COSUS Spring 2026 program
Conductor: Erik Leung
Coincident Dances – Jessie Montgomery
Violin Concerto – Edgar Meyer, featuring Jessica Lambert
Intermission
Darker America – William Grant Still
Appalachian Spring – Aaron Copland
Pre-Concert Talk by Erik Leung in Toomey Lobby at 2:15pm
Program Notes
PROGRAM NOTES
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.
(Bio from www.jessiemontgomery.com)
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Jessie Montgomery’s inspiration for Coincident Dances (2017) was the wide range of musical genres and cultural backgrounds overlapping with one another that can be heard while walking in the city. The work unfolds as a series of intersecting musical encounters, full of syncopated rhythms, driving grooves, and bright instrumental colors. True to its name, different musical bodies are constantly crossing paths as they dance both playfully and intensely into a fusion of English consort music, samba, Ghanaian dance tunes, swing, and techno. Montgomery drew from these styles when writing Coincident Dances thanks to her actual experiences hearing these genres simultaneously, either from her surroundings, or while trying to listen to R&B in her headphones but still hearing Latin jazz from a close-by car. “Working in this mode,” she explained, “the orchestra takes on the role of a DJ of a multicultural dance track.”
A solitary bass opens with a dramatic solo, then is joined by winds, strings, and brass playing together before the ensemble quickens and moves into various, separate paths. The music is never static, and while instrumental sections often seem to coexist independently of each other, it never reaches full cacophony. Contrasting styles morph from one to another; at other times, they overlap, occurring simultaneously. Motives are introduced then reappear, but the second time are played by different instruments. Montgomery describes her composition as a juxtaposition of five musical influences, but there are delightful surprises that emulate other sounds one might encounter while walking in New York. Woodwinds and brass emulate honking car horns, flutes and piccolo suggest bird trills, and opera lovers will recognize the Libiamo ne’ lieti calici – the brindisi (drinking song) from Puccini’s opera La Traviata.
The appeal of Montgomery’s Coincident Dances carried beyond the orchestra; Montgomery orchestrated the work for concert band in 2024, and in 2025, critically acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz created a ballet set to the piece, performed by the Miami City Ballet.
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In demand as both a performer and a composer, Edgar Meyer (1960) has formed a role in the music world unlike any other. Hailed by The New Yorker as “…the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument”, Mr. Meyer’s unparalleled technique and musicianship in combination with his gift for composition have brought him to the fore, where he is appreciated by a vast, varied audience. His uniqueness in the field was recognized by a MacArthur Award in 2002.
As a solo classical bassist, Mr. Meyer can be heard on a concerto album with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hugh Wolff featuring Bottesini’s Gran Duo with Joshua Bell, Meyer’s own Double Concerto for Bass and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma, Bottesini’s Bass Concerto No. 2, and Meyer’s own Concerto in D for Bass. He has also recorded an album featuring three of Bach’s Unaccompanied Suites for Cello. In 2006, he released a self-titled solo recording on which he wrote and recorded all of the music, incorporating piano, guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, gamba, and double bass. In 2007, recognizing his wide-ranging recording achievements, Sony/BMG released a compilation of The Best of Edgar Meyer. In 2011 Mr. Meyer joined cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile, and fiddler Stuart Duncan for the Sony Masterworks recording “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” which was awarded the 2012 Grammy® Award for Best Folk Album.
As a composer, Mr. Meyer has carved out a remarkable and unique niche in the musical world. One of his most recent compositions is the Double Concerto for Double Bass and Violin which received its world premiere July 2012 with Joshua Bell at the Tanglewood Music Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell have also performed the work at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Aspen Music Festival, and with the Nashville and Toronto symphony orchestras. In the 2011-12 season, Mr. Meyer was composer in residence with the Alabama Symphony where he premiered his third concerto for double bass and orchestra. Mr. Meyer has collaborated with Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain to write a triple concerto for double bass, banjo, and tabla, which was commissioned for the opening of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville. The triple concerto was recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and featured on the 2009 recording The Melody of Rhythm, a collection of trio pieces all co-composed by Mr. Meyer, Mr. Fleck and Mr. Hussain. Mr. Meyer has performed his second double bass concerto with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and his first double bass concerto with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra. Other compositions of Mr. Meyer’s include a violin/piano work which has been performed by Joshua Bell at New York’s Lincoln Center, a quintet for bass and string quartet premiered with the Emerson String Quartet and recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, a Double Concerto for Bass and Cello premiered with Yo-Yo Ma and The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, and a violin concerto written for Hilary Hahn which was premiered and recorded by Ms. Hahn with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra led by Hugh Wolff.
Collaborations are a central part of Mr. Meyer’s work. His longtime collaboration with fellow MacArthur Award recipient Chris Thile continues in 2014 with the release on Nonesuch Records a recording of all new original material by the two genre bending artists, a follow up to their very successful 2008 CD/DVD on Nonesuch. Mr. Meyer and Mr. Thile will embark on a nationwide tour in Fall 2014 appearing in many of the major cities in the US. Mr. Meyer’s previous performing and recording collaborations include a duo with Béla Fleck; a quartet with Joshua Bell, Sam Bush and Mike Marshall; a trio with Béla Fleck and Mike Marshall; and a trio with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor. The latter collaborated for the 1996 Appalachia Waltz release which soared to the top of the charts and remained there for 16 weeks. Appalachia Waltz toured extensively in the U.S., and the trio was featured both on the David Letterman Show and the televised 1997 Inaugural Gala. Joining together again in 2000, the trio toured Europe, Asia and the US extensively and recorded a follow up recording to Appalachia Waltz, Appalachian Journey, which was honored with a Grammy® Award. In the 2006-2007 season, Mr. Meyer premiered a piece for double bass and piano performed with Emanuel Ax. Mr. Meyer also performs with pianist Amy Dorfman, his longtime collaborator for solo recitals featuring both classical repertoire and his own compositions, Mike Marshall in duo concerts and the trio with Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain which has toured the US, Europe and Asia together.
Mr. Meyer began studying bass at the age of five under the instruction of his father and continued further to study with Stuart Sankey. In 1994 he received the Avery Fisher Career Grant and in 2000 became the only bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Prize. Currently, he is Visiting Professor of Double Bass at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
(Bio from www.edgarmeyer.com)
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Meyer’s Violin Concerto (1999) was commissioned by Sony Classical, and written with violinist Hilary Hahn’s specific sound in mind. Hahn herself premiered the work in 1999 with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of Hugh Wolff (the American conductor, not to be confused with the Austrian composer of the late Romantic era). Rather than the lush drama of the Romantic concerto tradition, Meyer’s concerto is lighter and leaner, with more transparency. The work also departs from the traditional three-movement structure, and is comprised of only two movements. The first movement begins with a plaintive violin elegy, simple and unornamented. that gives way to a vigorous 5/8 meter as the orchestra enters. While the dynamics and intensity ebb and flow, there is never a “wall of sound” moment. Even as the rhythms and texture grow more complex, there is always an intimacy that is rarely found in the first movement of a violin concerto, which usually are big, declamatory, and sweeping in scale. Meyer’s writing remains open and unobscured, and the different orchestral parts can always be followed with ease. The violin solo alternates between long lyrical lines and agile, demanding moments requiring technical brilliance, closing as it began, with its original opening theme.
The second movement is introduced by subdued horns, strings, and a graceful figure from the clarinets. A solo violin line emerges from this quiet background, sustained and contemplative. The violin briefly becomes faintly jaunty, more angular, gently disrupting the earlier legato ease and pointing toward the livelier material ahead, before returning to its reflective atmosphere. It gradually grows into contrapuntal writing that forms an intricate violin duet played by a single performer, although to someone listening and not watching it might sound like two violinists rather than one. In Meyer’s words: “This concerto was also written to take advantage of Hilary’s considerable technique. In Hilary’s hands, for instance, two passages combining a slow moving line on one string with a more rapidly moving line on another string sound more like violin duets than violin solos, especially the first, heard a few minutes into the second movement.” The movement seemingly comes to a close…then the soloist launches into a fiddle-style solo that would be at home at a country hoedown. The solo grows into virtuosic passagework supported by increased vigor in the orchestra. The movement becomes more and more athletic, but then eventually quiets, suggesting a gentle conclusion…only to return to its hoedown theme and builds up to a fiery, thrilling finale.
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Long known as the “Dean of African-American Classical Composers,” as well as one of America’s foremost composers, William Grant Still (1895-1975) has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. On May 11, 1895, he was born in Woodville (Wilkinson County) Mississippi, to parents who were teachers and musicians. They were of Negro, Indian, Spanish, Irish and Scotch bloods. When William was only a few months old, his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English in the high school. There his musical education began–with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather.
In Wilberforce University, he took courses leading to a B.S. degree, but spent most of his time conducting the band, learning to play the various instruments involved and making his initial attempts to compose and to orchestrate. His subsequent studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were financed at first by a legacy from his father, and later by a scholarship established just for him by the faculty.
At the end of his college years, he entered the world of commercial (popular) music, playing in orchestras and orchestrating, working in particular with the violin, cello and oboe. His employers included W. C. Handy, Don Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison and Artie Shaw, and for several years he arranged and conducted the Deep River Hour over CBS and WOR. While in Boston playing oboe in the Shuffle Along orchestra, Still applied to study at the New England Conservatory with George Chadwick, and was again rewarded with a scholarship due to Mr. Chadwicks own vision and generosity. He also studied, again on an individual scholarship, with the noted ultra-modern composer, Edgard Varese.
In the Twenties, Still made his first appearances as a serious composer in New York, and began a valued friendship with Dr. Howard Hanson of Rochester. Extended Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships were given to him, as well as important commissions from the Columbia Broadcasting System, the New York Worlds Fair 1939-40, Paul Whiteman, the League of Composers, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the American Accordionists Association.
In 1944, he won the Jubilee prize of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the best Overture to celebrate its Jubilee season, with a work called Festive Overture. In 1953, a Freedoms Foundation Award came to him for his To You, America! which honored West Points Sesquicentennial Celebration. In 1961, he received the prize offered by the U. S. Committee for the U. N., the N.F.M.C. and the Aeolian Music Foundation for his orchestral work, The Peaceful Land, cited as the best musical composition honoring the United Nations.
After moving to Los Angeles in the early 1930’s, citations from numerous organizations, local and elsewhere in the United States, came to the composer. Along with them came honorary degrees like the following: Master of Music from Wilberforce in 1936; Doctor of Music from Howard University in 1941; Doctor of Music from Oberlin College in 1947; Doctor of Letters from Bates College in 1954; Doctor of Laws from the University of Arkansas in 1971; Doctor of Fine Arts from Pepperdine University in 1973; Doctor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Southern California.
Some of the awards that Still received were: the second Harmon Award in 1927; a trophy of honor from Local 767 of the Musicians Union A.F. of M., of which he was a member; trophies from the League of Allied Arts in Los Angeles (1965) and the National Association of Negro Musicians; citations from the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Board of Supervisors (1963); a trophy from the A.P.P.A. in Washington D.C. (1968); the Phi Beta Sigma George Washington Carver Award (1953); the Richard Henry Lee Patriotism Award from Knotts Berry Farm, California; a citation from the Governor of Arkansas in 1972; the third annual prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. He also lectured in various universities from time to time.
In 1939, Still married journalist and concert pianist, Verna Arvey, who became his principal collaborator. They remained together until Still died of heart failure on December 3, 1978. ASCAP took care of all of Dr. Stills hospitalization until his death.
Dr. Still’s service to the cause of brotherhood is evidenced by his many firsts in the musical realm: Still was the first Afro-American in the United States to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra. He was the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, when in 1936, he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in his compositions at the Hollywood Bowl. He was the first Afro-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the Deep South in 1955, when he directed the New Orleans Philharmonic at Southern University. He was the first of his race to conduct a White radio orchestra in New York City. He was the first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States, when in 1949, his Troubled Island was done at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City. He was the first to have an opera televised over a national network. With these firsts, Still was a pioneer, but, in a larger sense, he pioneered because he was able to create music capable of interesting the greatest conductors of the day: truly serious music, but with a definite American flavor.
Still wrote over 150 compositions (well over 200 if his lost early works could be counted), including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes, especially Negro spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works.
(Bio from www.williamgrantstillmusic.com)
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Darker America (1924) is one of Still’s earliest orchestral works, and he described it as a musical portrait of the African American experience. Still described this as “…representative of the American Negro. His serious side is presented and is intended to suggest the triumph of a people over their sorrows through fervent prayer.” The strings introduce the opening theme representing Black Americans, full of weight and gravitas. While solemn, the hints of jazz prevent the music from sounding maudlin. The theme is passed around the orchestra expanding upon the Black American theme. The English horn soon plays the theme of sorrow, mournful as it symbolizes suffering and grief. Much like how Still viewed the Black American experience, the sorrow theme is recurring throughout the piece. Hope is cautiously portrayed by muted brass supported by strings and woodwinds; this is not a blazing beacon of optimism but rather has a vulnerable quality to it. The oboe expresses the theme of prayer; it is neither ceremonial or resplendent but private and weary. As these themes are played, the audience journeys back and forth between extremes: sorrow and hope, sparse and lush textures, languidity and urgency. While the conclusion is far from celebratory, Still intended for the ending he wrote to convey resilience, hard-won strength, and dignified triumph.
Brooklyn, New York was a bustling place at the turn of the last century, filled with people of many nationalities. Many were immigrants; some were customers of Copland’s Department Store on Washington Avenue. Described by Aaron Copland as “a kind of neighborhood Macy’s,” the store was operated by Sarah and Harris Copland, Russian-born, Jewish immigrants. They lived above and to the side of the store with their five children. Everyone in the family worked at the store. “Copland’s” was the center of their lives.
“The store proved to be influential in the shaping of my formative years,” Copland explained. “I took the cash register from time to time, learning the responsibility and trust the job implied. Artists have usually been thought to be nitwits in the handling of money. No one has ever accused me of that particular failing.”
When his friends joked about his frugality, and Leonard Bernstein called him “plain,” Copland would object good-naturedly: “What do you expect from the son of shopkeepers!” It was in the store that Aaron learned the value of hard work. “The daily routine was demanding, with Saturdays and sale days particularly exhausting, and Christmas the busiest time of all,” he recalled. “I worked after school. Later on it occurred to me that I was selling toys to kids my own age!”
In preparation for his autobiography, Copland talked about his family. He never looked for hidden meanings. His father came from Russia and the family settled on the East Coast, but his mother’s family, the Mittenthals, were more adventurous. They settled in Texas and sold dry goods until Jesse James’ brother, Frank, robbed the store and the family moved north to the Lower East Side of New York City. Sarah Mittenthal had spent her first nineteen years among cowboys, Indians, and immigrants. Copland was often asked, “How could a Jewish boy from Brooklyn write cowboy music?” He would respond, “Well, all American boys love the West!” or “Agnes [De Mille] insisted.” Not inclined towards self-analysis, he did not recognize a connection between Billy the Kid or Rodeo and his mother, who had grown up in Texas and sang Western folk songs to her youngest child. The Mittenthal relatives believed that their famous cousin’s dignity and reserve were southern traits from their side of the family.
Copland grew up with so many people around him that he was never lonely, but there was a certain amount of benign neglect that actually proved advantageous. He was left to make his own decisions. When he asked for piano lessons, the reaction was not enthusiastic–they had been given to his siblings with little success–but his parents agreed that he could find a teacher himself if he wanted lessons, and they would pay. Where this desire and talent to be a musician came from, no one knew, including Copland himself. He once wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch: “I was born on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab…” There was no connection of any kind to the arts. When Aaron told his father that he wanted to be a musician, Harris Copland exclaimed, “Where do you ever get such an idea?” But Aaron persisted, enduring “the tough guys around the block” who called him “sissy” and teased him about carrying a case with music. He found a few artistic friends who talked to him about France and wrote poetry. When he knew he needed a higher level of instruction, he arranged for lessons with the well-known New York musician Rubin Goldmark. “I will never forget the excitement of going over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan!” Copland exclaimed. Thus began a lifelong attachment to New York City. But not to Rubin Goldmark. Copland soon learned to keep his more imaginative pieces to himself, much as Charles Ives had done earlier when studying with Horatio Parker at Yale.
While working with the Copland papers and manuscripts that were in file cabinets in the basement of his house in Peekskill, New York, I came upon six workbooks of assignments for Rubin Goldmark. Copland was astonished to see things he had not looked at for sixty years. “Holy Moses!” he exclaimed, “I kept everything!” (He actually used expressions like this, as well as “gee whiz” and “golly.”) As we turned the pages of one folder labeled “Juvenilia,” Copland gleefully read the instructions from Goldmark: “No parallel fifths! No fourths! No octaves!” In response to my comment about how far he had strayed from these exercises, he said, “I had to learn it somewhere, and this was as good as it got in those days.” No anger, no criticism of Goldmark, no impatience to move on. Only humor at being called “the young modernist” of the class at the graduation recital.
Copland had been on the lookout for a way to get to France, “where everything new and exciting was happening.” He applied and was accepted for the first fellowship at the Conservatoire Americain at the Palace of Fontainebleau. Goldmark insisted Copland could not go without mastering sonata form. After composing a complete and proper sonata to satisfy Goldmark, Copland was free to board the ocean liner France for his first European crossing and what would be the most meaningful years of his life. It was five months before his twenty-first birthday. He had never been further from home than Manhattan.
Fontainebleau was a good introduction to France before going on to Paris. While at the Palace, a friend insisted Copland attend a harmony class taught by a young Frenchwoman, Nadia Boulanger. He was so impressed that he made a difficult decision–she was to be his teacher. Later, he remembered, “I hesitated, because I had never heard of any composer who had studied with a woman.” The good news was that it cost less: only 60 francs (about $4.20). As usual, his parents trusted him to make the right decision.
Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Melville Smith were Boulanger’s first American students. They were followed by Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Elliott Carter, and many of the century’s composers and musicians. Her students, who became known as the “Boulangerie,” called her “Mademoiselle.” She recognized Copland’s talent from the start, as he did hers. In later years, he often said, “I don’t know what my career would have been like without her!”
Copland was immensely talented–but he was also the right person in the right place on several crucial occasions. For example, it happened that Serge Koussevitzky was assuming his post as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the very same time Copland was planning to return to the states in 1924. Boulanger took Copland to see the famous conductor in Paris. After Copland played part of his only orchestral work, the ballet Grohg, on the piano Koussevitzky said, “You vill write an organ concerto, Mademoiselle vill play it, and I vill conduct!” (In the end, Walter Damrosch led the first performance of the concerto, with the New York Symphony.) Copland had never heard a note of his own orchestration, and here was the great conductor asking for a major work to be played by both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Symphony (one of the earlier incarnations of the New York Philharmonic). When Copland asked his teacher, “Do you really think I can do it?” she pointed a finger at him. “You can do it!” That was the end of the discussion.
A year of study in France became three. While far from home, Copland began to think about finding a distinctively American sound. “There is a French-sounding music, a German sound, why not American? We had done it in ragtime and jazz, but not in the kind of concert music I was interested in.” He returned to New York in 1924, totally unknown, without a job, but with the Koussevitzky commission in his pocket and a determination to promote American music. From the start of what would become a spectacular career, Copland had the support of an influential teacher and a major conductor with an orchestra at his disposal. “I’m a lucky guy,” was Copland’s genial way of recognizing his extraordinary good fortune.
Copland’s primary goal was to compose the best music he could. A quality of excellence is evident in all his work, from a wide range of abstract concert music to collaborative works for radio, film, ballet, and opera. He had a secondary goal: to promote the cause of American music and to increase performance opportunities for composers. Copland was at the center of activities in the world of contemporary music for decades. His efforts helped establish American music on the world scene, and his leadership and dedication as a “good citizen” set an example for composers that followed after him.
Copland changed very little through the years. He was a private person and kept personal affairs to himself, as he believed they should be. Even those closest to Copland were not sure they really knew him. He was supremely interested in all aspects of music to the exclusion of other things. He did not pay much attention to the other arts, except certain kinds of literature, such as biography. He had no hobbies, nor did he care much about food, sports, or gardens. But anything and everything relating to music interested him. He loved to hear gossip about the music world from visitors, and very late in life when he could no longer go to concerts he would still ask, “What’s happening out there? Who are the young composers? What are they writing?” He laughed when told tonality was back, saying he was not aware it had gone anywhere, and he was amused to hear about Minimalism. “By definition, it can’t do much harm, can it?” His wit and good humor made for good company.
“Simplicity” is a word that has been used to describe both the man and his music. If it is simplicity, then it is of the most complex kind. Copland was a complicated combination of genuine modesty and supreme confidence. He knew who he was and what he had accomplished, and he was very sure of himself musically, rarely adopting suggestions from others, even Boulanger or Koussevitzky. He would be interested, listen politely, then inevitably stay with his original decision. The only change he has ever accepted came from Leonard Bernstein, who deleted a few measures in the last movement of the Third Symphony. Copland didn’t appreciate the cut being made and played first without his permission, but he was so admiring of Lenny’s musicianship that he agreed for artistic reasons. Copland and Bernstein, totally different personalities, were very close, personally and musically.
Special birthday celebrations began with Copland’s 50th and continued to the 90th. He enjoyed them, mostly because these occasions generated performances of his music. He was especially pleased when his “neglected children” were included–those pieces played less often than the more popular ones. Copland’s long life and career paralleled what was happening around him. Although interested in what was new, he was not, like Ives and other innovators, far ahead of his time. When his music changed, as it did several times, it intuitively mirrored the world around him–from periods when he composed esoteric intellectual pieces, such as the three major piano works and the Short Symphony, to when he wrote the more accessible collaborative ballets with Lincoln Kirstein, Eugene Loring, Agnes De Mille, and Martha Graham. Commissions and extra-musical conditions might stimulate Copland’s imagination, but when he got down to composing, it was musical ideas that generated his decisions. The result was a “Copland sound” that is recognizable in all his work. It is a sound that became synonymous with the finest values of America to the world.
(Bio from www.aaroncopland.com)
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Appalachian Spring (1944) was originally composed as a ballet for his friend, famed choreographer Martha Graham. Graham once told Copland that she wished to create a dance for his Piano Variations, which Copland deemed impossible. Its eight sections are played without pause and tell the story of a young pioneer couple in rural Pennsylvania. Copland captured the intimacy of that world – as well as larger themes of hope, commitment, and renewal – with his composing philosophy in mind: “I felt that it was worthwhile to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” True to his world, much of Appalachian Spring is direct and never overindulgent.
The suite’s Prologue begins as if in the stillness right before the sun rises. Instruments enter gradually, always feeling unhurried. The clear texture and wide intervals create a spaciousness that has become synonymous with Copland’s name, and the clarinet plays its famous gesture that parallels the rising of the sun before the orchestra comes alive with energy when starting the Allegro section. The movement and rhythm suggest a world that is now awake, busy with the business of living. Full of animation, this section echoes themes from the opening, but combined with restless action.
The third section, Moderato, is modest and matter-of-fact – the perfect way to introduce the pioneer bride and her betrothed in the ballet. Tender and personal, one can imagine a young couple ready to wed, full of hope and possibility for the future. This is followed by the Quite fast section which is filled with celebration, energy, and at times, a rustic square dance feel.
Subito allegro is full of nervous excitement and anticipation. Graham choreographed this section as a solo dance for the bride – both exhilarated and apprehensive as she faces the unknown world of married life, motherhood, and adult life ahead of her. This is followed by a bridge (Meno mosso), allowing the action onstage as well as the audience to settle and catch a breath before moving into the suite’s most famous section, Doppio movimento, which is centered on the tune “Simple Gifts”. This nineteenth century song is often associated with simplicity and humility, and is introduced by the clarinet, followed by variations which represent the young pioneer couple in their home, dealing with everyday life.
The suite’s Coda returns to the quiet, reflective sense of peace from its beginning. Motives from the opening are heard again, bringing the work full circle, and this time as the now familiar themes play, both musical and narrative closure is achieved.
Program notes by Lauren Servias
