Appalachian Spring Research Articles

Discurso feminista e identidad americana en la danza moderna: Martha Graham y el significado social del cuerpo femenino

. Este artículo reflexiona acerca de los conceptos del discurso feminista y de la identidad americana en el contexto de la significación social del cuerpo danzante tal y como está representado en las coreografías de la bailarina americana Martha Graham. Aquí abordamos el impacto de las obras revolucionarias Heretic (1929) Lamentation (1930), Primitive Mysteries (1931), Frontier (1935), Letter to the World (1940) y Appalachian Spring (1944), explorando su significado social con referencia a la demarcación de la masculinidad y de la feminidad en la visión de danza de Graham. La iconografía visual, las partituras extraordinarias y la atmósfera sensorial creada por y para estas coreografías seminales son experiencias únicas de una danza artística específica que construye el discurso feminista. La contribución de Martha Graham a la formación de la danza moderna y sus característicos movimientos de ‘contract and release’ que forman la Graham Technique, en la que la energía se localiza en el centro del cuerpo, está saturada de emoción humana. El discurso feminista incorporado en estas coreografías habla del amor y de la muerte, de la opresión y de la libertad, de las limitaciones del género y de la lucha por identidad. Su contribución iluminadora a la danza contemporánea se basó en sus frases de movimiento corporal únicas y en su cuestionamiento sin concesiones de los cuerpos construidos socialmente. Martha Graham creó un nuevo vocabulario de movimiento que revolucionó la danza y se configuró debido al ‘cultural embodiment, cultural communication and the whole shift in the Western lifeworld at the beginning of the twentieth century’ . Palabras clave. Martha Graham, Graham Technique, danza moderna, significado social, discurso feminista, cuerpo femenino, grupos sociales, identidad americana, paisaje musical, cuerpo danzante femenino.

Zephyr

So many years spent learning how to talk to the wind, and I’m still sitting underneath a ceiling fan, my left eye watering, my parti-words littered out in little paper squares along the desk. I talked, but the only reply I could get was my own voice thrown back, echoed like the zephyr I was always chasing somewhere in the outskirts: I wanted to open a way station for monarchs, its milkweed itinerant and raucous. Or I played the first strains of Appalachian Spring and let those notes fill me with their epic persuasion, belated and in love still with all the zigzag currents who never even knew I was there.

President's message

Hello Everyone! I hope the last few months have been good to you. I cannot imagine that when I sat down to write the first of these entries, I would be looking at the global coronavirus situation still being so bad. I started my first column with a piece of music that I was listening to being quite apt. Perhaps I can continue that with the excerpt “Simple Gifts” from Aaron Copland's “Appalachian Spring”. The lyrics to the original Shaker song on which it is based start “…'tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free”. With all the restrictions and technology dominating our lives with those who are or have been working from home, they are probably quite apt.

Martha Graham, ‘An American, A kosmos’: Border-crossing in Martha Graham’s early works

This paper examines the connection between crossing borders (state limits, borders between America and Mexico or America and Europe, and temporal borders) and pushing choreographical boundaries in dance pioneer Martha Graham’s ballets created in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s.Danced only by women, Primitive Mysteries (1931) was inspired by Graham’s travels in New Mexico, and explores the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southern States of the United States; nine years later, Graham would explore this theme further with El Penitente, which also draws from the Medieval tradition of mystery plays. Frontier (1935), one of Graham’s most famous soli, clearly connects the American Frontier to the construction of female identity, as do American Document (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944). Graham pioneered a new way for women to dance, to express their femininity and their power: her works, inspired by Native American traditions, Mexican folklore, Greek mythology and literature from both sides of the Atlantic, depict strong women who are not afraid of pushing boundaries.Creating an American choreographic tradition also meant exploring its literary legacy for Martha Graham: this paper therefore also delves into the way the Whitmanian intertext emerges in Graham’s choreographic writing, in her conception of Americanness, modernity, the body and gender.

Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring

Research Article| December 01 2018 Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring David Vanderhamm David Vanderhamm David VanderHamm is a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Denver. He earned his PhD in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his dissertation, “The Social Construction of Virtuosity: Musical Labor and the Valuation of Skill in the Age of Electronic Media.” His research focuses on the meanings of musical labor across multiple genres of US music from the twentieth century to today and on the ongoing role of advertising and commodification in American musical life. David has presented widely at international, national, and regional conferences, including meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. His other publications include “Preserving Heritage, Fostering Change: Accidental Archives in Country Music and Hip-Hop,” coauthored with Mark Katz (Public Historian 37, no. 4), and an entry for “Virtuosity/Virtuoso” in Oxford Bibliographies Online. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 507–526. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0507 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Vanderhamm; Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 507–526. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0507 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Gay Divorce of Music and Dance: Choreomusicality and the Early Works of Cage-Cunningham

This article explores the early collaborations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, in which music and dance were united structurally and in expressive intent. Drawing on unexamined archival materials, I begin by highlighting the thematic content of the earliest Cage-Cunningham collaborations, Credo in Us (1942) and Four Walls (1944), of Cunningham's (rather than Martha Graham's) choreography for the Revivalist's solo in Appalachian Spring (1944), and of Cage's The Perilous Night (1943–44), premiered at the couple's debut concert. These works all portray a conflict between sexual desire and social conformity through marriage, a theme of pressing import as Cage left his wife to become Cunningham's partner. I then elucidate the programmatic nature of the first and last works that Cunningham choreographed to the music of Satie, Idyllic Song (1944) and Second Hand (1970), both of which use Cage's arrangements for piano of Satie's Socrate. Placing Cunningham's personal choreographic notes in dialogue with my own observation of rehearsals and performances, I suggest that Second Hand dramatizes not only the Socratic texts set in Satie's score but also the couple's relationship and their earlier dependence on and subsequent rejection of personal expression, a rejection that heightened their status within the postwar avant-garde. Instead of dismissing the collaborations of the 1940s as “early” or “anomalous,” I suggest that they are fundamental to understanding how Cage and Cunningham's relationship prior to their de facto marriage led to one of the most productive divorces in the history of artistic collaboration.

Searching for a Fresh Point of View

In the early 1940s Aaron Copland cultivated an identity as an authority on film composition through public lectures, interviews, and his own film scores. Championing film music’s potential as a serious art form, Copland sought to show Hollywood that film composers could branch out from the romantic and post-romantic aesthetics that infused contemporary soundtracks and write in a more modern, even American, style. During the 1940s the film industry was already embracing an abundance of new production styles, techniques, and genres that fostered innovation in the development of cinematic musical codes. When Copland returned to Hollywood in 1948 to score William Wyler’s psychological melodrama The Heiress (1949), he chose to take on a set of new challenges. Copland attempted to discover a new idiom for love music, on the one hand, and began to use leitmotifs as a structural device, on the other. Copland’s experience with The Heiress opens a space in which to reassess his opinions about appropriate film-scoring techniques as well as his public endorsement of film composition. His perspectives on film composition—as demonstrated in his writings, correspondence, and film scores as well as in interviews and reviews of his film music—reveal a tension between the composer’s artistic sensibilities and his attitude toward the commercialism of film music. Indeed he maintained a more ambivalent attitude toward cinematic composition than he publically professed. Understood in this context, Copland’s scoring decisions in The Heiress reflect a turn away from the Americana of Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944) and the Russian-themed score of The North Star (1943), as he sought to refashion his identity as a composer in the post-war years.

The Fence and the Chair: Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring, and Internment as Modernist Setting

The Fence and the Chair: Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring, and Internment as Modernist Setting

Danza!: Amalia Hernández and El Ballet Folklórico de México by Duncan Tonatiuh

Reviewed by: Danza!: Amalia Hernández and El Ballet Folklórico de México by Duncan Tonatiuh Deborah Stevenson, Editor Tonatiuh, Duncan Danza!: Amalia Hernández and El Ballet Folklórico de México; written and illus. by Duncan Tonatiuh. Abrams, 2017 34p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-2532-6 $18.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-68335-110-8 $15.54 R Gr. 2-5 Amalia Hernández was expected to grow up to become a schoolteacher, but instead she became fascinated with the world of dance. Initially she studied classical ballet, but when modern dance spread to Mexico she became inspired; she expanded her remit again to study traditional dances across Mexico and incorporate them into her new choreography. Her attention to stagecraft as well as choreography made her company a natural for the young medium of television in the 1950s, where it was a huge success, and El Ballet Folklórico de México soon became an international phenomenon. The book does an excellent job of chronicling Hernández’s work as cultural explorer and celebrator of both pre-Columbian past and Mexican present; while it doesn’t spend time on personal description, it’s clear from her achievements as dancer, choreographer, company founder, tour director, and teacher what a powerhouse Hernández was. Tonatiuh’s signature stylized figures in side view and flattened perspective are surprisingly well suited to dancing; though there’s not a lot of focus on motion, the rhythmic compositions and streamlined details of costume and set design have an appropriately theatrical flair. This is a useful complement to other chronicles of twentieth-century dance such as Greenberg and Jordan’s Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (BCCB 9/10) and it’s a rich introduction to an important figure less celebrated in the U.S. End matter includes a detailed author’s note, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index; there are no pointers toward YouTube, so make sure young readers take a look there to see the Ballet Folklórico in action. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Three New Cultivars of Cornus kousa: Empire, Pam’s Mountain Bouquet, and Red Steeple

The genus Cornus contains 58 species of trees, shrubs, and herbs that are mostly distributed throughout the northern hemisphere (Xiang et al., 2006). Flowering dogwood (C. florida), kousa dogwood (C. kousa), and their interspecific hybrids are considered the most popular and economically significant members of the genus in the nursery and landscape industries. These deciduous trees are valued for their spring display of pink, red, or white bracts, brilliant-red fall foliage, and exfoliating bark. Retail and wholesale sales of dogwood in the United States account for over $30 million dollars annually with 73.1% of these sales coming from eight states [Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture–National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2010)]. Sales in Tenneessee account for 21.9% of total sales of deciduous flowering trees, making it an important crop for the state’s economy. Additionally, six counties in Tennessee produce substantial amounts of 1-year-old liners that are sold to out-of-state nurseries for finishing and resale. In nursery production, a liner refers to a small tree that is transplanted and allowed to become a larger tree for sale by wholesale or retail outlets. These liners ultimately supply 80% of the country’s dogwoods (Simmons, 2002). Large-bracted dogwoods are widely grown throughout midtemperate regions of eastern North America, both in the wild and as coveted ornamental trees in urban and suburban landscapes. Across this range, flowering dogwoods have been severely affected by dogwood anthracnose [Discula destructiva (Redlin, 1991)] and powdery mildew [Erysiphe pulchra (Li et al., 2009)]. Because of the importance of dogwoods to the U.S. agricultural economy, an improvement program was initiated over 20 years ago at the University of Tennessee to develop disease-resistant cultivars of dogwoods. These efforts have resulted in the release of the first flowering dogwood cultivar (Appalachian Spring) with resistance to dogwood anthracnose (Windham et al., 1998) and three powdery mildew resistant cultivars: Jean’s Appalachian Snow, Karen’s Appalachian Blush, and Kay’s Appalachian Mist (Windham et al., 2003). Cornus kousa is more tolerant to anthracnose and powdery mildew than C. florida (Holmes and Hibben, 1989; Ranney et al., 1995). Hybrids between these two species are generally more vigorous than typical plants of either parent species and have field resistance or tolerance to dogwood anthracnose and powdery mildew (Ranney et al., 1995). There are over 100 named cultivars of C. kousa and many cultivars are the result of either selection of open-pollinated seedlings or spontaneous sports rather than systematic breeding (Cappiello and Shadow, 2005). The objective of this project was to evaluate 400 seedlings of C. kousa for disease resistance and horticultural traits such as color, degree of overlap, size of bracts, tree form, and bark and leaf characteristics. From these, three genotypes were selected for development and release.

The Ancestress figure: Puritanism in Martha Graham’s choreography

Abstract Puritanism, in Martha Graham’s dance work, has been an important conception for the development of her style, but has not been thoroughly analyzed by scholars. The Ancestress, in one of her most interesting and neglected pieces, Letter to the World (1940), embodies a powerful interpretation of Puritanism. The idea of focusing on a single character stems from the resonances it produces on the choreography and on Graham’s production at large. Letter to the World is about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and personality, and the Ancestress represents the puritanical force of tradition that attempts to stop the growth of the poet’s (creative) life. In this sense, she can be compared to Mother Ann Lee, leader of the Shakers, who preached chastity among her acolytes and to the way William Carlos Williams portrays the Puritans in his book of essays, In the American Grain (1925), a book that influenced Graham’s vision. Puritanism undergoes an interesting transformation this time in one of Graham’s dance’s most celebrated pieces, Appalachian Spring (1944), where the Revivalist sums up what the Ancestress represented with three twists in terms of name, gender and dance.

Homophobia in Twentieth-Century Music: The Crucible of America's Sound

Challenging notions of the composer as solitary genius and of twentieth-century homophobia as a simple destructive force, I trace a new genealogy of Coplandian tonal modernism–“America's sound” as heard in works like “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” – and glean new sociosexual meanings in “cryptic” modernist abstraction like that of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.” I consider gay white male tonalists collectively to highlight how shared social identities shaped production and style in musical modernism, and I recast gay composers' close-knit social/sexual/creative/professional alliances as, not sexually nepotistic cabals, but an adaptive and richly productive response to the constraints of an intensely homophobic moment. The essay underscores the pivotal role of the new hetero/homo concept in twentieth-century American culture, and of queer impetuses in American artistic modernism.

TRANSCRIPTOME SEQUENCING OF FLOWERING DOGWOOD (CORNUS FLORIDA) FOR DEVELOPMENT OF EST-SSRS

To obtain more information on the flowering dogwood genome, a single custom, normalized library for Roche/454 sequencing was prepared and sequenced for bract (‘Cherokee Brave’) and leaf ('Appalachian Spring' and 'Cherokee Brave') tissue. The 1,621,644 reads were assembled into 63,029 unique sequences, comprising 42,946 isotigs (26,627 isogroups) and 20,083 singletons. Also, 5,670 expressed sequence tags (EST) – simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were identified from the data set. To demonstrate the usefulness of this EST resource for marker development, primers were designed for 2,998 of the EST-SSRs of which 94 were tested for amplification of loci in 'Appalachian Spring', 'Cherokee Brave', and two F1 breeding lines. Seventy-five of the loci amplified and 29 were polymorphic, from which 9 of the most polymorphic loci were selected and tested using 22 individuals representing 6 dogwood species and an interspecific hybrid. The number of alleles detected ranged from 3 to 10 and observed heterozygosity was 0.05 to 0.67. Cross species transfer was higher in the big-bracted dogwood species (C. elliptica and C. kousa) than in the non-bracted species (C. alba, C. alternifolia, and C. sericea) and principal coordinate analysis differentiated all of the species. This work confirms the applicability of flowering dogwood EST-SSRs for the breeding and genetics of flowering dogwood and other Cornus species. We expect to optimize more EST-SSRs in order to accelerate breeding of flowering dogwood cultivars with improved disease resistance, heat or drought tolerance, and other aesthetically appealing ornamental traits.

A Jewish Composer for Our Time

A Jewish Composer for Our Time

Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (review)

Reviewed by: Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring Deborah Stevenson Greenberg, Jan. Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring; written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan; illus. by Brian Floca. Porter/Flash Point/Roaring Brook, 2010. [48p.] ISBN 978-1-59643-338-0 $12.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5. The Martha of the title is legendary twentieth-century dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and Greenberg and Jordan, noted chroniclers of art, here follow the artistic collaboration that created one of her best-known ballets, Appalachian Spring. Graham worked with composer Aaron Copland, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his score, and with sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who created the stage sets, to craft a "story of the frontier when pioneer families traveled west to put down roots." While it's tough to put together a few of the historical pieces here, the graceful, restrained text chronicles a process most people never see the inside of; the details of revision and collaboration are wisely chosen for effective illumination. Floca's art has some similarity to that of Robert Andrew Parker, illustrator of Greenberg and Jordan's Action Jackson (BCCB 11/02), in its slender linework and washes of watercolor hues; however, it's more trim and diagrammatic, evincing a delicate crispness that's subtly appropriate to Graham's vigorous aesthetic. This could make an interesting counterpart to Schubert's Ballet of the Elephants (BCCB 5/06), or, with additional information, an introduction to Graham and modern American art, especially if paired with Freedman's Martha Graham (BCCB 6/98) and the few extant film clips of Graham in action and conversation. The book closes with end matter including brief traditional biographies of Graham, Copland, and Noguchi; a bibliography; source notes; and a few black-and-white photographs of the principals. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Inheritance of red foliage in flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.)

Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.) is an ornamental tree valued for its showy white, pink, or red spring bract display and red fall color. A “pseudo” F2 flowering dogwood population was recently developed from a honeybee mediated cross of ‘Cherokee Brave’ × ‘Appalachian Spring’. The foliage color of 94 “pseudo” F2 plants segregated into green- and red- leaved phenotypes and was visually rated for color on five spring dates over 3 years (2007–2009). Chi-square analyses of observed segregation of phenotypes indicated that a complementary gene interaction form of epistasis controls foliage color with a 9:7 two gene ratio. We propose the symbols rl1 and rl2 for the genes controlling this trait.

Honeybee-mediated Controlled Pollinations in Cornus florida and C. kousa Intra- and Interspecific Crosses

Flowering (Cornus florida L.) and kousa (C. kousa Hance) dogwoods are ornamental trees valued for their four-season appeal, but also for their importance to retail and wholesale nurseries. The popularity of kousa dogwood has increased in recent years as a result of its resistance to dogwood anthracnose and powdery mildew as compared with flowering dogwood, which is typically susceptible to those diseases. This range of resistance allows the development of intra- and interspecific cultivars with multiple disease resistance or a combination of disease resistance and specific ornamental traits. Breeding requires controlled crosses that are usually done manually, which is a labor-intensive process. Cornus florida and C. kousa have generally been found to be self-incompatible allowing for the breeding process to be made more efficient by not having to emasculate flowers. We have capitalized on the natural ability of honeybees and the self-incompatible nature of dogwood to perform self- and crosspollinations of flowering and kousa dogwood. Self-pollinations were conducted in 2006 and 2007 with C. florida ‘Appalachian Spring’ and ‘Cherokee Brave’ and with C. kousa ‘Blue Shadow’ and Galilean®. The flowering dogwood self-pollinations resulted in no seed production, whereas the kousa dogwood self-pollinations resulted in low seed production, indicating self-incompatibility. Intra- and interspecific crosses of flowering and kousa dogwood cultivars and breeding lines were conducted in 2006 to 2008. Honeybees were effective in facilitating seed production for all intraspecific crosses conducted. Seedling phenotypes of putative intra- and interspecific hybrids are similar and practically indistinguishable, so dogwood-specific simple sequence repeats were used to verify a sample of the putative hybrids. The results demonstrated that honeybees were effective in performing controlled pollinations and that honeybee-mediated pollinations provide an alternative to time-consuming hand pollinations for flowering and kousa dogwood.

DVD Reviews

DVD Reviews

A linkage map for flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.) based on microsatellite markers

A genetic linkage map of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.) was constructed using 94 individuals derived from a cross of two F1 trees designated 97-6 and 97-7, which were originally from a cross between ‘Appalachian Spring’ and ‘Cherokee Brave’. Out of approximately 800 SSR loci examined, 271 were polymorphic between ‘Appalachian Spring’ and ‘Cherokee Brave’, but were monomorphic between 97-6 and 97-7. These 271 segregating markers were used to build a linkage map for flowering dogwood. Eleven linkage groups were obtained with a log-of-odds (LOD) value of 6.0 using JoinMap® 4.0 software, which matches the chromosome number of flowering dogwood haploid genome. This linkage map consisted of 255 SSR loci, spanned a total of 1,175 centimorgans (cM) with an average internal distance of 4.6 cM. Several larger gaps and slight clustering of markers were present on this linkage map. This is the first linkage map of flowering dogwood and will be a fundamental tool for new gene identification and marker-assisted selection in our flowering dogwood breeding program.

Development and characterization of simple sequence repeats for flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.)

Abundant, codominant simple sequence repeats (SSRs) markers can be used for constructing genetic linkage maps and in marker-assisted breeding programs. Enrichment methods for SSR motifs were optimized with the ultimate aim of developing numerous loci in flowering dogwood (C. florida L.) genome. Small insert libraries using four motifs (GT, CT, TGG, and AAC) were constructed with C. florida ‘Cherokee Brave’ deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Colony polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of 2,208 selected clones with three primers we reported previously indicated that 47% or 1,034 of the clones harbored one of the four targeted SSR motifs. Sequencing the putative positive clones confirmed that nearly 99% (1,021 of 1,034) of them contained the desired motifs. Of the 871 unique SSR loci, 617 were dinucleotide repeats (70.8%), and 254 were trinucleotide or longer repeats (29.2%). In total, 379 SSR loci had perfect structure, 237 had interrupted, and 255 had compound structure. Primer pairs were designed from 351 unique sequences. The ability of the 351 SSR primer pairs to amplify specific loci was evaluated with genomic DNA of ‘Appalachian Spring’ and ‘Cherokee Brave’. Of these primers, 311 successfully amplified product(s) with ‘Cherokee Brave’ DNA, 21 produced weak or faint products, and 19 did not amplify any products. Additionally, 218 of the 311 primers pairs revealed polymorphisms between the two cultivars, and 20 out of 218 primers detected an average of 13.7 alleles from 38 selected Cornus species and hybrids. These SSR loci constitute a valuable resource of ideal markers for both genetic linkage mapping and gene tagging of flowering dogwood.