Aaron Copeland - Appalachian Spring

Photo copyright: Borepatch

Spring is in full bloom here in the north Georgia foothills.  The landscape is just beginning to encounter rolling hills here, but you don't have to drive very far north to find the Appalachian mountains, that range perhaps most caught up in the early history of this Republic.  Settled by tough Scots-Irish people who valued simplicity and self reliance, it has been in many ways and for many years both the physical and psychological backbone of this land.

Aaron Copeland is in a sense the classical music equivalent of this.  His music is not "sophisticated" in the European sense, but it celebrates the American spirit in a way that the Old World tropes could never capture.  Like Norman Rockwell, his work has caused no end of sneers from more "refined" sensibilities on both sides of the Pond.  Also like Rockwell, it's been wildly popular with ordinary Americans.

Copeland originally wrote this piece for Martha Graham, the great dancer.  No less an eminence than Eugene Ormandy asked him to expand it to a full orchestral work.  It may be Copeland's most famous work, and there's a very good chance that just about all my American readers have heard not only this piece, but the old Shaker song that is the theme that runs through it and in a sense perfectly captures both Copeland's body of work and the American spirit:

'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gif to be free.
'Tis a gift to come down to where we ought to be.
And when you find yourself in the place just right
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.

That may be the best summation of the Immigrant Dream ever penned.  That hope was as fresh and filled with promise as Spring itself.  Copeland captured it all, in an ever so simple (but not at all simplistic) hymn to the season, and to the land, and to its people.