American composer Aaron Copland was the first American student of French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and spent the years from 1921-1924 studying with her at Fontainebleau. While there, he met many of the most important artists of the day, including the Russian émigré conductor Sergey Koussevitzky. These facts are all central to the creation of Copland's first great piece of music, his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. Koussevitzky commissioned the work from Copland in anticipation of Boulanger's first appearance in America in 1925. Copland wrote the symphony while working as a pianist at a resort in Pennsylvania. The work was premiered in Carnegie Hall by the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. Although composed in what was then the height of the avant garde musical style—that is, with complex and pugnacious rhythms, tonal but pungent harmonies, and with spiky and brilliant orchestration—Copland's symphony is clearly the music of a young man who had studied the most advanced music of Europe and who was determined to make a huge impact with his first widely publicized piece. But it is also the music of an American composer: The long lines of the melodies and the specific shapes and intervals of the themes could only have been written by a composer born in the United States.

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