Appalachian Spring

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Appalachian Spring (German: not - as is often wrongly assumed in English - spring in the Appalachians , but Appalachian spring ) is a well-known ballet music by the American composer Aaron Copland . The work was premiered in October 1944 and is widely used, especially as an orchestral suite .

Emergence

Copland wrote the ballet, which for three ten-member chamber orchestra set is, at the request of the choreographer and dancer Martha Graham , financed by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge . While the work was being written, Copland himself wrote that it was very stupid to write something like a ballet and that the scores in question would not last long historically. In 1945 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the ballet .

In 1945, Copland rewrote the ballet as an orchestral suite, with most of the work being preserved. Both the ballet and the orchestral version were received very positively by the audience, even if the orchestral suite played the more important role in the composer's growing popularity. In 1972 Boosey & Hawkes published a version of the suite that merged the structures of the orchestral suite with the cast of the original ballet: double string quartet, double bass, flute, clarinet, bassoon and piano. All three versions are still listed frequently today.

Originally, Copland had given the work no title and simply referred to it as "Ballet for Martha". Shortly before the premiere beat Graham "Appalachian Spring", a name from the poem The Dance of Hart Crane , even though it has no direct relationship to the ballet plot. Copland was later often amused when listeners told him how well he had captured the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains in his music.

Appalachian Spring premiered on October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, with Graham dancing the lead role. The set was designed by the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi .

construction

The plot of the ballet tells of a springtime for the American pioneers in the 1800s after they built a new farmhouse in Pennsylvania . The main roles include a newlywed couple, a revival preacher and his followers.

The orchestral suite is divided into eight movements, which Copland describes as follows:

  1. Very slowly. Introducing the actors, one at a time, in full light.
  2. Fast. A sudden outbreak of the unison strings in A major arpeggios opens the action. An upscale and religious mood is the key expression of this scene.
  3. Moderate. Duo of the bride and her fiancé, a tense and passionate scene.
  4. Quite fast. The revival minister and his flock. Folksy feel, memories of square dancing and country fiddlers.
  5. Even faster. Solo dance of the bride, anticipation of motherhood. Opposites of joy, fear and amazement.
  6. Very slowly (like at the beginning). Transitional scene to a musical reminiscence of the introduction
  7. Calm and flowing. Everyday scenes of the bride and her husband as farmers. Five variations of a shaker theme . The theme, performed by a solo clarinet, comes from a collection of shaker melodies compiled by Edward D. Andrews. The melody, Simple Gifts , received the text "'Tis a Gift to be Simple" in this collection, but later also forms the basis for a variation that Sydney Carter arranged as a hymn in 1963, with a different text and the title Lord of the Dance . In the suite, the melody and its variations remain purely instrumental.
  8. Moderate. Coda . The bride joins the neighbors. In the end, the couple is “calm and strong in their new house”. Muted strings intone a calm, prayer-like chorale passage. In the end, the topics of the introduction are taken up again.

The original ballet version is divided into 14 movements. The movements that were not recorded in the orchestral suite are all between the seventh and the last movement.

The seventh movement, the variations of the shaker melody “Simple Gifts” (from 1848), is the most famous section of ballet and has been used for numerous television commercials. Copland himself published various arrangements of this movement for wind orchestra (1958) and orchestra (1967) under the title "Variations on a Shaker Melody". Each variation takes up the simple theme and varies it in key, accompaniment, registration, dynamics, timbre and tempo. The second variation presents a lyrical arrangement in lower registers, while the third forms a stark contrast to this in a fast staccato . The last two variations of this section only use an excerpt from the folk melody, first as a pastoral variation, then as a majestic conclusion. In the ballet, but not in the suite, there is a longer intermediate section that leads away from the folk melody and anticipates the two final variations.

literature

  • Roger Kamien: Music. An appreciation. 3rd letter edition. Mcgraw-Hill, Boston MA 1997, ISBN 0-07-036521-0 .

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