Program Notes: Copland Appalachian Spring

DOROTHY CHANG 
Northern Star 
BORN: 1970, in Winfield, Illinois 
WORK COMPOSED: 2017 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 28, 2017, as the fourth movement in True North: Symphonic Ballet, by Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, in Jack Singer Concert Hall, Calgary. 

What to Listen For: 

• Phrases that develop, disappear and overlap. 

• Interplay between solo woodwinds, brass and string sections. 

When Dorothy Chang sits down to compose, she doesn’t start with staff paper, but a blank page. There is an openness and possibility that is harder to explore when faced with the finality of music staves. Only after writing “gestures, squiggles, graphic shapes” and other visual representations of the sounds she wants, does Chang move on to the stage of making her expressions concrete.  

Chang cut her musical teeth in the United States. Born in Illinois, she started playing piano at the age of 6, shifting her musical focus to composition at 14. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Composition from the University of Michigan and a Doctor of Music from Indiana University. She’s called Vancouver home since 2003. There, she serves on the music faculty at the University of British Columbia. 

Her works range from conventional concert music to multi-media/sensory projects. There’s White Wines, a radio play adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s play of the same name, and Flying white–飞白, an experimental dance work created in collaboration with composer Owen Underhill, the Wen Wei Dance Company, the Turning Point Ensemble and the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra. Northern Star is also the result of collaboration. Commissioned by the Calvary Philharmonic Orchestra, Chang joined four other composers who were each tasked with composing a movement for an orchestral work celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017 — True North: Symphonic Ballet. Chang’s Northern Star movement is the fourth of five, but it has also found life as a stand-alone piece. It has been programmed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and New Jersey Symphony with conductor Xian Zhang, who will also lead the Seattle Symphony debut of this work.   

The role of place looms large in Chang’s works. Geographic place; one’s cultural place; or one’s place in time. This, tied to her love of visualizing sound, is apparent in Northern Star. It’s impressionistic and full-bodied while avoiding textural clutter. Trills and ascending passages in the strings blossom from a group sound dominated by held notes in the woodwinds and brass, and interjections of chimes. What begins as a jockeying for power turns into a meeting of the minds as the orchestra comes together, the character chilly but with a bit of warmth as the strings and woodwinds balance out the horns’ brittle quality. This layering references the velvety dark that cradles the star in the night sky, a balance that both grounds and transports the listener.  

ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD 
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1937-1939, 1945) 
BORN: May 29, 1897, in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary 
DIED: November 29, 1957, in Los Angeles, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 1945 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 15, 1947, featuring violinist Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony under conductor Vladimir Golschmann. 

What to Listen For:

• Similarities between the main themes in the Moderato nobile and the Finale: Allegro assai vivace. 

• The double-time section in the Finale. 

• How the soloist drives the direction and drama. 

You may view the career of Erich Korngold as two halves of a whole. In the first half, he was a wunderkind of the Mozart and Beethoven variety, composing by the age of 7. He was referred to study with Alexander von Zemlinsky by Gustav Mahler, enjoying popular and critical success as a composer of ballet, opera, song, chamber music and incidental music by the time he turned 19. As his career progressed, Korngold began to narrow his focus on what he truly loved: the theatre and opera. In 1934, he crossed paths with theatre director and producer Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt hired Korngold to adapt Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for his film of the same name. It was Korngold’s first visit to the United States and the beginning of the second half of his career: that of film composer.  

Some of Korngold’s most iconic credits include films with major Hollywood stars of the late 1930s and early 1940s, including Errol Flynn (Another Dawn) and Olivia de Havilland (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood), Bette Davis (Juarez, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) and Edward G. Robinson (Sea Wolf). While creating music in the fast-paced milieu of filmmaking, Korngold continued to write for the concert stage. Arguably his most well-known work of that period is his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35. From 1937–1939, he noted ideas for the new work but did not complete it until 1945 after encouragement from violinist Bronisław Huberman, a fellow Jewish artist who fled home in the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power. In 1947, Korngold’s Violin Concerto was premiered by Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony and Vladimir Golschmann. Championed by one of the most celebrated violinists of the time (Heifetz would go on to record it six years later), this composition became and remains part of the standard violin repertoire.  

In the first strains of Moderato nobile, we hear that Korngold did not leave behind the film score sound he helped define. The main theme, introduced by the soloist, is supported by lush, rapturous swells in the orchestra that never overshadow the violin. This movement is a modification of the sonata form, moving through motivic episodes to a development section that plays host to a brief cadenza before returning to the main theme, while the recapitulation section moves to a brief, flurry of a coda.  

The cinematic lyricism is heightened further in the Romance: Andante, the longest of the three movements. Again, the soloist is the focus and driving force, with the orchestra delivering the textural backdrop on which melodies are developed and transformed. Only within the Finale: Allegro assai vivace is the orchestra more conversational, repeating the main theme in answer to the soloist. Though altered by the addition of neighbor tones, rhythm and meter, the Finale’s main theme is related in gesture and pitch to the Moderato nobile’s main theme. The result is not so much cyclic as conversational, reminding the listener of the importance of musical and emotional gestures, and that between movements, between notes, transformation is possible.  

AARON COPLAND  
Appalachian Spring Orchestral Suite (1945) 
BORN: November 14, 1900, in New York City, New York 
DIED: December 2, 1990, in Sleepy Hollow, New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1943–1944 
WORLD PREMIERE: The staged ballet was premiered by the Martha Graham Dance Company on October 30, 1944, conducted by Louis Horst. The Orchestral Suite premiered on October 4, 1945, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski.  

What to Listen For:

• Staggered entrances of the common Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” which create a new texture. 

• Open and spacious harmonies. 

• Interplay of different themes, like the solemn melody in the oboe versus the comical lilt of the brass. 

Like his contemporary Erich Korngold, Aaron Copland also made a living writing concert music and film scores. But unlike Korngold, Copland maintained his place in both worlds throughout his career. And like Dorothy Chang, Copland also composed in ways that were considered “unconventional.” His was a process of seeing how promising fragments — or as he called them, “gold nuggets” — could blossom into a complete work. This interlocking approach is apparent in such works as Appalachian Spring. 

For a work associated with pure Americana, the roots of Appalachian Spring may come as a surprise. Commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, choreographed by modern dance visionary Martha Graham, and with music by Aaron Copland and a story by Graham and Copland, the ballet chronicling the tensions and hope of a pioneer community was anything but conventional. Graham’s stark, angular movements, Isamu Noguchi’s minimalist set design, and moments of dissonance and tension in Copland’s score reflect an image of America’s pioneer past that wasn’t as innocent and pure as it was interpreted in the decades that followed.  

Originally scored for 13 instruments, Copland arranged his Appalachian Spring Orchestral Suite in 1945, one year after the ballet’s premiere. Similar to orchestral suites of opera scores, Copland placed the most evocative themes into a fuller orchestral setting. However, as is characteristic of much of his music in his populist period, the texture remains sparse and clear, indicative of his pairing of Neoclassical and modernist aesthetics, motives interlocking and enhancing each other and homophonic textures.  

Copland’s Appalachian Spring suite is divided into eight movements, designated by their tempo marking. The first, Very Slowly, opens with a solo clarinet and supportive strings that slowly grows as each section interweaves with the other. Hints of the unifying main theme emerge throughout the orchestra. This is where the characters in the ballet are introduced: the Husbandman, the Wife, the Revivalist preacher and his flock, and the Pioneer Woman, gathered in the small community they are building for themselves and each other. The Allegro follows and starts with a poky, exuberant theme in the violins. This is where the Revivalist’s followers — four women — dance together and in pairs while the Pioneer Woman looks on before joining the dance and blessing each young woman.  

The Moderato opens with a bassoon solo as the Husbandman begins his dance, followed by the return of the plaintive melody in the oboe. As the music becomes more agitated and solemn, the Husbandman is joined by the Wife. Quite Fast heralds the return of the young women and the Revivalist, eventually joined by the Pioneer Woman, set to a theme of naïve exuberance and rustic, vertical movements. Subito allegro scores the solo dance of the Wife: quick, animated, drawn from themes that, until this point, have been secondary in importance. Meno mosso is lyrical and bittersweet, during which the Revivalist and Husbandman shake hands while the Pioneer Woman and Wife embrace. The piece slows and quiets down until a three-note motive in the flute melds into a held note in the clarinet, which becomes the Doppio movement, better known as the “Simple Gifts” section.  

A popular Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts” is set by Copland in a round, different sections entering and culminating in one big majestic statement. In the ballet, Copland uses this music twice: during the second dance of the Wife and the Husbandman and in the final ensemble dance. The closing Coda moderato is mellow and intimate; the dancers leave the Wife and Husbandman to themselves, the flute and clarinet leading the charge as the orchestra, and its snapshot of the past, fades away.  

All notes by A. Kori Hill © 2024