Having music in my head almost all the time certain works buzz around over a period of days or weeks. If I am talking to you I’m usually engaged but I start to hear music as soon as I walk away. Lately Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring has been one of those musical pieces. There is always some association that makes me hear a particular piece. I’m thinking that my work is so wooden and automatic lately the way hospital managers and insurances have tried to do away with physician judgement and regulate everything. Over the past week or so I’ve heard the opening section that uses woodwinds as singing and chirping birds announcing the new spring season, followed by the forceful rhythmic opening dance carried on by low strings and brass. I can be distracted by my work, but still hear and picture a robotic Michael Jackson, or the poet scarecrow Gringoire from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, even Pinocchio as marionettes in a macabre dance, their strings pulled from above. This music and dance reverberated in me for a while until I decided to look at it again on You-Tube just to be sure I remembered it right which I almost did. The music I know by heart since I’ve heard it and played it in my head so many times, but I’ve never seen a live performance of the ballet. I watched the adapted original choreography of Nijinsky from the 1913 premier and this wasn’t quite what I had visualized, but close. The dancers were not like marionettes whose feet barely touch the ground. Instead their feet positively stomped on the dirt with all their might. I loved how they would come down in series which only served to emphasize the powerful irregular rhythms to make the dance literally ground-breaking.

Thanks again to You-Tube I was soon watching Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham dancing. Ok, that is almost a clang or alphabetic association that happens these days in cataloging video. I had never seen that and thought it would be totally different, but listening to the music after the Rite,  I noted how similar Aaron Copland’s music is to Stravinsky’s. That got my wheels turning. Without doing any research I thought I’d struck gold. I knew Copland to be younger than Stravinsky and influenced by him. I heard it in the music. My thought was that as the Rite was as quintessentially Russian harking back to atavistic paganism as Appalachian Spring is American. Copland went to France to learn from Nadia Boulanger to develop his own American musical idiom. The contrasts between the works seemed striking. In Stravinsky’s work the elders drag out a 300 year old woman. Dancers pound the earth convulsively and collapse to the ground. The whole work is about a ritual sacrifice of a young maiden who dances herself to a fatal convulsion. The musical rhythms are so powerful they kill her. In the last second her limp dead body is literally picked up into the waiting sky by the elders and offered to cruel heaven. Copland’s music has its own dissonances and rhythmic complexity. Otherwise it would not be so interesting. His dance takes place in the open air as Stravinsky’s does. But it is hopeful, not fatal. Cropland’s vision is profoundly religious though monotheistic and makes as ample use of American folk music as Stravinsky of Russian music. Copland’s coda is based on the famous Shaker theme Simple Gifts and he admires Shaker and Quaker and Christian roots that forged American Culture.  You could argue about whether Copland’s vision is Christian or Jewish. The high idealism is Jewish but the differences are slight and aims are highly compatible.  Copland employs a minister and a young couple about to be married in his work and some neighbors. In the dance the couple and all participants gaze up into the sky where God resides.  The ballet is about faith and hope as opposed to Stravinsky’s death and victory of the elderly and ritual. Copeland celebrates the promise of life which comes from the union of a young man and young woman. Youth and hope prevail. Far from being offered as sacrifice, the couple looks hopefully up and to a future of fruitfulness. So I thought Copland must have composed Appalachian Spring as American response to The Rite of Spring.

These contrasts are drawn starkly and they are deliberate. I after all am an American and my point of view tends to be much more with Copland’s than Stravinsky’s. If you have read anything I write or talk to me you know I view Russian history even preceding communism as one mostly of oppression and I place high value Americans being free. All of that doesn’t dampen one bit the reverberation of Stravinsky’s music inside my head just because it was so revolutionary and emphatic and has been and will always be appealing for me.

The real history I found, makes the theory Copland’s answer untenable. Anyone would agree that Copland, coming on somewhat later than Stravinsky, their years overlap, was influenced by the elder great man of music. Stravinsky’s dates are 1882-1971, Copeland 1900-1990.  I found a very nice little paper1  describing this relationship which was partly through the influence of the famous Nadia Boulanger who was close to Stravinsky. Stravinsky moved to the US but formative music that made him famous was profoundly Russian. Stravinsky took the folksiness and ideas of Rimsky-Korsakov and other lights and developed the language further. Stravinsky’s brilliance is unequalled at least as it buzzes around in my little head.

As for Appalachian Spring, the dancer Martha Graham commissioned it and starred in the premier of the work. It was never conceived according to the name only later took on. Appalachian Spring was called by Copland for most of its genesis simply “Martha’s ballet.”  In fact Martha Graham seems to have helped to name the work after the first line in a poem called The Dance by Hart Crane, so any thought that the music gives the feel of freshness of an Appalachian Spring morning, while understandable, comes about accidentally. In fact the Spring in the poem does not refer to the season or it might refer to the spring season obliquely or ambiguously but primarily to a source of water. The music was originally written for 13 instruments but later orchestrated in its own right which is mostly as we hear it today. So my theory about Appalachian Spring as answer to Rite of Spring is shot down entirely. Never mind. Appalachian is American, youth centered, upward gazing, fertile and optimistic.

1. Igor Stravinsky’s Influence on Aaron Copland An Inquiry into Stravinsky’s Effect on Copland’s Nationalism and Style of Composition by Marty Yang Music 89S Professor Davidson November 14, 2012