Sounds in the Sanctuary Concert Series Presents Pianist Michael Arnowitt

Michael Arnowitt, Piano An Aaron Copland Program Pianist, composer, and frequent event organizer Michael Arnowitt is one of today’s most creative musicians. He performs a program surveying the music of Aaron Copland, who created a distinctively American sound in classical music. Copland’s landmark compositions from the 1930s and 1940s used the energetic jazz rhythms and folksong material from different regions of the United States and Mexico, blended into his own classical music writing style to evoke our nation’s vast landscape. Arnowitt will perform music from Copland’s Four Piano Blues, Piano Variations, El Salon Mexico, and Copland’s famous Appalachian Spring. Also included on the program is Conversation at the Soda Fountain, from the music Copland wrote for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Copland travelled to Paris in the early twentieth century to study with the renowned Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau School in France, a program Arnowitt attended some 60 years later. Though Copland was influenced by his European travels and modern composers of the time, he returned to our country determined to create something uniquely American. His musical style has influenced American composers to the present day and contributed to the cultural creation of an American consciousness and character. Arnowitt’s musical landscapes and sense of touch at the keyboard have delighted audiences around the world, from his home in Vermont to Canada, Korea, Russia, and many European countries. His life and music is the subject of a documentary film, “Beyond 88 Keys” (2004). The film has been broadcast on public television and shown at festivals in Europe and the United States. His many unique creative projects include “If Music Be the Food of Love,” a program of classical and jazz music about food, simultaneously serving to the audience the food tastes that inspired the composers. For another intriguing collaboration, he combines his piano improvisations with the live creation of paintings on stage by visual artists. As a distinguished event organizer, he directed the Vermont Millennium Music Festival chronicling music from the year 1000 to 2000, and a number of large-scale fundraisers for humanitarian aid for Balkan and Syrian war refugees.