Copland's Appalachian Spring

Imagine a balmy summer evening, dusk is falling, and people are gathering for an al fresco evening of leisure and courting. There’s no electricity, but there are drinks, food, and candles. What’s missing? Ah, yes, a little music! In the late 18th Century, it was customary at high falutin’ affairs to have live music to accompany parties and events. Though the same attention might not be paid at these events as might be expected in the concert hall, the music was still expected to be of high quality. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born January 27, 1756 Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria) was not above writing music for such occasions. In fact, he wrote dozens of serenades for social gatherings, weddings, and graduations. While most of these works are for larger ensembles that include winds (so that the music could be better heard outdoors), he wrote his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) for strings alone. “That’s funny,” you might say, since you’ve read the program listing above, and right there in plain English it says it is “for Flute, Bassoon, and Strings.” Before you ask to speak to the manager, know that this performance is an arrangement by BCM Artistic Director Marya Martin that incorporates additional wind instruments. (One might argue that she is simply making the work more historically accurate.) Nonetheless, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is among Mozart’s most famous works, and has found its way into pop culture, heard in everything from commercials to Tim Burton’s movie, The Batman. The jumping opening bars are immediately recognizable and have almost become a default substitute for the words “classical music.” The music is jovial, but refined, upbeat and propulsive. Mozart’s signature clarity and deceptive simplicity give one the feeling that this music was ordained from above. The following Romance flows like a gentle river. Dip in a toe and watch the water eddy around it as light glints off the surface. A sharp wind and a dark cloud moves in momentarily before returning to the unperturbed music of the opening. A bright dance in three follows, and the work closes with a rustic and energetic Allegro.

 

While Mozart was celebrated for his clarity and sparkling textures, Arvo Pärt (born September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia), pursued an even more radical path toward musical simplicity. After years of composing in a highly complex serial style, Pärt underwent an artistic and spiritual crisis in the 1970s. Emerging from this period, he rejected both his earlier music and prevailing academic trends, developing a deeply personal style inspired by his study of Russian Orthodox chant. He called this new approach tintinnabuli – from the Latin word for “little bells” – a reference to the bell-like quality created by the notes of a simple broken triad. In Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror) for Cello and Piano, a simple long-spun melody unfurls gently in the cello over a steady pulse in the piano. The music is sublime and meditative, seeming to float in eternity, but there is an underlying structure that mimics two mirrors reflecting one another. An initial two-note falling phrase is reflected back, rising. It then becomes three notes, four, and so on. Where the cello has a short break between phrases, you’ll hear either a low bass note or the very highest pitch on the piano, defining each new reflection while creating the sense of a never ending and eternal beauty that is forever expanding. 

 

Another composer whose music often captures a sense of awe and space is that of Aaron Copland (born November 14, 1900, New York, NY; died December 2, Sleepy Hollow, NY 1990). One need just hear the “Corral Nocturne” from Rodeo, or the majestic power of Fanfare for the Common Man, or much of this evening’s Appalachian Spring for 13 Instruments, and you’ll understand. Like Pärt, Copland’s early music was thorny, though his inspiration to shift was not a religious awakening, but a response to the dire situation in which much of the world found itself during The Great Depression (1929–1939). While teaching at the New School for Social Research, he met Martha Graham and Frank Lloyd Wright. They, along with their colleagues, discussed the need to uplift the American people through new, accessible art. The relationship with Martha Graham got going in 1931, when Graham heard Copland’s thorny Piano Variations and, upon meeting the composer, told him she wanted to dance it. His response? “Impossible.” Undaunted, she premiered Dithyramb in 1932, a solo dance to this work. Copland later recalled, “Surely only an artist with an understanding of my work could have visualized dance material in so rhythmically complex and thematically abstruse a composition.” The two artists got on quite well, and Graham started pitching ideas for a collaboration. In 1941, she asked him to write music for a retelling of the Greek tragedy Medea, but Copland found the material too dark and demurred. In 1942, she returned with a grant from the influential arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who also commissioned works from a compendium of the 20th century’s greatest composers, including Samuel Barber, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, among many others. Copland accepted. When he delivered the score (over a year late) in 1944, his working title was “Ballet for Martha,” and it was Graham herself who, just shortly before the premiere, titled the work Appalachian Spring, taken from Hart Crane’s poem Powhatan’s Daughter, which included the line “O Appalachian Spring!” Copland provided his own description of the action as follows: 

 

“The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, which their new domestic partnership invites. An old 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.”

 

The work was an immediate and lasting success, and continues to enthrall and lift spirits more than 80 years after its premiere.

.   –ML