Asking Whether Copland’s Abstruse Works are the Exception or the Rule (Published 2016)

The eclectic composer Aaron Copland at his home in Ossining, N.Y., in 1956.Credit...Associated Press When Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic visited “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last month, it was only natural that they performed Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” (1942). Is there any work more emblematic of the dean of American music than the stirring “Fanfare,” wh