Chasing Home

Among American composers, when it comes to creating exactly that “sense of belonging to something bigger than just ourselves,” it’s hard to top Aaron Copland. He too was the child of immigrants, born into a Jewish family that had come a long way since Harris Kaplan left Lithuania as a teenager amid a rise of state-sponsored antisemitism and pogroms. In England, where he worked until he saved enough for transatlantic boat fare, the name got recorded as Copland, and it stuck. After settling in Brooklyn and marrying a fellow Lithuanian, the elder Copland started a business that became a thriving department store. The family’s youngest child, Aaron, was born in 1900 and grew up in an apartment above the store, where his older sister got him interested in the piano, which soon progressed to his first attempts at writing original songs.

Copland, a gay Jewish New Yorker trained in Paris, whose politics drifted far enough left that he could pass for a communist, would hardly seem to be the natural candidate to write music so heartily and red-bloodedly American that it literally became the jingle for red meat. (In the National Livestock and Meat Board’s legendary ad campaign from the 1990s, Copland’s “Hoe-Down” from the ballet Rodeo plays while a gruff narrator declares, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.”) But after studying in France for three years with the groomer of so many great American composers, Nadia Boulanger, and after an early phase of spiky, modernist music fashioned after Stravinsky and other European trendsetters, Copland found his own voice by drawing closer to the music of the people. It actually started in Mexico City, where a night in a dance hall in 1932 inspired his 1936 orchestra piece El Salón México. Following up with two ballets set in the American Southwest—Billy the Kid and Rodeo—Copland honed a musical language of wide-open intervals and unsentimental orchestrations that perfectly captured the awe and anticipation of America’s untamed spaces.

Copland’s next ballet score was commissioned for the company led by the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, in whom he saw “something prim and restrained, simple yet strong about her, which one tends to think of as American.” They decided on a scenario set in the Pennsylvania hills in the early 1800s, centered around the newly-built farmhouse of a soon-to-be married couple. Between Graham’s austere style and the plot of a young pioneer couple at the edge of a still-forming country, Copland was inspired to distill his musical language to a new level of simplicity and innocence. He was also pushed in that direction by the fact that the ballet would premiere in the tiny auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the limited space for the orchestra meant that Copland had to make do with just 13 instruments: flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and a nine-piece string section.

It was Graham who suggested the title, Appalachian Spring, taking a phrase from a poem by Hart Crane. Another outside source that shaped the entire ballet was the song “Simple Gifts,” composed in 1848 by Joseph Brackett, an Elder in a Shaker community. That enigmatic religious group split off from the Quakers in England, they sought refuge and religious freedom in the American colonies in the 1700s, building their idyllic settlements organized around equality of the sexes and simple living. The setting of Appalachian Spring is not explicitly tied to Shaker communities, but their humble lifestyle and faith permeates the ballet, as does that one homespun melody, which was barely known to the general public before Copland adapted it.

In the introduction, the clarinet intones a theme that traces the notes of a triad, the basic building of tonal harmony. The first four notes also happen to correspond to the initial points of emphasis in “Simple Gifts,” aligning with the words, ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free . When the section known in the ballet as “Eden Valley” arrives, it too builds its theme out of the notes of the major triad, this time with vigorous leaps and accents. There is a tender scene for the young couple, a lively romp depicting a revivalist and his dancing minions, and a brisk solo dance for the bride, until a return of the introductory music prepares the arrival of “Simple Gifts.” The increasingly grand variations rise to a transcendental climax, and then a prayer-like chorale provides a coda. (This recording, while keeping the original orchestration of 13 instruments, follows the structure of the concert suite that Copland created for full orchestra in 1945, omitting a few sections of the ballet score in which, according to Copland, “the interest is primarily choreographic.”)

At the heart of it, Appalachian Spring is a celebration of that eternal feature of American life: the freedom to start fresh. The musical DNA comes from the Shakers, a persecuted religious minority that came to America in the late 1700s, filtered through the sensibility of a first-generation son of Lithuanian Jews, a persecuted minority that arrived in the late 1800s. Neither was the “right” sort of immigrant when they came, nor were Joseph Thalken’s Irish and Italian ancestors who filled American slums earlier in the 1800s. The animus directed at Asian immigrant families like the one Margaret Fischer grew up in is recent enough to belong to living memory, and yet those are the same Asian-Americans who now hold as many as 20% of the positions in top American orchestras, with that number sure to grow considering that elite music conservatories have even higher ratios of Asian students today.

There is nothing wrong with taking this splendid recording at face value and enjoying the self-evident care and attention to detail brought to these two intricate ballet scores by the musicians of the Dallas Chamber Symphony, led by Richard McKay (an American three centuries removed from his own forbears, who left religious discrimination on the British Isles for a fresh start in the colonies). But if these stories of American acceptance inspire you to pause and feel a little more empathy for the tired, the poor, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” who live adjacent to you (to quote the words on the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus, an American descended from Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisition), then this music has succeeded in a way that perhaps only music can. It may be true that the American experiment is not yet a perfect union, but at least this album reminds us that we’re all in it together, continually chasing home.

–Aaron Grad