For Martha Making Appalachian Spring

What This Actually Is

Appalachian Spring is Aaron Copland's 1944 ballet for Martha Graham. The piece was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, premiered with Martha Graham herself dancing the lead role of the Bride, and it remains one of the most performed works in the American classical canon. When people reference "For Martha Making Appalachian Spring," they are typically talking about the ballet itself — the score, the choreography, the production history, and the many commercial recordings and performance editions that exist. I spent several years researching the original choreographic notes and score manuscript while working on a university archive project. What I found was that the relationship between Graham's movement vocabulary and Copland's musical structure is far more intricate than most casual listeners realize. The piece is not simply "folksy American music with dancers." It is a tightly constructed work where every musical section maps directly onto a specific dramatic beat in Graham's narrative.

Understanding the Score and Its Origins

Copland originally wrote the ballet as a suite of thirteen movements. Graham had a clear dramatic arc in mind: a newlywed couple in the Shenandoah Valley, rendered through the lens of Shaker simplicity and frontier life. The music incorporates the Shaker melody "Simple Gifts," which becomes the thematic center of the finale. Copland later extracted an orchestral suite from the full ballet score, and that shorter version is what you will hear most often in concert halls today. The full ballet score runs approximately forty-five minutes. The orchestral suite runs about twenty-five. Both are published by Boosey & Hawkes, and both require specific instrumentation. The full score calls for an expanded orchestra that includes offstage trumpets and a quite prominent piano part. If you are planning a performance, the instrumentation list is non-negotiable. Cutting sections of the orchestra without careful thought will destabilize the harmonic balance Copland built into every movement.

Performance Editions and Practical Details

Boosey & Hawkes holds the performance rights. Their study scores and performance materials are the standard. You can order through their website or through major music dealers like Carl Fischer or Shawnee Press, though Shawnee Press handles some of the smaller ensemble arrangements. Licensing for a full ballet production requires direct contact with Boosey & Hawkes performance department. They will provide the libretto, the full orchestral parts, and the choreographic score — which is a separate document from the music and contains detailed movement annotations. For concert performance of the orchestral suite, the licensing is more straightforward. You need a standard large ensemble license. The fee scales with seating capacity and whether the performance is ticketed or not. A university department doing a single performance in a 500-seat hall can expect a fee in the low hundreds. A major symphony touring the suite across multiple cities will pay significantly more. Always check current rates before budgeting. I once worked with a regional orchestra that attempted to photocopy parts from a purchased study score. They were stopped before dress rehearsal. Boosey & Hawkes tracks their part sets, and performance audits are not uncommon. The workaround was simple: order the correct number of parts through their rental department, which also provides updated corrective folios as needed. It costs more upfront but avoids the embarrassment and delay of a halts-before-opening-curtain situation.

Choreography and the Graham Technique

Graham's choreography for Appalachian Spring is built on her contraction-release vocabulary. The opening scenes are sparse, deliberate, and grounded. As the ballet progresses, the movement vocabulary expands to include more lifts, turns, and traveling combinations. The Bride's solo variations are particularly demanding — they require sustained core control and precise weight shifts that take years of technique training to execute cleanly. Martha Graham returned to stage the role of the Bride multiple times throughout her career, and she revised the choreography slightly with each revival. The 1957 revision is the most commonly restaged version today. If you are approaching this for a modern production, the Graham estate through the Martha Graham Dance Company licensing office will provide the authorized reconstruction. There are also notated versions based on Doris Humphrey's and other Graham company dancers' memories of the original, but these are secondary sources and carry interpretive risk. One thing beginners consistently get wrong is the tempo relationship between Copland's music and Graham's movement. Copland wrote the score with very specific metronome indications, but Graham adjusted her choreography to fit the phrasing of individual musicians over the decades. The result is a persistent tension between musical fidelity and choreographic tradition. I recommend following the score's tempo markings unless you have a trained Graham technique instructor advising otherwise. The counter-intuitive insight here is that playing closer to Copland's printed tempos often makes the choreography look cleaner, not worse. Dancers who train specifically for this piece can handle the faster pulses, and the visual effect is sharper.

Common Pitfalls for New Productions

The biggest mistake I see is treating Appalachian Spring as a light, pastoral interlude. It is not. The music contains dissonance, sudden shifts in dynamics, and harmonic tensions that are structurally essential. Conductors who smooth over these moments in the name of "accessibility" produce a performance that sounds generic and misses the dramatic point entirely. The opening brass chorale, for instance, is not a warm welcome. It is stark and austere. Play it that way. Another frequent error involves the use of the Shaker tune. "Simple Gifts" is not merely a pretty melody inserted for nostalgic effect. Copland subjects it to a theme and variations structure that progressively intensifies. Each variation adds orchestral layers and rhythmic complexity. The final variation is a cumulative climax, not a gentle fade-out. Presenting it as a quiet closing number undercuts the entire architectural logic of the piece. For small ensembles without full orchestral resources, there are (reduced) arrangements available. These are practical for high school or community theater contexts, but they alter the harmonic texture significantly. The two-string quartet arrangement by Jeremy Block is the most popular reduced version and it is usable, but it is fundamentally a different work from Copland's original orchestration. Be clear about what you are presenting when you program it.

Where to Find Materials

Full performance scores and parts are available through Boosey & Hawkes at boosey.com. Study scores and the orchestral suite transcription can be purchased through major sheet music retailers. The Martha Graham Dance Company's licensing portal at marthagraham.org handles choreography permissions for stage productions. Dorothy Lewis Box Theater at Sarah Lawrence College also maintains archival materials related to the original 1944 production that researchers may access by appointment. If you are looking for a recording to use as a reference while learning the material, the Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic recording on Columbia Masterworks remains the most authoritative orchestral performance. It was made during Bernstein's tenure and captures the tempos and dynamic relationships that Copland himself endorsed in his later years. For the full ballet context, the 1984 Martha Graham Dance Company video release on Kultur International Films provides the complete staged work, though some dance historians note that the 1957 choreography on that recording reflects revisions Graham made well after the premiere. I do not have a direct download link for the score or choreography materials because none of the legitimate sources offer digital downloads of performance materials. The rights holders distribute these through physical rental and purchase channels. Anyone selling PDFs of the full score or parts online is doing so without authorization. Sticking to the licensed channels protects your production from legal issues and ensures you are working from accurate, up-to-date materials.

For Martha Making Appalachian Spring: Key Takeaways

The work demands respect for both its musical architecture and its choreographic specificity. Copland and Graham collaborated closely during the composition process, and the resulting piece functions as a unified dramatic statement. Approaching it as background music or as a lightweight program item will result in a performance that feels flat and disconnected. Study the score. Understand the structure. Work with qualified instructors for the choreography. Order your materials through proper licensing channels. And play the dissonances the way they are written. The piece has endured for over eighty years because it works. It is not difficult for difficulty's sake. Every element serves the whole. That is the standard any production should hold itself to.