Sounds of America III: Appalachian Spring
What to listen for
Appalachian Spring: widely spaced notes create a sense of expansive possibilities; listen for the Shaker song “Tis a Gift to be Simple” towards the end
Harmonielehre: Listen for the trumpet solo in the second section and the gentle berceuse (lullaby) in the final section, which transforms into a massive soundwave of brass and percussion.
Listening Guide
Appalachian Spring: If you like Copland’s American sound, check out his ballet Billy the Kid, which features several cowboy songs and captures the lawless energy of the Wild West.
Harmonielehre: The pulsing rhythmic energy of Harmonielehre is also a central aspect of Adams’ dynamic Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Other works by these composers
Copland: Billy the Kid; Rodeo
Adams: The Chairman Dances; Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Aaron Copland: Suite from Appalachian Spring
Composer: born November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, NY; died December 2, 1990, North Tarrytown, NY
Work composed: 1943-4. Copland won a Pulitzer Prize for the ballet score in 1945. Copland conducted the premiere of the ballet at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 1944, the birthday of arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, to celebrate 25 years of her musical philanthropy.
World premiere: Artur Rodziński premiered the orchestral suite with the New York Philharmonic on October 4, 1945.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, bass drum, claves, orchestra bells, snare drum, cymbal, tabor, triangle, wood bloc, xylophone, piano, harp and strings.
Estimated duration: 24 minutes
Shortly before the debut of Ballet for Martha, Aaron Copland’s working title for the ballet Martha Graham had commissioned from him, the choreographer announced she had decided to name the ballet Appalachian Spring. Graham, who borrowed the words from Hart Crane’s poem “The Dance,” admitted she had chosen it simply because she liked the sound of the words together, and that it had no connection with either the location or scenario of the ballet. “Over and over again,” Copland recalled in 1981, “people come up to me after seeing the ballet on stage and say, ‘Mr. Copland, when I see that ballet and when I hear your music I can just see the Appalachians and I just feel spring.’ Well, I’m willing if they are!”
In Appalachian Spring, Copland’s affinity for folk melodies and idioms reaches its zenith. The Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” which Copland discovered in a 1940 book on Shaker culture, and the celebratory variations of its melody, form the climax of Appalachian Spring. When Copland arranged Appalachian Spring as an orchestral suite, he emphasized the song’s centrality by cutting several episodes from the ballet and changing the order of the variations. As scholar William Brooks notes, “In this context the Shaker melody came to serve as a kind of paradigm for the simplicity and authenticity of frontier America: mythical music for a mythical past.” In similar fashion Copland’s music, particularly Appalachian Spring, became the paradigm for the “American” sound of the mid-20th century.
Copland explained his musical conception: “When I wrote Appalachian Spring, I was thinking primarily about Martha and her unique choreographic style, which I knew well. Nobody else seems quite like Martha: she’s so proud, so very much herself. And she’s unquestionably very American: there is something prim and restrained, simple yet strong about her, which one tends to think of as American.”
Edwin Denby, a noted dance critic, provided program notes for the premiere of the Appalachian Spring orchestral suite in 1945: “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, that their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. 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.”
John Adams: Harmonielehre
Composer: born February 15, 1947, Worcester, MA
Work composed: 1984-85. Commissioned as part of the Meet the Composer Orchestra residency program and funded by Exxon Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
World premiere: First performed March 21, 1985, by the San Francisco Symphony led by Edo de Waart in Davies Hall, San Francisco
Instrumentation: 4 flutes (3 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (2 doubling bass clarinet ), 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, bass drum, bell tree, crash cymbal, crotales, glockenspiel, 2 marimbas, sizzle cymbal, 2 suspended cymbals, 2 tam-tams, 2 triangles, tubular bells, vibraphone, xylophone, celesta, piano, 2 harps, and strings
Estimated duration: 40 minutes
“‘Harmonielehre’ is roughly translated as ‘the book of harmony’ or ‘treatise on harmony,’ John Adams wrote in his notes for its premiere. “It is the title of a huge study of tonal harmony, part textbook, part philosophical rumination, that Arnold Schoenberg published in 1911, just as he was embarking on a voyage into unknown waters, one in which he would more or less permanently renounce the laws of tonality.”
At the time Adams was studying music at Harvard (1965-72), Schoenberg’s 12-tone aesthetic held absolute sway over contemporary classical music. As a young composer, Adams struggled with his conflicting feelings about Schoenberg’s overwhelming influence. “Despite my respect for and even intimidation by the persona of Schoenberg, I felt it only honest to acknowledge that I profoundly disliked the sound of twelve-tone music,” Adams explained. “[Schoenberg’s] aesthetic was … one in which the composer was a god of sorts, to which the listener would come as if to a sacramental altar. It was with Schoenberg that the ‘agony of modern music’ had been born, and it was no secret that the audience for classical music during the twentieth century was rapidly shrinking, in no small part because of the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written.”
“Harmonielehre … was a statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future,” Adams observed some years later. “I needn’t have worried, as the huge success of popular music and our growing awareness of other non-Western traditions were already making it clear that tonal harmony was in no danger of demise … While writing the piece, I felt as if I were channeling the sensibilities of those composers I loved ...
“[Harmonielehre] is a large three-movement work for orchestra that marries the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin-de-siècle Romanticism … The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere …
“The first part is a seventeen-minute inverted arch form … pounding e minor chords at the beginning and end of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image I’d had shortly before starting the piece. In the dream, I’d watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.” The second movement, “The Anfortas Wound,” was inspired by Adams’ interest in Carl Jung’s writings about Medieval mythology, particularly the character of Anfortas, a king whose wounds could never be healed. “Anfortas symbolized a … sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression,” Adams explained. “… a long, elegiac trumpet solo floats over a delicately shifting screen of minor triads that pass like spectral shapes from one family of instruments to the other.”
“‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’” begins with a simple berceuse (cradlesong) that is as airy, serene and blissful as “The Anfortas Wound” is earthbound, shadowy and bleak,” Adams continued. “The Zappaesque title refers to a dream I’d had shortly after the birth of our daughter, Emily, who was briefly dubbed “Quackie” during her infancy. In the dream, she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals. The tender berceuse gradually picks up speed and mass … and culminates in a tidal wave of brass and percussion.”
© Elizabeth Schwartz