CBS Television · Public domain

A composer who set out in the 1930s to make American classical music sound like something ordinary audiences could recognize as their own, and largely succeeded: Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man built an open, wide-horizon sound that is still shorthand for "American" in film and concert music. He trained in Paris under Nadia Boulanger before deliberately shifting from a modernist style to this more accessible "vernacular" one, and worked across ballet, opera, chamber music and film scores.