The Red Pony Suite

For The Red Pony Suite, adapted from his fourth Hollywood commission, Copland introduced a spare, atmospheric style to capture the rural, rugged setting of the film, based on a novella by John Steinbeck. Copland was commissioned to write the score for The Red Pony by producer and director Lewis Milestone, with whom he had worked on a previous Steinbeck adaptation, Of Mice and Men (1939). The novella comprises four short stories about a young farm boy, Jody Tiflin (known in the film as Tom), who lives on a ranch near Salinas, California, with his parents and the cowhand Billy Buck. Steinbeck himself wrote the screenplay, which tells of the death of Tom’s beloved pony and the lives of the various characters on the ranch. Portions of Copland’s score suggest American folk music, but the composer insisted that his melodies were original. Critics widely deemed the hour-long score to be the film’s most outstanding feature, and Copland later recast it as a six-movement concert suite. Efrem Kurtz conducted its premiere with the Houston Symphony in 1948.