Aaron Copland's breathtakingly evocative Quiet City was finished in 1940. It was actually based on thematic material Copland had previously incorporated within a suite of incidental music written for a play by Irwin Shaw. This intensely concentrated tableau was characterized by its director as "a realistic fantasy...something which concerned the night thoughts of many very different kinds of people within a great city." Although only lightly scored for string orchestra with solo parts for English horn (cor anglais) and trumpet, Copland's Quiet City is among his most popular and successful works, a highly skilled yet nonetheless affectionate tribute to the wakeful nights of inhabitants of a great metropolis that never sleeps.

Irwin Shaw's play focused on two main characters. The first was a young Jewish boy, awestruck by the steely modernity of his city environment, yet still profoundly in touch with his own feelings and heritage. The obverse figure is that of a poor, dispossessed, and lonely man, for whom the city provides no refuge. These two personalities were portrayed in Copland's original incidental music by a jazz trumpet solo played by the Jewish boy, and a disconsolate, idly limping string theme, which according to Copland signified "the slogging gait" of a vagrant.

Quiet City, one of Aaron Copland's most internationally performed concert works, takes the form of a short through-composed suite, encapsulating the essence of Shaw's play. The music begins and ends with a depiction of the still night air of the slumbering city, invoked by the improvisatory sounds of the trumpeter, with the English horn portraying the homeless man. The spaciousness of Copland's musical textures has often been compared to the vastness of the American landscape, and Quiet City was emblematic of an urban, internalized facet of Americana. As Virgil Thompson wrote, Copland's orchestration was "plainer, cleaner-coloured, deeply imaginative...it was theatrically functional." In Quiet City as in Copland's Music for the Theatre, the genius of modernism is heard in the way each expressive idea becomes a unique emotional construct, and also part of the unfolding drama of the work.

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