# Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid World premiere: New York, November 9th, 1940 (NBC Symphony Orchestra, cond. William Steinberg). Though Aaron Copland wrote in many styles across his long career, the "American" sound of his ballets from the mid 1930s and 1940s remains his distinctive hallmark. Billy the Kid was the first of a wildly successful creative run that included the popular ballets _Rodeo_ and _Appalachian Spring_, as well as the orchestral works _Fanfare for the Common Man_ and _Lincoln Portrait_. Billy the Kid was first a ballet, conceived by director Lincoln Kirstein, who gave Copland a package of Western songs before he went off to Paris for the summer of 1938. Composition came quickly, and a two-piano version was ready for a premiere with dancers by October. It was so successful that he adapted it into an orchestral suite in the summer of 1939. Copland used cowboy songs, including Git Along Little Dogies, The Old Chisholm Trail, and Goodbye Old Paint. There is also a symphonic 'harmonica' — listen for the upper winds and muted trumpet. The story begins on the open prairie, and first depicts the famous outlaw's origin story: Billy as a boy with his mother in a frontier town. A fight escalates, and a stray bullet kills her. Billy stabs the man responsible and flees, beginning his outlaw life. The story moves then to scenes of life on the run, including a card game in the desert at night. Then Billy is hunted by a posse, and, after a gun battle, he is briefly imprisoned before making a daring escape. Finally, his hideout is discovered and he is ambushed and killed; the camera pans back over the open prairie.