Cortlandt Manor, NY -- July 8, 2008. Make plans now for Sunday, September 21 at 5PM, when Copland House launches its 10th Anniversary season by whisking guests off to Paris After Dark, another of its scintillating, annual culinary and musical celebrations. A coterie of lovers of fine food and music at the renowned Le Bernardin will be dazzled by Master Chef Eric Ripert's culinary magic and delight in the music of several generations of Americans in Paris who followed composer Aaron Copland to the City of Lights from the 1920s on. Join Copland House as it continues its new tradition of these highly imaginative, sold-out, one-night-only events.

Amidst the chic elegance of Le Bernardin, regularly and widely ranked as one of the world's top restaurants, Chef Ripert will specially create a four-course, gastronomic tour-de-force of classic and contemporary French cuisine. Woven around his epicurean panache will be a vivacious musical buffet of compositions by Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, Philip Glass, and George Gershwin, as well as Ravel, Poulenc, and others, performed live by the internationally-acclaimed Music from Copland House ensemble and eminent guest artists.

Paris After Dark's special Guest of Honor is Copland's lifelong friend Rosamond Bernier, founder and editor of the legendary French art journal L'Oeil, former Paris-based Features Editor of Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s art lecturer extraordinaire. Gala Co-chairs are Ezriel Kornel, Katherine Petitti-Kornel, and O. Anthony Maddalena.

Ever since Franklin and Jefferson were posted to Paris in the 1770s and 80s, representing a group of breakaway former British colonies, generations of Americans have succumbed to the spell of France's allure. Copland was an avid Francophile as a teenager, and spent three years there as a young man in the early 1920s. Feeling, like so many others , that Paris was the center of the cultural universe, his sojourn was transformational, and he began to find his musical voice there. Upon his return, he actively encouraged his fellow composers (and eventually their students) to follow his path to the French capital and his iconic professor Nadia Boulanger.

Copland House's previous chef-composer galas were stunning, sold-out events: Troubadours' with Daniel Boulud and Richard Danielpour at Daniel in 2006 at Daniel was hailed as “unforgettable heavenly, heady, and divine (Westchester magazine), and Optimism at the Table with Lidia Bastianich and Aaron Jay Kernis at Del Posto last year was "a triumph (Food and Wine).

Copland House is a unique creative center for American music based at the iconic composer Aaron Copland's longtime, landmark Hudson Valley home. Listed in the National Register of Historic Place and an Official Project of the White House Save America's Treasures program, Copland House is the only composer's home in the U.S. devoted to nurturing and renewing America's rich musical heritage through a broad range of musical, educational, public, informational, and electronic-media activities.