Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid created American ballet music

Person: Aaron Copland
Lived: 1900–1990
Field: Music
From: American

The story

In the 1930s American ballet companies relied heavily on European music and stories, and American choreographers had little homegrown music to dance to. Aaron Copland, the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants, had recently changed direction. After years of writing in a demanding modernist style, he had started using folk material in El Salón México, inspired by a visit to a Mexican dance hall that won him a popular following.

The arts patron Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Copland to write a ballet about the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid for his company Ballet Caravan, with choreography by Eugene Loring. The story, based on a book by Walter Noble Burns, follows Billy from a frontier town to his death at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett, framed by an opening and closing scene of pioneers trekking westward across the open prairie. Copland wove six cowboy songs into the score, including Git Along, Little Dogies, The Old Chisholm Trail and Goodbye Old Paint, along with a Mexican jarabe dance played by solo trumpet.

Rather than quoting the tunes plainly, Copland reshaped them with modern rhythms, layered harmonies and syncopation, and drew the score's spare harmonies from the cowboy melodies themselves. The biographer Howard Pollack called the result an archetypal depiction of the legendary American West, and it was among the first ballets to display a truly American music and dance vocabulary.

Billy the Kid premiered in Chicago on 16 October 1938, with the score played in a two-piano version, and reached New York on 24 May 1939 with a full orchestra. Copland later said he could not remember another work of his that was so unanimously received. Together with El Salón México it became his first widespread public success, and it opened the way for Rodeo in 1942 and Appalachian Spring in 1944.

The ballet came at a moment when artists from Fred Astaire to George Balanchine and Martha Graham were working to democratise and Americanise dance. Copland's score helped fill the gap in the American dance repertory, and the musicologist Elizabeth Crist has described Billy the Kid and Rodeo as the basis of his reputation as a composer of Americana. The concert suite drawn from the ballet remains one of his most widely performed works.

Why it matters

Billy the Kid gave American dance a musical voice drawn from the country's own folk songs, and it shaped how the Wild West has sounded in concert halls and films ever since.