Appalachian Spring

Appalachian Spring is a ballet with music by Aaron Copland and choreography by Martha Graham, commissioned by the patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and first performed on October 30, 1944, at the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, with sets by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and costumes by Edythe Gilfond. Set around a wedding in a nineteenth-century Appalachian farming settlement, it centers on four characters, a Bride, a Husbandman, a Pioneer Woman and a Revivalist, and moves between celebration and an undercurrent of hardship and separation. Well received at its premiere, it earned Copland the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945, and the orchestral suite he arranged from the score the same year became one of his most widely performed works, while the ballet itself remains part of the core repertoire of the Martha Graham Dance Company.