Appalachian Music at the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival
Journeys usually start at home.
The theme of the 2025 Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival—“Journeys”—was inspired by the young J.S. Bach’s 200-mile walk to hear a great organist play. In modern times, 200 miles is a few hours’ drive, more than enough distance to reach the source or inspiration of some of the music planned for this year’s festival.
Specifically, 200 miles from Harrisonburg can get you to much of the region known as Appalachia. The limits of Appalachia depend on who you ask, but it’s generally said to run along the western side of the Allegheny Mountains (which are west of Harrisonburg), from northern Alabama to southwest New York. The Shenandoah Valley—east of the Alleghenies but west of the Blue Ridge Mountains—is usually considered “Appalachia” as well, though not by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the 1965 federal initiative aimed at economic development in the region. The Appalachian Mountains, which include both the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge, run all the way to Newfoundland, Canada.
And that brings us to Appalachian Spring.
Suite from Appalachian Spring comes from Aaron Copland’s 1944 score for a ballet and storyline by Martha Graham. The ballet’s plot revolves around the comings and goings of a bride, a groom, a “pioneer woman,” and a revivalist preacher and his followers in what Graham and Copland imagined to be a small village in Pennsylvania.
The “suite” from the ballet is the version almost always performed by orchestras. Created by Copland the year after the ballet’s premiere, it omits some Civil War–related movements from the ballet. But it includes the best-known musical theme of the work, variations on the Shaker tune, “Simple Gifts.”
“Simple Gifts” was written by a Shaker elder living in Maine in the 19th century and was not widely known outside of Shaker communities until Copland used it in the ballet (and won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music).
So, is it “Appalachian”? Graham worked mainly in New York City and all over the world, but she was born in Pittsburgh, and the ballet’s setting in a western Pennsylvania village probably qualifies. Copland was a New Yorker and “Simple Gifts” comes from Maine—not really Appalachian. It seems that while Copland and Graham liked the Americana-feeling idea of setting in the ballet in the region, they got the title from a line in a long Hart Crane poem called “Powhatan’s Daughter,” specifically in a section titled “The Dance.”
That line? “O Appalachian Spring!”
Suite from Appalachian Spring will be performed in Festival Concert I on Friday, June 13 (7:30 p.m., Lehman Auditorium at Eastern Mennonite University). The orchestra, under the direction of SVBF Principal Conductor Daniel Myssyk, will use Copland’s original ballet scoring for nine strings, three wind instruments, and a piano. (Copland also published ballet and suite versions scored for a full orchestra.)
On your local journey, you can get from Harrisonburg to the Blue Ridge Mountains in less than 30 minutes by car. And the Blue Ridge helped to inspire a new piece by composer Scott Wheeler: Blue Ridge Suite for viola and piano.
Wheeler says that he and frequent SVBF violist Celia Daggy collaborated at every stage of the development of the suite.
“The two of us discussed the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival and ways we might connect the four movements of the piece to this area of the country,” he writes. Wheeler describes the movements this way:
“Highway to Chesapeake Bay” depicts both the city and the countryside and makes a brief reference to Benjamin Britten’s Sunday Morning sea interlude from Peter Grimes.
“The Governor’s Mansion” combines a waltz and a gentle ragtime, using two spirituals to represent the workers who were all too often invisible but were responsible for maintaining the elegance of the mansion.
“Shenandoah” combines the famous folk melody with a movement from a Bach cantata—a literal depiction of this festival.
“Fire on the Mountain” is a traditional fiddle tune including a sort of folk dance, also quoting a slower fiddle tune. “Hector the Hero.” A Beethoven string trio also makes a brief cameo.
“Blue Ridge Suite as a whole is an exploration of the colors of the viola, with several passages that call on the composer/pianist’s long background in jazz,” Wheeler writes.
Scott Wheeler’s operas have been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera. the Guggenheim Foundation and White Snake Projects. His music has been performed by violinist Gil Shaham, conductor Kent Nagano, and singers Renee Fleming, Sanford Sylvan, and Susanna Phillips. He has appeared as conductor in New York, Berlin, Boston, and on several recordings, often with the Boston-based ensemble Dinosaur Annex, which he co-founded and directed for many years.
The world premiere of Blue Ridge Suite, with Daggy as the solo violist and Wheeler at the piano, comes at the noon concert on Wednesday, June 11 (12 noon, Asbury United Methodist Church, Harrisonburg, no tickets needed).
Remember that Hart Crane line that provided the title, “Appalachian Spring”? A few lines before that, the poem says: “I left the village for dogwood.”
There’s no indication that local band Dogwood Tales got their name from that line, but nevertheless, Dogwood Tales headlines Rock Bach @ Pale Fire (Tuesday, June 10, 7–9 p.m., Pale Fire Brewing Co., Harrisonburg). “Dogwood Tales is an emotional alt-country band from Harrisonburg, influenced by the sights and sounds of the Shenandoah Valley,” the band’s website says. “The band emerged from the rich DIY scene of their college town with their debut album, ‘Too Hard to Tell’ in 2018 and tours regularly on the east coast and nationally.”
More local connections? Dogwood Tales has a song called “Mt Jackson” (the one in Shenandoah County, off Interstate 81 north of Harrisonburg), and while one character in the story calls it a “nowhere town” that she wants desperately to “get out of,” another thinks to himself “this place has some magic.” And the cover photo on their 2024 album, “Sending,” is a view of Massanutten Peak taken from near the Carlton Street McDonald’s in Harrisonburg. Both the song and the photo are beautiful.
And on the last day of the festival, we’ll hear the most directly Appalachian music of them all: After Jack is an Appalachian music trio based in the Blue Ridge foothills of Ferrum, Va. The group will play a few sacred songs, and lead the congregation in another, at the Leipzig Service (Sunday, June 15, 10 a.m., Lehman Auditorium).
Emily Blankenship-Tucker, currently director of Appalachian Music at Ferrum College, founded the group in 2011 with her wife, Rachel Blankenship-Tucker. They were joined in 2019 by songwriter Catherine Backus.
The name “After Jack” was inspired by the Jack Tale Players, a touring music and theater group that Emily and Rachel were part of (and still participate in). In Appalachian folklore, Jack is a recurring character often pitted against “powerful or scary things, like challenging giants or the king or witches or whatever,” Emily says. “But he comes out on top because he’s lucky and smart.”
After Jack has toured widely in the past, took a break from that like most live music during the Covid-19 pandemic, and is working back to a wider touring schedule. (SVBF Artistic Director David Berry saw them play for a group of third-graders at an Any Given Child event in Harrisonburg and invited them to the festival.)
Emily and Rachel Blankenship-Tucker both work in a new Bachelor of Fine Arts program at Ferrum College called “music and theater: professional stage performance,” which offers concentrations in Appalachian music and Appalachian storytelling and drama. A student group at Ferrum, called Orchestra Appalachia, plays all kinds of Appalachian music—string band, old-time gospel, bluegrass, folk, and so on—and the major offers classes in social dance (Emily says it’s her favorite to teach), dulcimer playing, songwriting, and several styles of music. There is also a practicum side that puts students in communities—working with kids, leading jam sessions, learning from seniors—all in hopes of helping the students become “practitioners of arts in their community” rather than, say, on Broadway, Emily says.
At the Leipzig service, which also features Bach’s Cantata 104 (Du Hirte Israel, höre) and lots of organ music from organist Marvin Mills, After Jack will sing “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” “Far Side Banks of Jordan,” and “Farther Along,” and lead the congregation in singing the bluegrass hymn, “Jacob’s Vision.”
And there, the journey ends.
Jeremy Nafziger