A Pulitzer for a Ballet About a Wedding Day

Appalachian Spring began as a commission with almost no fixed subject. Patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge asked Copland in 1942 for a new ballet score for Martha Graham, and Copland composed most of it under the working title Ballet for Martha before Graham herself proposed the eventual title, lifted from a line in Hart Crane's poem The Dance that has no direct connection to the ballet's own story. Graham's choreography settled on a wedding day at a Pennsylvania farmhouse in the early twentieth century, following a bride, a husbandman, a revivalist preacher and his flock, and an older pioneer woman who serves as the community's memory.

The ballet premiered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 1944, with Graham dancing the bride and Copland's score performed by a thirteen piece chamber ensemble sized to fit the small stage the commission required. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945 and the New York Music Critics' Circle Award the same year, and Copland later arranged a fuller orchestral suite from the score that became, and remains, one of the most performed American orchestral works of the twentieth century, independent of any staged production of the ballet itself.