Appalachian Spring: ballet suite (1944)

Very slow – Fast – Moderato – Fast – Still faster – As at first (slow) – Calm and flowing – Moderato

Copland’s Appalachian Spring was one of three ballets – the others were Hindemith’s Hérodiade and Milhaud’s Jeux de printemps – commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for the Martha Grahms Company to perform at the Library of Congress in 1944. Much the most successful of the three, it was arranged a year later as a concert suite, the composer cutting ten minutes from the ballet and expanding the original ensemble of 13 instruments to full orchestra. A later arrangement, which preserves the suite form but restores the music to its Library of Congress instrumental proportions (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and 9 strings), is arguably closer to the spirit of the ballet and the Pioneer period in which it is set.

Appalachian Spring is based on a spring-time Pioneer celebration round a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the 19th century. The central figures are the young Husbandman and his Bride who are to occupy the new house – but not before they have received the blessing and advice of a Revivalist Preacher, a Pioneer Woman and other neighbours. The Very slow first of the eight movements, which are played without a break, sets the wide-open Appalachian scene and introduces the characters in turn. It is followed by a Fast, characteristically vigorous barn dance and then a Moderato section in which the assembled company prays together and the Husbandman dances a solo before he is joined by his Bride in a love duet. Another country dance, the Fast fourth movement broadens out towards the end to make way for the wisdom of the Pioneer Woman. The Bride dances a solo to a Still faster variation on the Fast barn dance and, at the point where the rhythms assume a Stravinskyian energy, the Husbandman joins her. The As at first sixth movement recalls the opening of the ballet and brings the Preacher’s blessing.

The climax of the work is the Calm and Flowing and ever more expansive series of variations on the Shaker tune “Simple gifts,” a dance song written by Joseph Bracket in 1848, to which Copland was to return in his Old American Songs in 1952. A closing, reflective Moderato leaves the couple “quiet and strong in their new house.”