
Aaron Copland, working by candlelight in his studio in the Berkshires, 1946
Copland’s American Spring premiered 76 years ago today
Photo by Victor Kraft
Born and raised in the same urban environment that produced Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin, American composer Aaron Copland was trained in the classics but steeped in the jazz and popular Jewish music that surrounded him in childhood.
As a young composer, his stated aim was to write music that would "make you feel like you were alive on the streets of Brooklyn."
Ironically, it was music that evoked the rural American heartland that made Copland famous.
One such work — arguably his greatest — was the score for the ballet Appalachian Spring, which became one of the most recognizable and beloved pieces of American music ever written almost immediately following its world premiere on this day in 1944 — 76 years ago.
The score for Appalachian Spring was commissioned in 1942 to accompany a ballet being choreographed by a young Martha Graham.
Copland would know the work only as "Ballet for Martha" throughout its composition, having no guidance other than that the ballet would have some sort of a "frontier" theme.
In fact, the name Appalachian Spring and the setting of western Pennsylvania would be decided on only after Copland had completed his score.
Yet somehow, without having had any idea of doing so, Copland had composed a work that audiences and critics alike found brilliantly evocative of the specific time and place referenced in the title.
The most recognizable passage of Appalachian Spring is the portion Aaron Copland adapted from the Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" — "'This a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free" — which was largely unfamiliar to Americans prior to Copland's adaptation.
Copland's artful incorporation of the folk tradition with his distinctly modern sensibility is what made Appalachian Spring the transcendent work that it is.
In its review of the October 30, 1944, premiere, the New York Times praised all elements of the "shining and joyous" work: the choreography by Martha Graham; the set design by the Isamu Noguchi; and the score by Aaron Copland, which it called "the fullest, loveliest and most deeply poetical of all his theater scores....It is, as the saying goes, a natural."
Though written expressly for the ballet and for only 13 instrumentalists — a limitation dictated by the size of the orchestra pit at the Library of Congress where the premiere was held — Appalachian Spring was soon adapted into an orchestral suite, which is the form in which it became widely popular.
Appalachian Spring was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1945.
Copland and his music is perhaps more connected to the folk era of the 1960s than one might think.
In his book, Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilenz connected the dots between the American Communist world of the 1930s, the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and the folk music era of the 1960s.
Copland, who was very close to Charles Seeger, Pete’s father, wrote the film score in 1939 for Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck novella, for director Lewis Milestone.
Young Jack Kerouac saw that movie in high school and later wrote about it in Chorus 54 of his poetry book, Mexico City Blues.
Bob Dylan was greatly influenced by Kerouac’s "breathless, dynamic bop phrases," and called Mexico City Blues the first poetry to speak to him in his own American language.
Kerouac showed deep understanding for lower working class life and appreciation for Steinbeck’s writing about the box cars of American trains — a trait shared by Dylan.
Pete Seeger, who got among the first permits to sing folk music in Washington Square Park, was — with Earl Robinson and Alan Lomax — directly connected to the leftist political movements of the 1930s.
When Dylan reached Greenwich Village in 1961, the Gaslight — where he played — had earlier alternated folk musicians with beat poets. Among those poets with Allen Ginsberg.
Even so, Ginsberg and Dylan would become close. Dylan taught Ginsberg to play his harmonium and influenced the poet to perform musically in his later years.
From 1963 until Ginsberg’s death, he and Dylan would work and travel together, influencing each other with their talents.
Dylan gave Ginsberg the money to purchase a Uher tape recorder on which he composed Wichita Vortex Sutra, the great antiwar lament of the Vietnam era.
Dylan acknowledged his debt to the beats for his classic song, Chimes of Freedom.
"Making music out of nature's sights and sounds had attracted Dylan before in his mystical song Lay Down Your Weary Tune, just as Jack Kerouac had tried to render the ocean's roar as poetry in his book, Big Sur, published in 1962," said Wilentz. "Chimes of Freedom was far outside the old politics of left and right and black and white."
Thanks History.com and Sean Wilenz
Aaron Copland, 1946
Photo by Irving Penn