If you've been listening to BBC Radio 3, you'll probably know that this week's "composer of the week" has been Aaron Copland. To hear the name is to pull up your mental Google page of standard information an American grows up with: Copland was, pre-eminently, the composer ready to say it loud, "I'm American and I'm proud" - the would-be or maybe achieved creator of an indigenous American concert style that didn't look to Europe; composer of scores for choreographers Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille; incorporator of American folk tunes (never mind that the tunes probably came from the British Isles or that the idea of so using folk music seems likely to have come from Hungarian Bela Bartok or Czech Anton Dvorak). His achievement remains. I personally may have gone to Quaker camp, where we sang "'Tis a gift to be simple", but that the hymn is no longer the province of such a specialised milieu is because of "Appalachian Spring", the Graham score that makes it a theme.

But, from the BBC, it took probably less than 90 seconds to learn what I'd never heard in all my years listening to classical music in America, living with a composer, or taking Graham-technique dance classes, and what it had never occurred to me to wonder about: that Copland was "of Lithuanian Jewish descent".

That was the first thing they needed to mention about Aaron Copland? Jesus Christ Almighty.

But why was I surprised? Hadn't they begun their biography, several years ago, of Gerald Finzi with words along the lines of "born to a British mother and a Jewish father"? And to think at the time I just thought they couldn't tell the difference between religion and nationality.

But that must have been before I heard the Radio 3 announcer refer to "the Jewish composer Mendelssohn". I had to tell my New York friends about that one. But because they couldn't believe anyone would use such a locution on the revered BBC, I eventually found an example in print, from our own Guardian Review section, in which Craig Raine wrote "the Jewish poet Max Jacob", though the man's religion or ethnicity had no relevance whatever to the portraits being discussed...