The Ellington Century (56 page)

Rodeo
must have seemed like a diversion from the war;
Appalachian Spring
was intended from the start as a commentary on it.
⁵¹
Indeed, Copland's third Western ballet was at the outset not Western at all. Graham's first scenario, “Daughter of Colchis”, was set in New
England in the time of Hawthorne; Graham, who called the second script (after Copland rejected the first) “House of Victory”, placed the action slightly westward, in Pennsylvania, and moved the timeframe up to the Civil War. The characters included the “Citizen”, whom Graham associated with the abolitionist John Brown, and a fugitive slave; in a revision Graham added an Indian girl inspired by Hart Crane's vision of Pocahontas. These early dramatic ideas would shape the later music: the New England setting suggested a musical and scenic relation to the Shakers, a sect not found in Pennsylvania, and the distant sound of war would appear in the suggestion of a fanfare in the opening clarinet solo. While Graham would end up with a more abstract, almost mythic, treatment of the story, her drafts included specific period episodes such as a retelling of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(an idea picked up by Jerome Rob-bins for
The King and
I), a charade of John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, and a scene that would suggest a Negro church.
⁵²

Copland began composing even as Graham sent him these evolving concepts. After she received his final score, however, Graham altered the scenario significantly, as Copland would discover to his surprise a few days before the premiere; Graham also gave the work its title, based on a line from Hart Crane. Graham, after all, had commissioned the music (though the money came from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge).

Copland, who, like Ellington, knew the value of a smiling public face, said that the fact that Graham had used “music composed for one kind of action to accompany something else, doesn't bother me a bit”, but, as Howard Pollack notes, his letters to Carlos Chavez were less sanguine and cautioned that Graham was “becoming more and more psychoanalytic in her motifs.”
⁵³
Copland had expressed no unhappiness with the Freudian aspects of the two previous ballets.

In its final form
Appalachian Spring
had just eight characters, with no Fugitive or Indian woman:

The Revivalist (danced by Merce Cunningham)

The Pioneer Woman (May O'Donnell)

The Husbandman (Erick Hawkins)

The Bride (Graham)

The Revivalist's Followers: Nina Fonaroff, Marjorie Mazia,

Yuriko [Kikuchi], and Pearl Lang

(The fact that Copland's score managed to upstage three of the giants of American dance testifies to its power and cogency.) The two minority
figures were absorbed into white characters; the Pioneer Woman took on some of the traits of the Indian girl, and the Revivalist channeled some of the rage of the Fugitive. The action was similarly streamlined to a presentation of the characters, a wedding followed by a “charivari” or shivaree accompanied by variations on “Simple Gifts”, and a fiery sermon by the Revivalist (“Fear in the Night”) followed by “Day of Wrath” and “Moment of Crisis”, with the action and music returning to its calm pastoral tone in a concluding “Lord's Day”. Graham turned three large sections of the score into solos for the Bride, her own role. These solos foregrounded the Bride, transforming the external story into what Howard Pollack has termed a “psychological monodrama”, a continuation, so to speak, of the Dream Ballet in
Oklahoma!
In the section of the score marked “Wedding Day II”, the Bride makes an insistent gesture that seems to ask “What about me?” Although she does not dance with the Husbandman here, she seems to cradle their child near the end of the solo, but she hands off the baby to the Pioneer Woman. In addition to dropping the specific Civil War references, Graham also made the narrative less explicit. It is hard to say when the wedding ceremony takes place or when the child is born. At the temporal and spatial center of the ballet the two male principals shake hands and the two women principals embrace, as if in accord, but the terms of their social compact are not clear, especially since the Pioneer Woman makes little contact with the other characters and the Bride acknowledges the Revivalist only once.

The music for the Fear, Wrath, and Crisis sections is unfamiliar because Copland omitted them from the orchestral suite. The action in these sections, however, is crucial to the story. The Revivalist, previously appearing as an almost comic figure despite a suspect relationship to his four female followers, who flutter around him like a flock of small birds, suddenly becomes terrifyingly stern. Graham told Merce Cunningham, “I don't know if you are a preacher, a farmer, or the devil.”
⁵⁴
His sermon demands that the Husbandman leave for war, which he does after first consulting the Pioneer Woman rather than the Bride. In my reading of the ballet he does not return alive but only as a ghostly memory. In the climactic reprise of “Simple Gifts” the Bride and Husbandman do not dance together. He seems at once present and absent. At the end, as Howard Pollack writes, “The Husbandman—or rather his spirit—stands behind the Bride, as she stretches her arm out toward the horizon, a remarkable gesture conjoining private and public destinies.”
⁵⁵

If Graham's choreography told a story of a woman's love, fear of abandonment, and inner strength, what story was Copland telling in the music, much of it written for different characters than those of the final version? Pearl Lang, one of the original Followers, described the score as “joyous”, “without a tragic moment in it—there is only the hint of one.”
⁵⁶
May O'Donnell recalled that the music had a “gentleness and sweetness” untypical of Graham's other dances.
⁵⁷
Copland's score was heard, quite aptly, as a utopian vision, well suited to the original name for the setting, Eden Valley. The music subliminally places the action in an idyllic fantasy world just after the opening when the violins echo Stephen Foster's “Beautiful Dreamer”. Whatever tensions might have appeared onstage, the music (or at least the parts of the score the people remembered) pictured a community where man was one with nature, woman was one with man, labor meshed with faith, the past gave strength to the future. A cynic might say that Copland's utopia crossed a Shaker village with a Labor Zionist kibbutz.

To represent Eden as simultaneously a legacy of the past and a hope for the future, Copland reinvented neoclassicism by way of traditional American fiddle music. This folk style preserved the straightforward harmonic logic and clear-cut phrase structure of the classical period. The music evokes American spaces through its own spaciousness of phrasing. Dissonances are rare, and Copland restricted his habitual irregular rhythmic groupings to two and three eighth notes, a device he derived from jazz, to a few moments of intensification; unusually for Copland, a lot of the music unfolds without metrical changes. No matter what convoluted situations Graham offered him, Copland seemed to perceive that his goal was to give his audience the quality that Stendhal had defined as the essence of art: the promise of happiness. It is quite likely that Copland understood that this luminous approach would serve well as a foil to Graham's darker expressionism.

Like
Black, Brown and Beige
, the ballet
Appalachian Spring
questioned the war effort under a camouflage of patriotism. While Ellington reminded his audience of the black heroes of America's earlier wars and implicitly called for a new social order, Graham portrayed the impulse to war itself in terms of demonic male fanaticism. By loosening the historical representation of the original scenario, she heightened its contemporary relevance at a time when many American women did not know if they would ever see their husbands again. In its reception and revisions,
Black, Brown and Beige
itself became a battlefield between Ellington and his mainly white critics. In its development and
dual history as ballet and concert work,
Appalachian Spring
remained a contested zone in a gendered battle. In the contrasting entrances of the principals Graham not only set up the drama to come but also characterized her working relationship with Copland.

The most potent and disputed feature of the score was its treatment of “Simple Gifts”. Despite the stamp of authenticity that it lends to the action, the Shaker hymn was wildly inappropriate, as Copland enjoyed pointing out: since the Shakers were celibate, a Shaker wedding was a contradiction in terms.
⁵⁸
As Pollack notes, Copland may have viewed the Shakers sympathetically as protocommunists; Graham, by contrast, saw them as a typical American religious cult whose fanaticism sprang from “hidden desires”. Copland made this dark side audible in the later sections of the ballet, whose style recalls the brittle tensions of the gun-fight in
Billy the Kid
, but hardly any of this mood emerged in the suite, which omitted around three hundred measures from the original score.

In the ballet the four variations on “Simple Gifts” function much like the parts of a traditional pas de deux:

Theme: The Bride

Variation I: The Husbandman

Variation II: The Bride

Variation III: The Husbandman

Variation IV: Bride and Husbandman

The Husbandman's movements become increasingly outgoing and athletic in his variations. At the end of Variation IV the Bride and Husbandman enter the house, and she sits in the chair where the Pioneer Woman had sat at the opening. In the coda to the variations, however, the action shifts to the Revivalist and his flock. Suddenly the Revivalist begins to spin like a tornado, his arm jabbing out from time to time like an accusatory bolt of lightning. With the blessing of the Pioneering Woman, but without bidding his Bride farewell, the Husbandman steps across the fence that has so far bounded the action. The Revivalist and his followers pray for him and return to their regular business. Suddenly the Husbandman reappears, but no one seems to see him; perhaps he is only the image of the Bride's concern. She launches into a distraught solo in which she seems to tell her child about his or her father and recall their wedding dances. When the fifth, climactic variation of “Simple Gifts” sounds everyone dances joyously, except the Bride, who sits on the side, alone. For most of the quiet, prayerlike music that follows, she
dances alone while the others are still. As the opening music returns the Husbandman joins her as the other characters depart; it is not clear whether they will face the future together, as many early accounts of the ballet assumed, or if she is alone with her memories.

However we interpret the action, the choreography for the final variation comes as a theatrical shock, and, if we only know the suite, a musical one as well. By placing the Bride off to the side, Graham stressed her alienation just as the music resonated with communal accord and marital affirmation. Indeed, watching the ballet I find myself continuously taken aback by moments of tension and pathos that I had not perceived in the music, a testimony, it might be said, to the artistry of both of its creators; there was no need for Copland to “mickeymouse” the action. And yet, as Marta Robertson warns, the fact that music and dance seem to tell such different stories might also be termed an artistic failure on the part of the composer. The concert suite, Copland's pentimento, achieved its momentous success, we might speculate, precisely because it replaced Graham's story with a plotline more familiar in the concert hall. By lopping off the episodes of Fear, Wrath, and Crisis Copland allowed the fifth variation to appear as the defining and logical completion of the series, a triumphant resolution. Instead of appearing as a midballet divertissement, the sequence of theme and variations was now the goal of the entire composition, on the model of Beethoven's Ninth, whose theme Copland must have realized has a clear kinship with “Simple Gifts”. The timing was perfect. With the war over, America (or at least its noninvisible population) was ready to sing its own “Ode to Joy”. Years later Copland made no bones about his good fortune in mirroring the national mood: “I must admit I'm influenced by public opinion!”
⁵⁹

“Simple Gifts” was an odd anthem for a newly emerged nuclear superpower. Copland had no interest in actual Shaker doctrine; he had voided the song of its content just as he and Graham had bleached the discordant racial elements out of their vision of the American past. At war's end none of the demands that black leaders had made for fair employment and civil rights had been implemented; indeed, the reforms would not come about for another twenty years. Due to a large extent to the continuing power of Southern Democrats in Congress, the American Armed Forces remained segregated until the Korean War. A new world of equality was once again a “dream deferred”. Late in the twentieth century conductors began to preface performances of Beethoven's Ninth with Schoenberg's
Survivor from Warsaw
, a chronologically
inverted attempt to assert the Ninth's continuing relevance. Perhaps conductors might someday consider a similar pairing of Copland's
Appalachian Spring
with the Ellington/Strayhorn
Deep South Suite
, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in January 1946. Its first two movements, Ellington's satiric “Magnolias Dripping with Molasses” (titled “Psuedo”
[sic]
in the parts) and Strayhorn's grimly dissonant “Hear Say”, contrast illusion and reality in a way that parallels the interplay of Copland's bright music and Graham's dark drama. And its final movement, “Happy-Go-Lucky Local”, presents a vision of hope just as powerful as Copland's but far more reflective of the conditions over which hope would have to triumph.

OUTRO: THE ELLINGTON ARCHIVE

The study of history combines evidence and interpretation. Today much of the written evidence about Ellington's music is housed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Archive Center is located on the first floor of the museum, just across the hall from a much-visited re-creation of Julia Child's television kitchen. For most of Ellington's compositions the Ellington Collection contains the composer's sketches, full scores, and original sets of the parts used by players. The Ellington Collection is just one of many in the care of the devoted and helpful staff of the Archive Center, though most of the other collections contain what is called “material history”. While I was looking at the original instrumental parts for Ellington's scores, a researcher across the table might be examining maps of the national power grid, or nineteenth-century cookbooks, or early twentieth-century advertisements. It seems fitting and proper that Ellington's legacy resides in the city of his birth, surrounded by such seemingly modest yet essential Americana.