You’d be hard-pressed to name a piece of music more quintessentially “American” than Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Since its Washington

premiere in 1944, Copland’s balletic collaboration with choreographer Martha Graham has come to embody the American spirit arguably more than any other work. Music historians frequently laud its critical role in defining the American style and, along with a handful of his other “patriotic” works, it earned the composer an oft-repeated, and rather enviable epithet: “dean of American composers”. At a time of global conflict, its straightforward and light-hearted aesthetic gave people much-needed respite from the bleak reality of war, and reason to hope for a better future.

Yet what is it exactly about this enduringly popular work that is so American? Considering many of his contemporaries were also penning emblematically American works at that time, could Copland’s masterly

work have been solely responsible for the development of the American sound? And just why has Appalachian Spring endured while so many other “Americanist” works of that time have fallen into obscurity?

Aaron Copland’s background is as far from Appalachian as you could imagine. The son of Jewish migrants from Russia, he was born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900. His brother was proficient on the violin and his mother, an avid amateur pianist and singer, saw to it that Aaron had his first piano lessons. As a young man, Copland allegedly declared that his goal as a composer was to write music that would “make you feel like you were alive on the streets of Brooklyn”. Ironic, then, that his music would instead mainly be remembered for its vivid evocation of America’s rural heartland. After a period of formal lessons with Rubin Goldmark, a local music pedagogue noted for his conservative inclinations (Copland would later say of

SPRINGIN THEIR STEPS

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Did Aaron Copland accidentally invent the American sound in his expansive 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring? Ilario Colli investigates

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IN TIME OF CONFLICT, ITS AESTHETIC GAVE RESPITE FROM THE REALITY OF WAR

Copland was, in fact, already working on a third film project, The North Star (for which he received an Academy Award nomination), when he was approached with a new ballet commission by American heiress, socialite and amateur pianist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who was known for her zealous patronage of new chamber music. The ballet would tell the simple story of a wedding in rural Pennsylvania, and the brilliant and influential choreographer, Martha Graham would bring the music to life on stage with her highly communicative and idiomatic style.

Once the venue had been selected, the orchestral score completed, and the choreography finalised, all that remained to be settled was the pesky matter of a title. Copland, rather more skilled at conceiving music than he was at naming it, had thitherto referred to the work by a dryly prosaic working title: “Ballet for Martha”. And if, a few days before the first performance, Graham hadn’t chanced upon The Dance by Ohio poet Hart Crane (in whose ninth stanza, we read: O Appalachian Spring!), that’s what we might have called the work today – and you’d be forgiven for doubting that anyone would have cared for it at all.

Admittedly, Copland can’t be held entirely to blame for his lack of inspiration – all the information he initially had to go on was the vague stipulation that the ballet should have “some sort of frontier theme”. The Pennsylvania setting was decided upon only after he’d finished the score. Well after the work had entered the standard repertoire, Copland would reportedly smile in silent amusement whenever anyone complimented his accurate depiction of the Appalachian mountains. Seventy years ago this year, on October 30, 1944, in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, in its original chamber version for 13 instruments, Appalachian Spring had its world premiere, with Graham in the lead role, Erick Hawkins as the husbandman, Merce Cunningham as the revivalist, and May O’Donnell as the pioneering woman.

By all accounts, Appalachian Spring was a hit. In a review of the premiere performance, New York Times

him, “his list of approved composers ended with Richard Strauss”), the 21-year-old Copland made perhaps the most decisive move in his budding compositional career: he packed his bags and left for Paris.

The city of lights was, in the 1920s, the world’s undisputed arts capital, and exerted an irresistible pull on artistic and intellectual luminaries the world over. Paris would prove formative for Copland. He mingled with some of the generation’s most brilliant writers, composers and artists – many of them expat Americans – and took lessons with the much sought-after composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

By the time he began work on Appalachian Spring in 1943, Copland had already cemented his reputation as a leading composer in the US. He’d written widely-appealing orchestral works like the upbeat El Salón Mexico (1936), two successful ballet scores (Billy The Kid, 1938 and Rodeo, 1942), as well as the iconic Fanfare for the Common Man (1942). He was also gaining ground as a film composer and, to the general public, may have been best-known for his recent Hollywood scores for Of Mice and Men (1939) and Our Town (1940).

Above, opposite and over: Scenes from a colourful 2014 staging by the Martha Graham Dance Company versus black and white shots of Graham herself and the original cast

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critic John Martin (November, 1944) praised the ballet for its “shining and joyous” tone and called Copland’s work “the fullest, loveliest and most deeply poetical of all his theater scores.” Similarly enthusiastic, Dance Observer’s Robert Stabin (December, 1944) remarked that “Appalachian Spring works outward into the basic experiences of people living together, love, religious belief, marriage, children, work and human society.” Once Copland had made an arrangement of the score for full orchestra, the work really took off, gaining popularity and critical praise to the point of winning him a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. People instantly connected with its largely accessible style and, in a world battered by five years of global warfare, its cheerful musical ideas provided solace and comfort. As an American writer once put it, “It captured the imagination of Americans who were beginning to believe in a more prosperous future.”

Appalachian Spring’s appeal has endured to the present day, having long consolidated its status as an undisputed classic. Its influence on younger generations of American composers has been considerable, and its part in creating an iconic American musical idiom has been almost universally recognised. Australian conductor, Benjamin Northey, who has recorded the work with the Melbourne Symphony, reaffirms the conventional narrative: “Appalachian Spring is the beginning of the national sound of America - it’s become the sound of America. And it’s inspired so many composers working in this form.”

But did the American style suddenly materialize out of thin air at Appalachian Spring’s première in 1944? The answer to this question might well be found in the TV archives of American TV broadcaster CBS, of all places. On the evening of Feb 1, 1958, hundreds of thousands of American families gathered around their TV screens, hushed and excited, to watch a handsomely coiffed Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York

Philharmonic. It was the latest installment of a series of popular televised educational programs called “Young People’s Concerts”. Tonight, Bernstein would tackle the elusive question, “What is American Music?” After purveying circa 50 years of American music history, from its shaky beginnings in Eurocentric late-Romanticism to the proudly robust open sound of the ’30s and ’40s, Bernstein finally comes to rest upon none other than Copland, whose music he describes as perfectly typifying many of the characteristics of the true American style: “syncopations, wide-open spaces, simplicity and sentimentality.” Add to this otherwise satisfactory list of musical attributes the use of American folk tunes, a strong preference for diatonicism, and a peculiar kind of wildly adventurous and high-spirited melody – and we pretty much have all bases covered.

Leaving aside the philosophically troublesome question of whether musical notes can express non-musical ideas, it is revealing to examine how many of these supposedly American traits Appalachian Spring contains. We might want to get the easy one out of the way first: folk tunes. The piece famously ends with an arrangement of the Shaker melody, Simple Gifts, which

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APPALACHIAN SPRING IS THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONAL SOUND OF AMERICA. IT’S BECOME THE SOUND OF AMERICA

Copland borrowed from 19th-century preacher Joseph Brakett. The tune was a relatively well-known one, and few who heard it would have had trouble accepting it as American. Even some of the material Copland didn’t copy directly – for example, the rambunctious melodic figure of first Allegro section – sounds suspiciously like revamped American country dance music.

Diatonicism? Well, these harmonies may not be classically diatonic, but make no mistake, Copland’s work contains key signatures, major and minor pitch collections, and triadic verticalities that would have been as familiar to Beethoven as Bratwurst – he just mixes them up in unconventional ways. And how is diatonicism specifically American? Plainly put, it’s not. But if we really tried, we could argue that Copland’s motivation to write diatonically was American in nature.

Diatonic harmonies and melodies have been in our musical genetic code for at least 400 years; they fall very naturally on our ears, and speak to us like no other tonal system can. By writing with a musical vocabulary that many avant-garde composers of the time (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varèse) would have considered, at best, quaint and, at worst, irrelevant, Copland may have run the risk of appearing reactionary, but there’s no doubt he was intentionally writing music that people of all types would intuitively understand. And, in a politically tumultuous time, who didn’t need a populist voice telling them – clearly and loudly – that everything would be ok? And what could be more American than to address the common man in plain, simple language? Admittedly,

some Europeans were also writing diatonic music at that time but, with the possible exception of Hindemith, most were either doing it under threat of government censure or prosecution (Shostakovich and Prokofiev), or to screw the establishment (Poulenc and Les Six).

Pioneer melodies? Look no further than the fast section about eight minutes into the piece. The unmistakable oom-pah accompaniment, energetic melodic leaps and semiquaver-semiquaver-quaver rhythms have the American pioneer spirit written all over them. Check. Simplicity and sentimentality? Well I wouldn’t call Appalachian Spring technically simple, but – as we’ve mentioned – it speaks plainly and directly. And, with its sweetly dissonant harmonies and wistful

diatonic melodies, its sentimentality is quite apparent – at least in its slow sections. What’s American about simplicity and sentimentality? Beats me.

When Bernstein mentioned syncopations, he was referring to a specific kind: those American classical music had inherited from jazz. These syncopations – or musical accents falling on weak beats – had begun with jazz, but had, over time, become so entrenched in America’s musical psyche that they’d detached themselves from their original musical context to become generically American. However, while it’s true that Appalachian Spring is full of rhythmic quirks (which include bold rhythmic displacements and additive figures), its metric complexity owes more to the continental tradition of Stravinsky than American Jazz.

And what about wide-open spaces? You need only listen to the first minute of the piece to realise this one’s a no-brainer. The opening slow section of Appalachian Spring is, in fact, the best-known example of what music writer Alex Ross dubbed the “open-prairie” sound – slow moving textures and unresolved harmonies used to create a sense of wholesome American optimism, and capture the

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COPLAND’S WORK CONTAINS KEY SIGNATURES THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN AS FAMILIAR TO BEETHOVEN AS BRATWURST

vastness of American wilderness. As Northey puts it, “The open sound is the endlessness of the two chords – A and E Major – that begin the piece, superimposed on each other. The tonic is A, but the chord sounds like it has no root, and so it feels like it floats.”

Clearly, Copland uses many of the musical devices that are widely seen as emblematically American, but a quick look at some of the music he’d been writing during the previous decade (in particular, his ballet scores) reveals he’d test-run this musical idiom many times before. What’s more, three of his contemporaries – Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris and William Schumann – had been similarly preoccupied with the development of an American Sound, and had themselves produced work exhibiting these Americanist qualities in abundance – the pioneer melodies, the diatonicism, the folk music, the optimistic openness. So quite evidently, far from appearing suddenly from the pen of a single composer, the Americanist style slowly gestated, and was the result of a collaborative effort between like-minded artists.

But why then did Appalachian Spring endure, while Thomson’s The River suite (1937) didn’t? Why do we often hear Appalachian Spring in our concert halls, while Bill Schumann’s American Festival Overture (1939) hardly ever makes it into a concert program? Aside from the obvious argument that Copland’s work is simply better, there may be a more subtle explanation. And to get to the bottom of this, it may be helpful to draw a few comparisons between Appalachian Spring and a masterpiece composed just three years earlier by one of Copland’s most brilliant transatlantic colleagues: Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Quartet for the End of Time is, in many ways, the antithesis of Appalachian Spring. Both works were written during war years, and are attempts to come to grips with existential questions raised by war, but their aesthetic

vantage points are diametrically opposed. They are both prophetic in scope, but where Messiaen’s quartet is mystical and apocalyptic, Appalachian Spring shines with a humanistic belief in better things to come. In a world teetering on the edge of self-destruction, Europeans like Messiaen surrendered to the seemingly inevitable darkness, while Copland and many of his fellow Americans drew strength from their faith in human resilience to steer away from it.

This philosophical divergence would prove critical historically, foreshadowing a major geo-political transition. While Europe collapsed, America would spring energetically from the rubble, brimming with self-confidence. New-world outward-looking optimism would triumph over old-world melancholic introspection, bringing an era of European colonial power to an end, and ushering in a new age of American cultural and political domination. Appalachian Spring, more than any other musical work of that time, may have captured the essence of this new global era. In the words of music critic Terry Teachout, Copland’s Appalachian Spring was “the right piece at the time”. That could well be why it has become a cornerstone of orchestral repertoire, while other American concert pieces of the same epoch have passed by like so many tumbleweeds. ●

The MSO’s disc of Appalachian Spring, conducted by Benjamin Northey, is reviewed on page 68.

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BEST SPRINGSCoplandNew York Philharmonic Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein SONY COLSMK63082

Bernstein’s classic account of the suite from 1961 matches Copland’s clarity with Lennie’s dramatics.

Copland the PopularistSan Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas RCA 82876658402

Tilson Thomas’ complete version of the score is a sonic treat and brings Copland up fresh as a prairie daisy.