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PROGRAM NOTES

AARON COPLAND (1900 — 1990)
Suite: Appalachian Spring (1944)

Set in the hills of central Pennsylvania, Aaron Copland’s 13-instrument score for
this short modern ballet has a curious history. Premiered in Coolidge Auditorium
at the Library of Congress in late 1944 and filmed for television in 1958, the work’s
final set of variations on the Shaker tune “’Tis the Gift to be Simple” is well known
to concert audiences. The ballet was perfectly suited to America’s optimistic mood
at the time (starting to envision postwar reconstruction after the successful D-Day
landings in June).
The original scenario for the ballet was dreamed up by a young Martha Graham,
who was living in Greenwich Village and working out of a tiny studio above
Carnegie Hall. Commissioned in 1942, she proposed new works by Chavez and
Copland with settings ranging from Victorian England to the Civil War. Copland
negotiated slowly, taking time to complete film scores (such as The North Star, about
the German invasion of Ukraine). Graham’s goal evolved to create a “legend of
American living,” and she worked through many drafts with Copland, insisting on
a central pioneer bride (who she would play), a young husband (Erick Hawkins,
whom she would later marry), a wise woman (her close colleague May O’Donnell),
and a charismatic minister (a young, pronking Merce Cunningham); she did not
incorporate Copland’s suggestions to add Pocahontas and a runaway slave. Copland
labeled his early 1944 sketches “Ballet for Martha,” but by October 3, Graham was
inspired to change the title to echo two lines from Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930): “O
Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge; / Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward
bends.”
Isamu Noguchi’s spare, almost abstract set and furniture pieces brought a universal
elegance and openness to Graham’s choreography: he later cast Graham’s pioneer
rocking chair in bronze as a museum piece (1985). Graham had worked with
Noguchi on her earlier piece Frontier (1935, featuring an austere fence against a
blue background) and he also developed sculptures for her to inhabit, like his spiky
metal “dress of transformation” for Cave of the Heart in 1946 (she called it “a chariot
of flames”). He also designed the other two ballets premiered on October 30, 1944:
Milhaud’s Imagined Wing and Hindemith’s Mirror Before Me. All three dances are
landmark works of Americana, mostly fashioned by immigrants and first-generation
Americans: Hindemith and Milhaud had emigrated from Europe in 1940 to teach
in America, Copland grew up in a Conservative Jewish Brooklyn household to
Lithuanian parents, and Noguchi spent most of his childhood in Japan near his
poet father, so Graham was the lone third-generation American of the creators (with
roots in Pittsburgh, Plymouth, and Santa Barbara). That’s America for you.

16 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra
16 Plymouth Philharmonic Or c hestr a