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Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland and choreography by Martha Graham, counts among the best known American contributions to the global concert hall and stage. In the years since its premiere-as a dance work at the Library of Congress in 1944-it has become one of Copland's most widely performed scores, and the Martha Graham Dance Company still treats it as a signature work. Over the decades, the dance and the music have taken on a range of meanings that have transformed a wartime production into a seemingly timeless expression of American identity, both musically and visually. In this Oxford Keynotes volume, distinguished musicologist Annegret Fauser follows the work from its inception in the midst of World War II to its intersections with contemporary American culture, whether in the form of choreographic reinterpretations or musical ones, as by John Williams, in 2009, for the inauguration of President Barack Obama.



About the Author

Annegret Fauser

Annegret Fauser is a cultural musicologist whose work emphasizes how music intersects with its social, political, and artistic contexts. Her research focuses on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particularly that of France and the United States. She has published on French song and opera, women composers, exoticism, nationalism, reception history, and cultural transfer. Her books have been recognized by major awards, including the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Music in American Culture Award of the American Musicological Society and an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. For her substantial body of distinguished and important work she was awarded the 2011 Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.Annegret Fauser teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she is currently Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music. She is also affiliated with the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She was born in Germany, lived in Ghana and Germany, and studied musicology, art history, and philosophy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne. She received her PhD at the University of Bonn in 1992. Before becoming a member of the faculty at UNC, she taught musicology at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and City University, London.



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