Aaron Copland

The Kennedy Center Honors is an annual honor given to those in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture.

A basketball player's father must try to convince him to go to a college so he can get a shorter prison sentence.

From 1958 through 1973, renowned conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra thrilled audiences with wonderful concert experiences presented in a sparkling music-with-commentary format: the Young People's Concerts.

In 1840s New York, the uneventful and boring days of the daughter of a wealthy doctor come to an end when she meets a dashing poorer man — who may or may not be after her inheritance.

From the Giovanni Agnelli Auditorium in Turin: Aaron Copland, Danzon Cubano; Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas brasileiras No. 2; Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story symphonic dances. Conductor John Neschling. RAI National Symphony Orchestra.

A prescient documentary about city planning, which presents idyllic suburbs and nuclear families as a solution to the chaos, poverty and social decay of industrialized inner cities.

An intellectually disabled giant and his level headed guardian find work at a sadistic cowboy's ranch in depression era America.

A young rape victim tries desperately to pick up the pieces of her life, only to find herself at the mercy of a would-be rescuer.

Early Lindsay Anderson industrial film promoting Sutcliffe's conveyors. Three different uses of Sutcliffe's conveyor installations.

Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century. We see birth, life and death in this small community.

Peter Miles stars as Tom Tiflin, the little boy at the heart of this John Steinbeck story set in Salinas Valley. With his incompatible parents -- the city-loving Fred and country-happy Alice -- constantly bickering, Tom looks to cowboy Billy Buck for companionship and paternal love.

A Ukrainian village must suddenly contend with the Nazi invasion of June 1941. Later re-edited and released as "Armored Attack."

A filmed version of Aaron Copland's most famous ballet, with its original star, who also choreographed.

Led by the conductor Zahia Ziouani and the choreographer Mourad Merzouki, a humanist concert combining classical music, contemporary creation, dance and world traditions.

At the close of the 74th ARD International Music Competition, the best clarinetists, trumpeters, and pianists perform at the winners' concert. They are accompanied by one of the world's most renowned ensembles: the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sasha Scolnik-Brower.

Produced by the U.S. Office of War Information, this short dramatizes the uneasy but ultimately hopeful integration of European war refugees into the small town of Cummington, Massachusetts. Narrated over silent images with a score by Aaron Copland, it blends documentary style and propaganda, underscoring both cultural tension and community acceptance.

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”

German-Brazilian production on the life of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.

A film with very little dialogue. Set in the Catskills of 1896 – 1916, a farmer buries his deceased wife atop a nearby mountain, then makes the difficult decision to give up his newborn son, Jonathan. Later in 1916, Jonathan returns to confront his past. The only real dialogue is a voice over of the father reading a letter he wrote to his son explaining himself.

From the Rai Arturo Toscanini Auditorium in Turin: Johann Sebastian Bach – Anton Webern: Fugue (Ricercata) for 6 voices from *The Musical Offering* BWV 1079 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concerto in A major K. 622 for clarinet and orchestra – Aaron Copland: Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra – Igor Stravinsky. Conductor: John Axelrod.