Holidays Symphony (with Copland - Appalacian Spring)

Folk music played an important role in shaping the musical styles of both Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, a pair of American originals-one French-trained, the other stubbornly home-grown-who are both noted for weaving alluring sonic tapestries of American life. For New Englander Ives, the key to authenticity lay in a kaleidoscopic pageant of tunes, dances, evocative sounds, and wildly unorthodox harmonic idioms. The Holidays Symphony, beginning with "Washington's Birthday" and ending with "Thanksgiving," occupied him on and off for more than fifteen years. New Yorker Aaron Copland's Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring, a ballet score for Martha Graham written thirty years after the Ives, approaches the American scene quite differently, blending folk-inspired melodies, energetic dances, and evocative landscapes within a sophisticated Stravinskian language, the whole trimmed and buffed to a wiry yet colorful idiom that has become for many the quintessential sound of modern American music.

This companion concert recording for Keeping Score includes Charles Ives's Holidays Symphony performed by the San Francisco Symphony, which was featured on PBS in Keeping Score: Ives Holidays Symphony. The recording of Copland's Appalachian Spring, performed here in the original 13-instrument chamber arrangement, was featured on Copland and the American Sound.

This album is the companion concert recording for Keeping Score, the San Francisco Symphony's multi-media project on PBS, national public radio, web sites and education.