Copland House Ensemble

THE COPLAND HOUSE ENSEMBLE has long welcomed and championed musical dreamers, explorers, and game-changing innovators of all backgrounds and identities, who have changed the way we engage with the world. Offering “a spellbinding journey” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) across 150 years of America’s vast musical landscape, the Ensemble links centuries and cultures within exhilarating human and historical narratives, celebrating classic and forgotten voices from the past, and today’s established and rising composers.

Based at the unique creative center for American music and the arts at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home near New York City and its new satellite venue at Bluestone Farm, the Ensemble’s “polished, communicative, and colorful playing” (Opera News) has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR (including Tiny Desk Concerts), and Euro-Radio. The only wide-ranging American repertory ensemble in the U.S., it has been engaged by Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Universities of Chicago and Virginia, the Bard, Caramoor, Bowdoin and Ecstatic Music Festivals, and many other leading North American venues. It also presents two mainstage series at Elebash Hall at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Copland House at Bluestone Farm. The Ensemble has also recorded for the Arabesque, Koch International, and Copland House Blend labels, and commissioned nearly 100 works. Inspired by Copland’s peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, it presents a wide variety of award-winning educational and community outreach activities.

Founded in 1999, the Copland House Ensemble’s “carefully-crafted programs, beautifully and seductively played” (The Los Angeles Times) range from America’s era of candlelight and cobblestone through urbanization and global emergence to the present. Its five-instrument core – flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano – is repertory-driven, expanding and contracting from two to thirteen performers, who have been hailed as “excellent musicians in vital performances … Copland would have been proud of all of them” (Chicago Tribune).

THE COPLAND HOUSE ENSEMBLE is the internationally-acclaimed, touring resident ensemble based at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home near New York City (www.coplandhouse.org), an award-winning creative center for American music. Hailed as “bold, adventurous, and superb” (The New Yorker) and for “illuminating essential truths about the music” (The New York Times), the ensemble occupies a special place as the only wide-ranging American repertory ensemble journeying widely across 150 years of the U.S. musical landscape. Drawing from an active repertory of 300 works by over 100 American composers, reaching back into the 19th century and forward to newly-created pieces, the ensemble’s musical adventures embrace Harlem jazz clubs, Southern churches, urban soundscapes, the majesty of the heartland and the American West, the sounds of Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, and the literary voices of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Billy Collins. The ensemble has been engaged by Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Miller Theatre, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Merkin Hall, the Bard, Cape Cod, Caramoor, Ecstatic, and Sonic Music Festivals, and many other leading North American presenters, and collaborated with NPR and Euro-Radio on a special concert of American music aired in over 20 countries. MCH records for Arabesque, Koch International, and COPLAND HOUSE BLEND, and is regularly featured on its two main-stage series at Elebash Hall at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Copland House at Bluestone Farm.