During the 1930s, Copland and celebrated choreographer Martha Graham developed a mutual sense of admiration, based on their shared interest in simple, natural expression. Thus Appalachian Spring was born. The Shaker tune Simple Gifts fits well with Graham’s image of unity, simplicity and American rural life. Copland presents a series of variations on this tune – the music is illuminated by an inner glow of greater warmth and poignancy than perhaps any of his earlier works and has become the quintessential representative of American musical nationalism. The oratorio A Child of Our Time was Tippett’s artistic and emotional response to the events that led to the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom of November 1938. He used as his formal and historical models the Bach Passions and Handel’s Messiah which share with this contemporary morality the subject of the death of an individual set against the universal background of human suffering. Tippett’s use of the spiritual as a contemporary equivalent for the Lutheran chorale of the Bach settings draws the listener more closely into the drama through the spirituals’ unique verbal and musical metaphor.
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