Aaron Copland
Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo
Copland composed his score for the ballet Rodeo on a commission from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942 and it was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, the same year. Copland extracted the suite in 1943, expanding the orchestration slightly, and it was given its first performance the same year by the Boston Pops led by Arthur Fiedler. The score calls for 3 flutes, 2 piccolos, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, piano, and strings.
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After the great success of his Billy the Kid, Aaron Copland wasn’t particularly interested in composing “another cowboy ballet” despite the many invitations he had to do so. But one of those invitations came from a friend, choreographer Agnes de Mille, who described to him a ballet that would be “The Taming of the Shrew—cowboy style.” Copland realized that this promised a significant departure from his previous work and—after a bit of persuasion—he signed on to the project.
Though it is set among the swaggering cowboys and flirting ladies of the American Southwest, the theme of Rodeo is timeless: the ritual of courtship. The pre-feminist scenario centers on the Cowgirl, a tomboy who seeks the attentions of the Head Wrangler by showing off her own cowboy skills during the intermission of a rodeo. She manages only to annoy him, and as twilight falls she is left without a date for the Saturday night dance at the ranch house. She flees the dance in tears, consoled by the Champion Roper. When she reappears she is wearing a beautiful red dress and bows in her hair. The crowd gapes and the cowboys vie for her attention as she consents to dance the wildly exuberant hoedown with the Head Wrangler. As the music slows the Wrangler approaches her for a kiss, but the Roper pulls her away and claims her for his own.
The Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo contains nearly all the music from the ballet save for the very short “Ranch House Party” and the music that originally connected the various sections together. And while Copland was sometimes coy about his use of folk materials in his works, in Rodeo they are front-and-center and almost always complete. We hear “If He’d Be a Buckaroo” and “Sis Joe” in “Buckaroo Holiday,” “I Ride an Old Paint” in “Saturday Night Waltz,” and the fiddle tunes “Bonyparte’s Retreat” and “McLoed’s Reel” in “Hoedown.”
The brash opening of “Buckaroo Holiday” is the ballet’s miniature overture; the curtain rises on the softer music that is associated with the Cowgirl, and as it speeds up we hear her bumpy ride on a bucking bronco. Loud rim shots announce the arrival of the cowboys, and from here the music expands in a nearly symphonic fashion, with the opening motto and the Cowgirl music its themes. Alert listeners may catch “If He’d Be a Buckaroo” in three-part canon along the way!
In the bittersweet “Corral Nocturne” the once-brassy Cowgirl is now lovesick and lonesome. “She runs,” de Mille wrote, “through the empty corrals intoxicated with space.”
After a vigorous tuning-up from the orchestra, the cowboys and ladies pair off in “Saturday Night Waltz,” where Copland turns “I Ride an Old Paint” into a “Texas minuet.”
“Hoedown” explodes to life, strutting and stomping with sheer vitality. The music comes to us in episodes, including a trombone-led slowing down that leads to the lovers’ kiss—whereupon the hoedown returns and whirls breathlessly to the end.