Aaron Copland (born in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, died in 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York), the child of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, received his first piano lessons from his older sister before formal music education. Amidst the rich cultural scene of New York, understanding that his interest in music is composing, he furthered his studies of composition in Europe, with his most influential teacher Nadia Boulanger at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau. Copland was her first American student and prior to this no famous men-composers learnt their craft from a woman. Many soon followed Copland, whose relationship with Boulanger remained one of lifelong friendship and mutual admiration.

As a composer, Copland mirrored the trends of his time and in different periods worked with jazz rhythms, drew inspiration from folk music, was influenced by Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, and also wanted to see how far the abstraction can be taken. However, his mission was to advance American music and liberate it from European influence. This inspired his most popular works from the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944), in which he attempted to simplify the new music so that it would have a meaning for a large public. Copland reached his widest audience composing for the movies, of which The Heiress (1949) won him an Academy Award for best score. In his later years he also produced a number of works adopting twelve-tone or dodecaphonic technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg, but these were not generally well-received. By the early 1970s, Copland stopped writing original music, and spent most of his time conducting, lecturing and reworking older compositions. He wrote more than sixty articles and essays on music and five books, received more than thirty honorary degrees and many additional awards which cemented him as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American music. 

As It Fell Upon a Day, a chamber art song for soprano, flute and clarinet, originated from a flute and clarinet composition assignment which Nadia Boulanger gave to her student in 1923, requesting the imitative counterpoint between the two instruments. Copland fulfilled the task, adding a voice after he came upon a simple and tender poem referencing Greek myth by the seventeenth-century English poet Richard Barnefield. The sorrowful and solitary nightingale’s lament is nested in the story of a spring celebration. This nightingale is the younger of two daughters of King Pandeon, Philomela, who was raped and had her tongue cut by her sister’s husband King Tereus so she could not speak. She managed to tell her story by weaving a tapestry and, after obtaining her revenge, she was transformed into a nightingale. The nightingale names the rapist (Tereus! Tereus!), but this appears not to be heard as all other birds continue with their cheerful singing, unaware of her cries. Ironically, in nature, the female nightingale is actually mute, and only the male of the species sings. Being Copland’s early piece, it does not resemble his more mature programmatic works. In this emotional musical expression, Copland uses more complex harmonic vocabulary, almost cheeky and Schoenbergian, while, as he explained himself, ‘the harmonies that seem to evoke an early English flavor were suggested by the nature of the text’.