This is my WHY I LOVE AARON COPLAND post

I love Aaron Copland. Besides the fact that he is the first American composer most people can name, he was a shameless self-promoter, and probably would have loved the fact that his music was used for the "Beef. It's what's for dinner." commercials.

He was also homosexual. He was tight-lipped about it, but he was out, and it's kind of brilliant that a gay man's music is known as some of the most recognizably American music of all time.

Appalachian Spring was a ballet written for another American great - choreographer Martha Graham. It was originally written for 13 instruments, and it is just so eerie and beautiful with this sparse instrumentation. The full orchestral suite is lovely too, but the original ballet music? Gorgeous.

So here, Appalachian Spring Suite, ballet music for 13 players.

This is my orchestral conductor from grad school, Keith Clark, with an orchestra basically made up of the ridiculously talented studio musicians in LA, who are hired for their ability to sightread anything (they generally do movie scores), the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. If you like it, the album includes An Outdoor Overture (a more mature and complex work) and Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, a beautifully haunting song cycle sung by Marni Nixon.

2008 Posted Fic

( The List )

25 stories, 3 fandoms, 53,556 words. Thank goodness for sga_episodefic; it gave me a kick in the butt to start writing regularly.