Copland House and Bluestone Farm—Music World Destinations

The iconic composer Aaron Copland’s home in Cortlandt Manor, New York, and a recently acquired satellite site in nearby Brewster, are becoming nurturing creative centers for the arts

By George Gelles

Aaron Copland at the piano in his home, Rock Hill, in Cortlandt Manor, New York, c.1975.
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November 27, 2024
“We have all stepped into the future.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Michael Boriskin, the voice and vision of Copland House, thus welcomed a small audience of friends to an informal concert at Bluestone Farm, an idyllic expanse in the town of Brewster, in New York State’s Lower Hudson Valley, where Putnam County meets Connecticut.

Earlier this year, the property was acquired by Copland House, an organization that is a living tribute to Aaron Copland, arguably America’s foremost 20th-century composer. His ballet Rodeo and the celebratory Fanfare for the Common Man are among his most appealing masterworks—but perhaps you’ve also heard others, including Lincoln Portrait and Appalachian Spring.

Entering Bluestone Farm, a wooded 24 acres, you drive past a Greek Revival residence whose Doric columns and black window shutters proclaim its pedigree. The main structure, a sprawling tripartite building to the left, through the years housed varied activities of the Episcopal Church. Known as Melrose Convent, it served as home to an order of nuns. Then it became Bluestone Farm and Living Arts Center—a working farm founded on principles of organic agriculture. After that, it morphed into a day school—the Melrose School. But for the past ten years, until June 2024, Bluestone was unused.

The Copland House Ensemble rehearsing at Bluestone Farm. From left: Siwoo Kim, violin; Amir Hoshang Farsi, flute; Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin, piano; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello; and Moran Katz, clarinet.
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What comes next—“the future”—will be the transformation of Bluestone Farm into a multidisciplinary, multidimensional center for music and its sister arts. (Bluestone, should you ask, is a variety of dark blue-gray sandstone that was first mined locally, starting around 1830, in Kingston, New York, a country mile from Brewster.)

Boriskin described the occasion at Bluestone Farm as “a preview event.” The afternoon’s charmer was a piano trio composed in 1937 by a Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein. Scored for piano, violin, and cello, it was melodically taut, rhythmically incisive, and impeccably crafted to a professional sheen, and it was expertly performed by the Copland House Ensemble. Although it lacked the depth of feeling the teenage composer would later find, let’s give it an A+.

“A national glory” is how Copland was praised in 1948, at the apex of his career, by our country’s then–most prescient music critic, Virgil Thomson, of the New York Herald-Tribune. Since then, Copland’s eminence has only grown.

Brooklyn-born with the new century in 1900, he died in 1990. His former residence—the heart of Copland House—is a spacious multilevel mid–20th century home called Rock Hill, located by the Hudson River in Cortlandt Manor, where he lived from 1960 until his passing. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, and in 2008 it was named a National Historic Landmark—the only one in the country connected with a figure from the world of classical music.

An exterior view of Rock Hill, Copland’s beloved, decades-long residence.
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In a weekend visit to both Bluestone Farm and Rock Hill, Michael Boriskin was an ideal tour guide. For almost a quarter century, he has served as both artistic director and executive director of Copland House. A Juilliard graduate, he had, and maintains, a formidable career as a pianist known for definitive performances, in concert and on recordings, of some of the most challenging contemporary scores.

He is known, too, for a vast range of significant collaborations. “I’m kind of constitutionally schizoid,” he told me, “because at heart I’m a concert pianist. That’s what I do; I’m an artist, a performing artist…. But also I’ve always been interested in putting people together.” He continued, “What’s held me in good stead in this position at Copland House is that it’s another aspect of performing.” Perhaps so. But performance without passion is empty, and it’s Boriskin’s drive and commitment that keep Copland House moving forward.

Fresh out of Juilliard, he joined colleagues in presenting a summer festival in Providence, Rhode Island; later he was soloist with the American Ballet Theatre when it performed the rarely heard Second Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky. Choreographer George Balanchine set the piece in 1941 for the American Ballet Caravan, one of the precursors of the New York City Ballet. Then known as Ballet Imperial, it is now known, prosaically, as Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 2.

Boriskin went on to collaborate with the Mark Morris Dance Company and was music director of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project. In addition, he served on a committee at the University of Southern California that hoped to acquire the archives of two giants among 20th-century composers, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. He was also artistic adviser to the New York Philharmonic in 2000, when the orchestra celebrated the Copland Centenary—and the list goes on.

In the late 1990s, a steering committee was tasked with planning the future of Copland’s residence, and Boriskin was a member. At the request of his committee colleagues, he arranged several successful performances at Rock Hill. When it was time for the committee to name a leader for Copland House, the obvious became the inevitable, and Boriskin was chosen.

Copland’s home was destined for the real estate market after the composer’s death. But a group of neighbors—not people in the arts, just neighbors—coalesced in their conviction that the home should be saved to honor its former occupant.

“It was just such a noble and pure idea for them to have done this,” Boriskin explained, “to have saved Copland’s home and put it into the service of American music. These folks were not in the music business; they had no artistic experience; they had no personal money; they had no connection to money. Mrs. Rockefeller was not on the board, you know…. And out of steely determination they went to the town of Cortlandt Manor, and they said, ‘Look, we have this idea.’

“And the short of it is that an arrangement was made between the executors and the town, and the town then turned around and made an arrangement with this new organization, Copland House. I’ve often said that Copland would have been half-thrilled and half-embarrassed by all the fuss, because he was so unpretentious and always so modest.”

The 2024 Fellows of CULTIVATE, Copland House’s Emerging Composers Institute, on the steps of Rock Hill. From left: JaRon Brown, Kevin Kay, Claire Hu, Celka Ojakangas, Sofia Rocha, and Connor Elias Way.
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Nobody has a clearer view than Boriskin of the organization’s past and vast potential. Since the start, Copland House has been best known, by the musical community if not by the general public, for offering creative isolation to both accomplished young composers and those in mid-career. Begun at Thanksgiving 1998, its Residency Awards program became the foundational Copland House initiative. Complementing it is the CULTIVATE Emerging Composers Institute, through which six gifted composers at the start of their professional careers, designated as Fellows, are brought to New York each year for an intensive, all-scholarship, weeklong creative workshop and mentoring. Around the same time, wider audiences across the U.S. came to know the organization through concerts, broadcasts, and, later, recordings by its resident chamber-music group, which was first known as Music from Copland House (and then the Copland House Ensemble).

Here’s how the Residencies work: A blue-ribbon jury assesses the prior work and future promise of interested composers. Successful applicants, approximately eight to 12 annually, live in the house where Copland lived and compose in the studio where Copland composed, for a few weeks or longer, with all expenses covered. Fellows, already more established, meet for an intense week of workshopping with music-industry colleagues. From the program’s inception to the present, 306 composers have been chosen for Residency Awards or as Fellows.

Other retreats offer similar opportunities to mixed communities of artists: writers, painters, and choreographers, as well as composers; the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, comes quickly to mind. But in its singular focus, Copland House is unique as an incubator for future generations of American composers.

Boriskin also has formed a resident ensemble composed of crackerjack instrumentalists, collectively called Music from Copland House, or occasionally known as the Copland House Ensemble. With programs that serve generous helpings of Copland’s chamber music, they tour nationwide and perform throughout Greater New York—at Merkin Concert Hall, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Merestead Estate in Mount Kisco—and they venture up the Hudson to appear at the Maverick Concerts in Ulster County. Recently, Copland House collaborated with the West Point Band—a largely hidden asset of the U.S. Army’s service academy—in a program of American Songs and Dances and a performance of Symphony for Band, by the American composer and Copland contemporary Roy Harris.

For the future of Copland House, Bluestone Farm is pure potential—37,000 square feet, every inch usable. A visionary’s visionary, Boriskin sees the venue fulfilling multiple goals that would expand and enrich Copland House and the services it provides. In an interview with The Journal News, serving Rockland and Westchester Counties, he mentioned a panoply of programs, including artists’ residencies, multi-arts projects, intensive concert series, learning projects, and outreach to diverse populations that could become part of the Copland House community. Referring to the Bluestone Farm expansion, Boriskin affirmed that “Rock Hill will always be Copland House’s institutional and inspirational home.”

An aerial view of Bluestone Farm.
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In a walk-through of Bluestone as it exists today, I quickly found a favored space—a small chapel ready-made for intimate performances. Its wood-beamed ceiling supports wrought-iron chandeliers that wed delicacy and strength, and it boasts an organ made by Casavant, the storied Canadian firm founded in Montreal in 1879, and among the leaders in its field.

I came late to Copland. As an undergraduate, I took both the best and worst from a music faculty of high distinction. I grew to appreciate that audience members and musicians alike must honor the interdependence of music history, music theory, and performance practice; each aspect informs the others. But I was exposed, as well, to a doctrine, very much alive at the time, that suggested abstruse, arcane compositions were preferable to those more accessible.

When I started my career as a critic, a certain strain of Copland seemed ubiquitous. Every dance program I attended included Rodeo, composed for Agnes de Mille, or Appalachian Spring, for Martha Graham. If I was fortunate, there was Billy the Kid—the one true masterpiece created by dancer-choreographer Eugene Loring. Every vocal recital included not the trenchant settings of Emily Dickinson but the Old American Songs, Copland’s folk-song settings. By that time, he had composed plenty of difficult music, thrillingly difficult. But I was too incurious to know this. All I could hear was anodyne Americana. Inexperienced and judgmental, I was unfair in print. I heard from the composer, who was saddened, perhaps aggrieved, that I, that anyone, could be so injudicious.

It was an experience that scarred the soul, but one that set me on a path to discover all possible aspects of Copland, the man and his music. It’s a journey that to this day continues.

Copland House is open year-round for tours by appointment, which can be scheduled at office@coplandhouse.org or (914) 788.4659. General information about concerts, events, and other activities is available at www.coplandhouse.org.

An Opinionated Guide to Several Copland Compositions (With Links to Performances)

A worksheet of Copland’s output lists 120 compositions. Dating from 1920 to 1982, they include two operas; three numbered symphonies and other music for orchestra; six ballets; seven film scores, one of which, for The Heiress, won a 1950 Academy Award; music for voice, for piano, for chamber ensembles. They range harmonically from conventional tonality to 12-tone techniques; and they can be stylistically simple or emotionally exhausting. They are never naive, and each note in every piece is always considered and made to count. As Boriskin said in our recent conversation, “There was no slumming in whatever project he undertook.”

It is obviously impossible to comment on each of Copland’s works, but let me mention one from each decade of his creativity.

The Cat and the Mouse (Le Chat et la Souris), from 1920, is his first published work (and it was published by Durand, no less—the storied Parisian publisher of Debussy, Ravel, and many others in the French musical pantheon). It’s a fanciful, whimsical hide-and-seek for solo piano. The composer performs it here:

According to the composer-critic Arthur Berger, Piano Variations (1930) “essentially … was like nothing ever conceived before,” and I believe he’s referring not just to music by Copland. Berger cites the economy of means, the primacy of every note, and the imaginative power sustained through the permutations of each variation. It was composed, we are told, episodically. Copland once explained that he would jot down motivic ideas and musical phrases as they occurred. Then, when the moment felt right, he would fit them together. “I don’t compose; I assemble materials,” he famously said. Hearing the piece in performance, as it flows seamlessly, inevitably, from the initial theme to the concluding 20th variation, perhaps belies this assertion. Listen to the composer at the keyboard:

Copland’s Third Symphony (1946), premiered by the Boston Symphony, led by Serge Koussevitsky, remains unequaled among American symphonies. Arthur Berger, again, cites the sentiments it evokes: “Its general character is that of a glorified and expansive hymn—of prayer, of praise, of sorrow, of patriotic sentiment.” Written at the end of World War II, it allows for great and exuberant theatricality, as Leonard Bernstein, Copland’s other great advocate besides Koussevitsky, displays in this performance with the New York Philharmonic:

More to my liking is a thoughtful, ardent performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, led by the composer:

When the last movement ends—it is based on Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man—you want to wipe away the tears, stand up, and salute the flag.

Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950), each of which is dedicated to a fellow composer, is Copland’s most serious encounter with poetry. Dickinson’s verses sear, and Copland complements the words with music of equal intensity. They are sung here by mezzo-soprano Martha Lipton, with Copland the pianist:

In the 1960s, Copland wrote Connotations and Inscape for Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Both utilize 12-tone techniques pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Discussing Connotations, Copland said that serial technique “freshened [his] harmonic palette … here was a new way of moving tones about that had a freshening effect on one’s technique and approach.” The works, however, have proved problematic, and unlike virtually all of Copland’s other orchestral music, they have not entered the repertory. The New York Philharmonic is led here by Bernstein in Connotations:

The Emerson Connection

Copland’s studio at Rock Hill is connected to the home’s living room by a hallway lined with bookshelves filled with volumes of literature, history, and philosophy; books on music are found in his studio. On an upper shelf, I spotted The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Ralph Rusk, a Columbia University professor and the foremost authority in his day on all things Emerson; his Life… won a National Book Award in 1950. Waldo, as Emerson preferred to be called, was in the forefront of Transcendentalism, the 19th-century movement that united literary, spiritual, artistic, and political aspirations. Yet Rusk’s book touches only lightly on the centrality of music to Transcendentalist thought.

In The American Scholar, Emerson’s well-known speech from 1837, he “argued not only for a new American culture, freed from European bondage, but also for a rebirth of an intellectual and artistic life that was inextricably bound up with the life of the spirit.” Emerson, as time allowed, was a concertgoer. In Europe he heard famed soprano Adelina Patti, pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and violinist Niccolò Paganini, “the man,” he later said, “who could extract rapture from a catgut”—a reference to the violin’s strings. He also saw the production of a lavish new grand opera by Daniel Auber, a composer then famous, now forgotten.

Gustave III premiered at the Paris Opera in 1833 and tells a story of a Swedish regicide. (The story was later retold by Giuseppe Verdi in his great opera Un ballo in Maschera). Emerson, Rusk relates, “was struck by the good taste and imposing effect of the dancing and by the brilliant scenic decoration.”

Though music was not his central concern, Emerson valued it and in 1862 wrote a poem titled “Music,” a paean to its charms (“Let me go where’er I will/I hear a sky-born music still”).

Of greater significance, he earlier addressed the art’s essentials in the fifth volume of his Journals, from the mid-1830s: “So music is an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, when, and whereto.”

Is it farfetched to imagine Copland in his studio, at his desk or piano, gazing southwest through a wall of windows at the acres of trees that envelop Rock Hill? His finest compositions were by 1960 behind him, though he still searched throughout his last decades for the inspiration found earlier in abundance. Those “dim secrets” from his prime he bequeathed us, and they are gifts that will earn eternal gratitude from endless generations.

George Gelles was the dance critic of The Washington Star from 1970 to 1976 and the author of A Beautiful Time for Dancers. He thinks of himself basically as a musician—a horn player—who just happened not to play professionally for 37 years. Gelles has also written about music and dance for The New York Times, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Musical America, and lectured on music and dance at the Smithsonian, George Washington University, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And from 1986 to 2000, he was the executive director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

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