Born to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900, Aaron Copland eventually became the most distinctive voice in American music. While many of his early compositions were in the vein of less accessible twentieth-century music, Copland gradually grew concerned with this state of affairs. As he writes,
During the mid-1930s, I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. The old ‘special’ public of the modern music concerts had fallen away….It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.
Copland turned to folk and popular music for inspiration, and in so doing, launched the most productive period of his career. In 1935, he composed El Salón México, drawing on Mexican folk music to produce a new sound. He also began writing film scores, such as those for “Of Mice and Men” (1939), “Our Town” (1940), and “The Heiress” (1949). Ballet proved to be another creative outlet. In the early 40s, Copland composed two of his most famous: Rodeo, written in 1942 (the same year the US formally entered World War II), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring (1944). In 1942, Copland composed his inimitable and extraordinarily famous Fanfare for the Common Man in fulfillment of a commission by Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
Appalachian Spring was the third and last of Aaron Copland’s “Americana” dances (after Billy the Kid and Rodeo.) Much more introspective and lyrical than the previous “Western” works, Appalachian Spring was composed for Martha Graham. As Copland noted, “the music of the ballet takes as its point of departure the personality of Martha Graham.” While the ballet’s working title was “Ballet for Martha,” the final iteration of its name—taken from a poem by Hart Crane—refers to a spring or brook in the Appalachian Mountains, not the season. Edwin Denby summarized the ballet in the Herald Tribune as follows:
. . . a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end, the couple is left quiet and strong in their new house.
Copland scored the original ballet for chamber ensemble, subsequently arranging Appalachian Spring for full orchestra. It is in this form that the work is most famous. In his notes for the suite’s premiere in 1945, Copland described the eight sections as follows: