Aaron Copland
Appalachian Spring
The difficult period of the 1930s in America became a time for American composers to rethink their musical vernacular. Composers wondered how to reach out to a struggling public. How might they find a way to connect, musically, to those who felt disenfranchised, without a voice? One method was to turn to the music of the people–the folksongs and traditional musical language that so-called serious music had seemed to ignore. Aaron Copland, whose earliest works had embraced the modernist avant garde styles he learned from the likes of Nadia Boulanger in 1920s Paris, later wrote of this time: “I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”
And so Copland began exploring, musically, the traditions that most meant “America.” He gathered musical building blocks from all around: cowboy tunes, Latin-American music, Appalachian folk tunes, Jewish melodies, African-American music. “I do not compose,” he said, “I assemble materials.” He distilled these materials into works such as El Salón México (1933), Billy the Kid (1938), Our Town (1940), Lincoln Portrait (1942), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1943-4). These works are also more accessible in form as well, from dance-hall music (El Salón México) and ballets (Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring) to a motion picture soundtrack (Our Town) and music accompanied by a speaker (Lincoln Portrait). But despite his self-deprecating remark about being just an ‘assembler,’ it was Copland’s genius for finding the memorable, evocative musical phrase that moved him from avant-garde maverick to the voice of America. It’s both amusing and inspiring that when most of us think of an “American” sound, one that evokes the wide-open spaces of the American landscape, we think of the open fourths and fifths in the harmonies written by a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.
Appalachian Spring began life as “Ballet for Martha.” In 1943, arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned a ballet from Copland, to be performed by a chamber group and dancer/choreographer Martha Graham’s troupe. Copland scored the piece for 13 musicians and divided it into 14 movements, in which Graham’s dance would depict various emblematic scenes from American pioneer life. The final title, Appalachian Spring, was assigned by Graham shortly before the work’s premiere in October of 1944 at the Library of Congress. She took the phrase from several lines by Hart Crane in his poem, “The Dance:”
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!
Note that Crane’s poem is not about the season of spring, but a geographical spring of water. Copland was highly amused by persons who complimented him on capturing the feeling of spring in the Appalachian mountains when he had, in fact, completed the piece long before the title was even assigned, and the title had nothing to do with springtime in any case. As he said in 1981, “people come up to me after seeing the ballet on stage and say, ‘Mr. Copland … when I hear your music I can just see the Appalachians and I just feel spring.’ Well, I’m willing if they are!”
The ballet was well-received, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May of 1945. Copland then orchestrated his chamber score, omitting some sections he felt were purely choreographic, and introduced the new suite in October, 1945, with the New York Philharmonic under Artur Rodzinski. The first recording was made only three weeks later, by Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony.
The ballet’s scenes center around a new bride and her husband, and depict a revivalist preacher and his sermon, the bride’s anticipation of motherhood, a house-raising, a country dance, and the moment when the bride and groom are left to contemplate their new life. The piece features a number of rhythmic variations and irregular, changing meters, giving the work a constant feeling of motion appropriate for ballet. It opens with quiet passages for several solo instruments, as each character is introduced, then a burst of unison strings in A major arpeggios begin the dance proper. Copland wrote that the section for the preacher was meant to suggest “square dances and country fiddlers,” while the bride’s solo theme should reach “extremes of joy and fear and wonder.” The most direct musical quotation is the Shaker folk song “Simple Gifts,” first played by a solo clarinet. Copland presents several variations on the melody in key, register, dynamics, tempo, and tone color, ending with a full, reverent statement by the entire orchestra. The work ends with a hushed chorale for muted strings and quiet statements by flute and clarinet similar to those in the opening, as the bride and groom greet their future together.