Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania on November 14, 1900, Aaron Copland became one of the most distinctive voices in American music. While his early compositions were written in the less accessible modernist style of early twentieth-century music, Copland eventually grew concerned about the widening gulf between composers and audiences. As he wrote, 

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, including El Salón México, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Rodeo.

Composed in 1942, Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo distills the most memorable music from Copland’s ballet, originally written for choreographer Agnes de Mille and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The tightly paced suite highlights Copland’s forging of a uniquely American symphonic sound. “Buckaroo Holiday” bursts with brash brass, snapping rhythms, and asymmetrical accents that evoke the swagger of ranch life. In contrast, “Corral Nocturne” is broad and lyrical, its spacious melodies and gentle harmonies suggesting the vastness of the Western sky. “Saturday Night Waltz” is elegantly rustic, blending folk-inflected tunes with a slightly off-kilter sway, while the famous closing “Hoe-Down,” built around the fiddle tune “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” drives to a jubilant, propulsive finish.