[Above: portion of letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Original in the Library of Congress’s Aaron Copland Collection.]
[“Appalachian Spring (7th Movement)” (about 13:30 long)]
[…or, if you’d prefer, the whole thing (about 35:57)]
Note: If you’re interested in the early history of “Simple Gifts,” rather than its resurrection in the 20th century, you might want to begin with Part 1 of this two-part series, posted a few days earlier.
In late 1942, choreographer/dancer Martha Graham first approached composer Aaron Copland. She hoped he could score a new ballet for her troupe. She had a grant from the Library of Congress’s Coolidge foundation to fund the work, but at that point she didn’t know the details of the project — certainly not the title. She hoped to premiere it in the auditorium of the Library in Washington, DC, within a year.As you can see from the portion of the letter reproduced at the top of this post, as of the following spring Copland had heard no more from her about the new ballet and moved on to other projects. But by June, 1943, he’d received Graham’s first notes; by July, he’d managed to compose the first third of the ballet. The premiere date was now set for October 30, at the Library of Congress as Graham had hoped. (One constraint: the orchestra would be limited to 13 musicians, because of the small size of the orchestra pit there.)
What Copland knew about the ballet at this point was the general story it would tell. It would be about a young farming couple in the hills of Pennsylvania, early in the 19th century. Graham hoped it might capture of the same spirit as Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (1938). Of course, with the US and the world in the grip of war — and because the life of a pioneer farming couple would not have been easy — it could not be too sweet and sentimental. Importantly, it still had no title. (Copland settled on Ballet for Martha as his working title.)
But it did have a main theme, one which Copland had found almost by accident.
