Born to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900, Aaron Copland became one of the most distinctive voices in American music. While he wrote his early compositions in the less musically accessible style of twentieth-century music, Copland eventually became concerned about the increasing gulf between composer and audience. As he writes,

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.

This shift in aesthetic priorities produced the music for which Copland is primarily known today: El Salón México, Rodeo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring (1944), and Fanfare for the Common Man, to name a few. Written between 1931 and 1933, Copland’s Symphony No. 2, also known as the “Short Symphony” due to its 15-minute length, offers glimpses of this later musical voice. One significant ingredient is jazz, which had an audible effect on the “Short Symphony.” When composer Edward Cone asked Copland in a 1967 interview if the work had more international influences than his earlier compositions, Copland responded,

Perhaps, but nonetheless, I like to think of them as being in some way American. Their rhythmic life is definitely American and influenced by jazz, although there are no literal quotations. I wouldn’t have thought of those rhythms, particularly in the “Short Symphony,” if I hadn’t had a jazz orientation.

Like the Symphonic Ode, composed a few years earlier, the “Short Symphony” exhibits a high degree of rhythmic difficulty, including shifting meters and cross-rhythms that are challenging to conduct and perform. After its 1934 premiere in Mexico City under the direction of Carlos Chavez, the symphony did not reemerge until Leopold Stokowski led the NBC Orchestra in the work on January 9, 1944. Throughout all three movements, Copland creates a highly expressive, unique musical landscape that, while relatively dissonant, is nonetheless full of the aural signposts that eventually made him famous.