Aaron Copland

This week should prove an embarrassment of riches musically.Tonight at 8: 15, the newly formed Towson University Chamber Orchestra makes its debut in the university's Center for the Arts Concert Hall. With Mark McCoy on the podium, the orchestra will perform Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde" and works by Stravinsky.Tickets, at $4 and $6, are available at the Center for the Arts box office or by calling 410-830-2787.Wednesday night at 8 p.m., Benjamin Pasternack, the newest member of the Peabody Conservatory's piano faculty, will give his first solo recital in Friedberg Hall.

Although Virgil Thomson's place in the pantheon of American composers is secure, it is as a music critic that his influence is most obvious.His daily reviews at New York's Herald Tribune (1940-1954) were much admired for intelligence and sophistication. Those qualities could turn cruel in the composer's elegant prose. And the gratuitous nastiness some newspaper readers detect in music criticism today is partly Thomson's legacy. In this respect, Thomson was the mother of us all.As it happens, it is "The Mother of Us All," Thomson's second opera (and second collaboration with Gertrude Stein)

Anne Arundel Community College continues the celebration of its 35th anniversary with concerts this weekend and May 11.The Concert Choir will present a varied program called "Swing Into Spring" at 7: 30 p.m. Saturday at the Pascal Center for the Performing Arts. Conductor Terrence Greenawalt will lead the 40-voice choir, which includes students and community members, in a program dominated by the music of George Gershwin.Selections from "Porgy and Bess" will be performed with Alfred McEwen as Porgy, Marilyn Gaver as Bess and James Ballard as Sportin' Life.

If you liked "Lenny I," chances are you'll like "Lenny II."If the first Lenny was the late Leonard Bernstein, Lenny II is surely Leonard Slatkin, who will conduct the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tonight, tomorrow and Saturday in works of John Corigliano and Ralph Vaughan Williams.Comparing Bernstein, one of the most glamorous figures in American musical history, to Slatkin, a paunchy, balding, unpretentious, middle-age guy, may seem a little peculiar -- not least to Slatkin himself."When people make the comparison, it's always without my being around," Slatkin says.

Autographs after concertThis year's Baltimore Symphony Summerfest may be the orchestra's best ever and this Thursday's program will bring music director David Zinman closer than ever to his fans. The 7:30 p.m. program will consist entirely of great popular works by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aaron Copland .But immediately after the concert ends at about 9 p.m., Zinman will appear in the lobby to autograph copies of the BSO's latest Telarc CD, a luscious recording of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. There will also be a drawing for a complete set of the BSO's Telarc recordings.

One of the best things about living in Baltimore is that you can get to New York in 2 1/2 hours, Washington in 45 minutes and Philadelphia in 75. Here is a sampling of the many concerts in those cities worth making the trip for:WASHINGTON*Nobody plays Mozart's piano concertos better than Murray Perahia, who will perform and conduct three of them (K. 413, 482 and 503) with the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 6.NEW YORK*The great Kurt Masur is the New York Philharmonic's new music director, and his presence has made the orchestra a hot ticket for the first time since the Bernstein era ended more than 20 years ago. One of Masur's greatest strengths is Bruckner, and it's no accident that this composer's mighty Symphony No. 7 -- along with music by John Adams and Aaron Copland -- is featured in the orchestra's first concerts with Masur (Sept.

WHEN AARON COPLAND was a young man, he studied music under the composer Rubin Goldmark. Because Goldmark's heroes were Beethoven, Wagner and Fuchs, wrote one biographer, the independent Copland became enamored of composers like Mussorgsky, Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin.There was something always fresh and individual about Aaron Copland, who died yesterday of pneumonia at a hospital in Tarrytown, N.Y., not far from his Peekskill home. He had recently suffered two strokes. He was a man many 20th century musicians contend was America's finest composer, classical or otherwise.

OF COURSE Aaron Copland was the son of immigrants; that explains why his music was so American. Was it more classical or popular? The sound obliterates such categories; its love, gratitude, and sheer recognition of what lies all about us overflows all classifications except American. His is the music of discovery presented with calculation.This composer was in love with the simple things about America -- cowboy tunes, folk songs, Lincoln -- that are not so simple at all, any more than he was. He didn't just use American themes in his music but created them anew for future generations.

CoplandEditor: Aaron Copland and George Gershwin were each born in Brooklyn about the same time and had the same music teacher.Copland laid the foundation for his long career by studying in Paris with the famous teacher, Nadia Boulanger. He felt he had to appeal to a larger audience by using folk song material in the brilliant orchestral suite of ''El Salon Mexico'' in 1936, and cowboy songs in ''Billy the Kid'' and ''Rodeo'' ballets.The two cowboy ballets will always be remembered for rekindling American interest in ballet from early in the century to the halcyon days of the Anna Pavlova tours.

Composer Aaron Copland was as old as the century and wrote the music that immortalized him by his (and the century's) mid-forties. He died two weeks after his 90th birthday party.Mr. Copland wrote two strands of music. The first was up-to-the-minute, at least the minute of the 1920s when his education in composition took place. It was difficult, intellectual, modernist and had a lot to say to other composers and the musically literate. The other, inspired by his populist politics and his need to earn a living, was melodically accessible to all.And when they are played, listeners say "American!"

Ideally, concertgoers in this country would know and love at least two big, hearty all-American symphonies - I'd vote for No. 2 by Charles Ives and No. 3 by Aaron Copland - as deeply as they embrace European classics. But that's not likely to happen if our orchestras don't make more room for them. Although the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra enjoys a solid reputation for its support of American music, it has programmed Copland's Third only four times in the past four decades and has never played Ives' Second.

One simply wanted to be present. Freezing cold or not, a crowd of 2 million, whatever - solemn warnings about tight security, long lines, traffic jams, cell phones not working. In the end, one wanted to be there on the Mall before the Capitol on Tuesday at noon amid the jubilant throng and see the man take the oath of office - our first genuine author-president. So I hitchhiked a ride in the middle of the night on a jet heading to Baltimore and got to the train station at 5 a.m., and already the platform was packed.

The iconic 1939 World's Fair, the last hopeful celebration before war would change everything, was a showcase for any number of forward-looking products, ideas and dreams - "the world of tomorrow." Among the many attractions at the event was a documentary called The City. Made expressly for the fair, it addressed a potent issue of the day - how excessive, unregulated urbanization limited the quality of life. Making the movie all the more effective was its distinctly American music, composed by a man who was then only just beginning to enter the public consciousness.

According to conventional wisdom, Aaron Copland's only full-length opera, The Tender Land, just doesn't cut it. Too static. Too much like one of his Americana ballets, only with words. Not enough story, character development, or truly gripping drama. A very unsatisfying ending. Well, conventional wisdom has been known to be wrong before, and it's wrong in this case. If you don't believe me, just check out Opera Vivente's affecting presentation of the piece. No, you won't come away thinking The Tender Land deserves to be ranked alongside La Boheme, but you're likely to end up with a new - or renewed - appreciation for Copland.

I am not a credible critic of a great deal of the fiction held sacred by the magistrates and myrmidons of many of this nation's schools of writing - and by small literary journals inhabited by them. To the extent that I read what often is called "experimental" and sometimes "postmodernist" fiction, self-referential insistences tend to make me queasy. Writers writing about writers writing of writing's deep agonies. That sort of thing. Thus prejudiced, I am of a mind to conclude that Vanishing Point, by David Markson (Shoemaker & Hoard, 208 pages, $15)

The relationship between television and national memory almost always makes for fascinating holiday viewing. But rarely is the history remembered on screen as heartbreakingly close to home for those in the audience as "In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01" (HBO, 9 p.m.) - a record of that horrible day as seen through the eyes of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and more than 100 of the citizens and workers of that city who bore witness. A body of great film and television documentary is already growing up around the terrorist attacks and our responses in the minutes, hours and days immediately after.

Concert will celebrate 20th-century composers Chamber Music on the Hill will honor composers born near the start of the 20th century at 7 p.m. Sunday in McDaniel Lounge at Western Maryland College. Part of a series at the college, the concert will feature WMC performers David Duree, Kyle Engler, Linda Kirkpatrick and David Kreider; Julie Gregorian, Esther Mellon-Thompson and Melissa Zaraya, all of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Evan Walker of Carroll Community College; and area professional musicians Lynn Griffith and Mindy Niles.

The Columbia Orchestra and its conductor, Jason Love, have designated their concerts of 2000-2001 as "An American Century Season." True to that spirit, the orchestra will open its 23rd year of concertizing Saturday evening with a program of works by Aaron Copland, the most quintessentially American composer of them all. Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," "Lincoln Portrait" and Suite from "Our Town" will be performed at the 8 p.m. concert in Jim...

This week should prove an embarrassment of riches musically.Tonight at 8: 15, the newly formed Towson University Chamber Orchestra makes its debut in the university's Center for the Arts Concert Hall. With Mark McCoy on the podium, the orchestra will perform Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde" and works by Stravinsky.Tickets, at $4 and $6, are available at the Center for the Arts box office or by calling 410-830-2787.Wednesday night at 8 p.m., Benjamin Pasternack, the newest member of the Peabody Conservatory's piano faculty, will give his first solo recital in Friedberg Hall.

Although Virgil Thomson's place in the pantheon of American composers is secure, it is as a music critic that his influence is most obvious.His daily reviews at New York's Herald Tribune (1940-1954) were much admired for intelligence and sophistication. Those qualities could turn cruel in the composer's elegant prose. And the gratuitous nastiness some newspaper readers detect in music criticism today is partly Thomson's legacy. In this respect, Thomson was the mother of us all.As it happens, it is "The Mother of Us All," Thomson's second opera (and second collaboration with Gertrude Stein)