condition (record/cover): NM / EX
Two of the canonical works of American orchestral music in their most familiar forms, documented on Desto. Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944), originally composed as a ballet for Martha Graham, became in its orchestral suite version the most widely performed piece of American concert music of the 20th century - its Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" so thoroughly identified with a certain idea of American pastoral that the music itself has been partially consumed by that identity. Charles Ives's Three Places In New England, the older and stranger work, serves here as counterpoint: American landscape and memory rendered not in the clear diatonic light of Copland's prairie but in the overlapping, contradictory, superimposed layers that were Ives's natural mode of thought.
