Suite from Appalachian Spring (1944 original orchestration)
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

[1944]

The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Aaron Copland was born in 1900 in Brooklyn. Like so many eager American artists, he spent time in the 1920s in Paris, where lessons with Nadia Boulanger helped him find his true voice. In the 1930s, visits to Mexico and a pair of ballet scores meant to evoke cowboy culture in the Southwest helped this city slicker tap into a spacious soundscape of simple intervals and pure harmonies. 

Copland began his crowning work of Americana, Appalachian Spring, in 1943. He created the ballet for the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and he worked under the title Ballet for Martha until not long before the premiere, when Graham suggested Appalachian Spring, borrowing a phrase from Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge.”

Created for the 500-seat auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, this ballet needed a compact pit orchestra, so Copland used just thirteen instruments in the original version. The next year he arranged most of the ballet into a concert suite for full orchestra. The work went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, cementing Copland’s status as the leading composer of his generation.

The wonder of Appalachian Spring is how it achieves so much using such simple and familiar musical ingredients. The first section assembles its hazy wash of consonant sonorities by enunciating plain triads and the resonant intervals of fourths and fifths. The following section energizes similarly basic materials octave leaps, triadic intervals, and descending major scales—into spry dance music. There is a tender scene for the young couple, a lively romp depicting the revivalist and his dancing minions, and then a brisk solo dance for the bride, which dissipates into a return of the gentle, triadic wash of the beginning.

The famous section that follows, starting with a theme in the clarinet, presents the tune of “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker dance song written in 1848 by Joseph Brackett. The humble melody fits seamlessly into the homespun language of Copland’s score, and the increasingly grand variations rise to a transcendental climax.

Flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, strings