One of the sunniest pieces of American music ever written began as a dark, anxiety-ridden story about the trauma of war, was composed in Hollywood for an East Coast stage, and carries a title with nothing to do with Appalachia or spring. This episode traces the 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring and the long-distance collaboration between Aaron Copland and Martha Graham, drawing on their correspondence, Graham's choreographic notes, and 1940s reviews. We follow Copland's shift from jagged Paris-influenced dissonance to the accessible "ordinary music" of the Depression years, and Graham's grounded, contraction-and-release technique that put gravity and female psychology back into dance.

Graham first pitched a Medea adaptation set in New England; Copland refused, and they settled on a Civil War-era Pennsylvania settlement, developed entirely by m ...