After last week’s wonderful impromptu musical performance, courtesy of Antonio Hart, I was inspired to find out who exactly this Aaron Copeland person was. After all, it seems he was worthy of having one of the greatest aspects of Queens College named for him, right?

Turns out, Aaron Copeland and I share a litvishe (intermittent Scottish roots included!) background. Unfortunately that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Born in Brooklyn at the turn of the century, Mr. Copeland expressed amazing musical skill from a very young age. He composed his first opera scenario called Zenatello, which included seven bars of music, at age eleven. And that was just the beginning of a long and illustrious career as one of America’s greatest modern orchestral composers.

Copeland is perhaps most famous for his originality in film scores. In 1949 he won an Academy Award for the Heiress film score. While most composers at the time adhered to the constraints of post-romantic pieces, Copeland proved to be an effortless iconoclast, and ever a crowd pleaser.

Later in life, Copeland’s career developed, and he became quite a successful conductor, until, in 1990, he died of Alzheimer disease.