Page 288 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained
P. 288
286
THE MUSIC IS SO KNIT …
THAT IT TAKES YOU
IN VERY STRONG HANDS
AND LEADS YOU INTO
ITS OWN WORLD
APPALACHIAN SPRING (1944), AARON COPLAND
n August 1944, the dancer and 90 minutes long and scored for only
IN CONTEXT choreographer Martha Graham 10 to 12 instruments, but Copland
I first heard the music that used 13. Graham had also chosen
FOCUS Aaron Copland had created for her the title Appalachian Spring, which
Contemporary American ballet Appalachian Spring, about a came from a verse of “The Dance”
nationalism
young couple ready to embark on by the American poet Hart Crane.
BEFORE married life in a Pennsylvanian
1911–1915 Inspired by local farmhouse in the early 1800s. She Clarity and simplicity
transcendentalism, Ives was pleased with what she heard Copland’s music had been heavily
composes his Concord Sonata. and praised its power to lead the influenced by his time as a student
listener into a singular world. in France in the early 1920s, when
1928 Virgil Thomson’s Four Graham commissioned the work he had been surrounded by people
Saints in Three Acts celebrates determined that it would be “a who represented all that was new
American diversity. legend of American living” and in the arts. In Paris, several young
“the inner frame that holds together composers were newly reworking
1939 Roy Harris conveys the a people.” She had also stipulated Classical styles and exploring
immensity of the American that the music should be about genres such as Modernism and
rural landscape in his Impressionism, eschewing the old
Symphony No. 3. German Romanticism of Brahms
AFTER and Wagner. Copland himself was
1947 Samuel Barber sets his particularly influenced by Igor
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 to Stravinsky, who was just entering
James Agee’s memoir of his So long as the human spirit his neoclassical phase. Stravinsky’s
Octet (1923) impressed Copland
childhood in rural Tennessee. thrives on this planet, music with its clean lines, crystal-clear
1989 Elliott Carter’s Three in some living form will textures, and concise structure.
Occasions for Orchestra accompany and sustain it and From this time, Copland’s music
celebrates the vigor and give it expressive meaning. became more open and its form
energy of America. Aaron Copland and instrumentation more tightly
controlled. The hardships of
1999 John Harbison composes World War I compeled him, like
The Great Gatsby based on Stravinsky, to write for smaller
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. orchestras. With Appalachian
Spring, he said, he was forced
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