Symphony No. 3

Copland's Third Symphony (1946) is his largest and most ambitious orchestral work, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and premièred by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky. Its finale — a reworking of the Fanfare for the Common Man — culminates in one of the most exhilarating orchestral perforations in American music, and the work as a whole combines Copland's characteristic open textures and wide intervals with a structural ambition that places it firmly in the tradition of the Romantic symphony. Described by the composer as expressing "the optimistic, affirmative nature of the American people," it is the central work of 20th-century American symphonic writing.