known for works like Appalachian Spring, A Lincoln Portrait, and Fanfare for the Common Man—powerful and immediately accessible music. Copland started his career in a very different place, producing compositions that fell squarely into the modernist camp. He gradually realized that the appeal of atonal works crafted to resist populism seemed to be diminishing. 

During the mid-1930s, I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. The old “special” public of the modern music concerts had fallen away…. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. 

Copland’s Orchestral Variations, a 1957 transcription of his 1930 Piano Variations, is an excellent illustration of the music he composed before his profound shift in musical aesthetics. As Copland describes the process that led him to the idea, 

The Orchestral Variations were completed on December 31, 1957. The work is an orchestral transcription of my Piano Variations composed in 1930 and first played by myself at a concert of modern music given by the League of Composers in New York on January 4, 1931.

I had for a long time wanted to make an orchestral version of my Piano Variations. This is an eleven-minute work and is generally considered to be among my most serious compositional efforts. I noted that Luigi Dallapiccola fulfilled a Louisville Orchestra commission through a similar orchestral transcription of a series of his piano variations.

My purpose was not to create orchestral sounds reminiscent of the quality of a piano, but rather to rethink the sonorous possibilities of the composition in terms of orchestral color. This would have been impossible for me to do when the work was new, for at that time the piano tone was an integral part of its conception. But with the perspective of 27 years it was a comparatively simple matter to orchestrate as I have in the past, using the original as a piano sketch with orchestral potentialities.

The overall plan of the work remains as it was: an eleven-measure theme, dramatic in character, followed by a series of twenty variations and a Coda. The intention was to make each variation cumulative in effect, with the Coda as a kind of summation of the emotional content of the work.

Nothing has been added to the notes themselves except for a few imitative voices. These were needed in an occasional variation to fill out what otherwise might have been too thin a texture. Although the rhythms have remained the same, the bar lines have been shifted in some cases to facilitate orchestral performance.

The brass, in subdued tones, open the work and the theme is presented in a restrained vein. The quiet feeling persists until Variation VII when the mood becomes bolder. In Variations VIII and IX, the singing string tones predominate, and in XI, the oboe is heard in duet with a solo flute. From Variation XII on, the climax builds steadily by an increasing use of brass. Variation XVIII is a Scherzo, with flute and clarinet taking the lead. A section for drums closes the last Variation and leads to a brilliant-sounding Coda.

The Piano Variations were dedicated to my friend, the American writer, Gerald Sykes.