Aaron Copland, born and raised in a small Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, worlds away from the sophistications of Carnegie Hall, helped define American music. His “vernacular” style, honed to perfection in the 1930s and 1940s with ballets like Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo, almost single-handedly reinvented American classical music and shaped such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein and John Cage. This PBS website provides a fascinating biography of the man as well as Michael Tilson Thomas’s hour long episode of Keeping Score. Entitled “Copland and the American Sound,” the episode is a great introduction to the “music that gave Americans a sense of identity.”