Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_MAR_APR | Page 24

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APPALACHIAN SPRING
Aaron Copland
Born in Brooklyn, NY, November 14, 1900;
died in North Tarrytown, NY,
December 2, 1990
“I have been amused that people so
often have come up to me to say,
‘When I listen to that ballet of yours,
I can just feel spring and see the
Appalachians.’ But when I wrote the
music, I had no idea what Martha was
going to call it!”
So wrote Aaron Copland of the
beautiful ballet score he composed for
Martha Graham, the high priestess of
American modern dance. She named it
Appalachian Spring after a line in Hart
Crane’s poem The Bridge, from which
she also drew the ballet’s scenario; he
called it simply “Ballet for Martha.”
The two great American artists, born
in the same year, had been brought
together through the philanthropic
generosity of Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge, a visionary American
patroness who commissioned many
important works in the first half of the
20 th century. Appalachian Spring was
premiered on October 30, 1944 at the
Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. and immediately became an
American classic. The following year,
it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
In a time when American values
were being challenged by totalitarian
adversaries, Graham fashioned an
affirming scenario that drew on the
pioneer spirit that built the country.
As described in the score, the ballet
concerns “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.…A revivalist
and his followers remind the new
householders of the strange and terrible
aspects of human fate. At the end the
couple are left quiet and strong in their
new house.”