By Milner Fuller
Manager of Classical Programming
Appalachian Spring is a strange title.
Appalachia is not an abstract idea to me. My father grew up on Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, and I grew up hearing “Little Boy Named Brud” stories about his childhood there. Years later, he took me back to the neighborhood where he grew up. I also spent summers at camps on Lookout Mountain in Alabama. I first heard music from Appalachian Spring at boarding school in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I could see the Blue Ridge Mountains from my dorm room window.
This title points to a world I actually know.
Which may be part of why it has always felt a little off.
The piece is often described as taking place in frontier Pennsylvania. And that could very well include Appalachia. The mountains run through the state, and a young couple building a life on the early American frontier might plausibly be living there.
But the piece never settles into a specific place. The title comes from a line of poetry, not from the setting of the ballet. And the most recognizable melody in the work, the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts,” was written by Elder Joseph Brackett in a Shaker community in Maine.
The elements do not quite line up.
The title aside, it was one of the first pieces of music that truly moved me.
We studied it in my first music history class at Virginia Episcopal School, where Debbie Burton became the first person who really taught me how to listen seriously. I arrived there at a moment when much of my life felt unsettled, and those first months became a period of reorientation, discovery, and rebuilding. I already loved music, but this was the first time I had been taught how to sit with it, study it, and listen beneath the surface.
In that class, we listened to the set of variations on “Simple Gifts.” At the time, I did not have the language for what Copland was doing, but I felt it deeply: the warm embrace of the strings as they enter, the playful tickle of the counterpoint section, and finally the sweep and grandeur of the last variation as the music opens outward into something expansive and fully earned.
Music as something shared was familiar to me. I had grown up around communal singing in church, though I was often too self-conscious to sing out myself. I had also heard the rich four-part sound of the professional choir at Birmingham’s stately Cathedral Church of the Advent.
But Debbie Burton, who grew up in rural western Virginia, described a very different musical tradition. Each summer, a traveling “Singing Master” named Robert Leslie would gather congregations from several small Methodist churches for nightly singing school, teaching shape-note hymns and four-part harmony. Debbie later told me that when she went to college and started attending larger churches, she automatically began singing harmony, only to find people turning around to stare at her. She had assumed this kind of congregational singing was normal everywhere.
What stayed with me was the idea that something so rich and disciplined could emerge collectively, through shared practice rather than professionalization.
Appalachian Spring similarly transforms communal traditions into something disciplined, stylized, and deeply expressive. Originally conceived as a ballet for Martha Graham, the work centers on a young pioneering bride on her wedding day. Graham’s choreography carries her unmistakable movement language: grounded, restrained, and intensely physical, with ritualized gestures shaped through precise form. But the ballet also contains warmth, humor, and a sense of openness that mirrors the wide spaces Copland evokes in the score.
That lineage is not distant for Indianapolis audiences. David Hochoy, longtime leader of Dance Kaleidoscope, studied at the Martha Graham School, danced with her company, and later served as a rehearsal director, bringing that language into his work with Dance Kaleidoscope for more than three decades. In 2018, the company even performed Graham’s choreography with this piece.
In that light, Appalachian Spring feels both connected to and removed from the world it evokes. The piece draws on communal traditions, but it also transforms them, shaping shared forms into something carefully crafted and emotionally resonant.
And that transformation is perhaps why the “Simple Gifts” variations land with such emotional force. The music does not present the tune as untouched folk material or regional color. It builds toward it patiently, giving it weight, structure, and emotional inevitability.
So no, the title is not precise.
But the music does not feel misplaced.
It does not describe Appalachia so much as it captures something I recognize from it: space, community, discipline, and the difficult optimism of beginning again.
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The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming performances of Appalachian Spring, conducted by Robert Spano and featuring saxophonist Steven Banks, also include Joan Tower’s Love Returns and Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5. Performances take place May 29–30 at Hilbert Circle Theatre. More information and tickets are available here.