![]() ![]() The following year, Copland’s music for Of Mice and Men earned him two Academy Award nominations and the National Board of Review Award. The film won immediate critical praise, as did Copland’s accessible adaptation of modernist techniques-including, daringly for the time, dissonance-to his score’s wide-open, pastoral evocations. Thanks in part to his good friend Harold Clurman of the Group Theatre, who had relocated to Hollywood, and inspired in part by Virgil Thomson’s film work, Copland finally got his foot in the door, received the Steinbeck assignment, and produced a score in his new style of “imposed simplicity” (although without the obvious borrowing from folk music or cowboy songs). Copland had been trying to break into film work since 1937 but was still known in Hollywood as a composer of modernist art music and hence was considered too difficult for American moviegoers. Aaron Copland’s first important musical project after Billy the Kid was to write the score, in 1939, for a film by the innovative director Lewis Milestone, made from John Steinbeck’s novella about hard-luck migrant workers in California, Of Mice and Men. ![]()
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