Simple Gifts (1950)

Copland’s major contribution to the song repertoire is the Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson assembled over a period of six years between 1944 and 1950. Towards the end of that period - in the hope, he said, “of recharging my inspiration” - he turned to a less demanding project, which was to arrange for voice and piano a series of five 19th-century American tunes selected from a variety of traditional sources. They were first performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1950 and proved to be so successful on that occasion, as on their first American performance by William Warfield and Copland himself a few months later, that he had a second set ready by the middle of 1952. “Simple Gifts,” the universal favourute in the first set, is based on a dance song written by Joseph Bracket, an Elder of the Shaker community at Alfred, Maine, in 1848. Copland’s treatment, with a few astutely placed chords and an occasional abbreviated echo of the vocal line in the piano part, displays the same kind of minimally decorative but perfect craftsmanship as that of the makers of old Shaker furniture.