Two years later Martha Graham's introspective scenario about life in Pennsylvania when it was the frontier elicited Copland's score Appalachian Spring, first performed in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress. (In it he included one fiddle tune from a Library of Congress field recording, which he knew through its transcription in John and Alan Lomax's Our Singing Country.) ( Music for Radio, written in 1937, was given the title Saga of the PrairieВ as the result of a contest, so some people heard the West in Copland's music even before the first of his works to have a specifically Western subject.) Kirstein wanted the score of Billy the KidВ to contain quotations of cowboy songs and sent Copland off to Paris with several cowboy songbooks thus the score's heavily folk-music texture is partly a result of the commission.Д¬opland again made extensive use of folk material in his next ballet score, Rodeo, written in 1942 for the choreographer Agnes DeMille.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!В was a local success but did not make the transition to repertory when asked about it in later years Copland would say 'I wrote that piece very fast.' His second commission, from Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan in New York, resulted in Billy the KidВ (1938), one of his best-known works and the work which first definitely identified him with the American West. The first, from the Chicago choreographer Ruth Page, resulted in the 1935 score Hear Ye! Hear Ye!, a ballet with a Rashomon-like plot set in a court of law. In the mid-1930s Copland began to receive commissions from dance companies. Listen to this page Music for Dance and Film Billy the Kid: production shot, 1938, Music Division, Library of Congress.

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