Upright 4to.  Signed full score of the waltz from the important American composer's Billy the Kid, in the 1957 orchestration, signed "Aaron Copland / 1977" at the head of the music.  [PN] D. E. 99.  Some light wear at edges, but overall in very fine condition.  17 pp. bound with staples.  9 x 12 inches (23 x 30.5 cm).

"In an article for RCA Records in 1950, Aaron Copland (1900–1990) described how he came to write Billy the Kid, recalling that it was ‘the first time that I attempted to tap the rich source of American folk music and give it a full orchestral setting’. The idea for the ballet came from Lincoln Kirstein, who commissioned Copland to write it for his Ballet Caravan in 1938, in collaboration with the choreographer Eugene Loring. With wry humour, Copland wrote that ‘having been born in Brooklyn myself, I was rather wary of tackling a cowboy subject. But Kirstein was persuasive … and tucked two collections of Western tunes under my arm. I had worked with Mexican folk tunes in El salón México, and the idea of seeing what I could do with homegrown ones helped Kirstein win the argument. Thus in the summer of 1938 I found myself writing a cowboy ballet in Paris, France.’ Though mostly written in Paris by a Jewish composer from Brooklyn, Billy the Kid quickly became the archetypal musical evocation of the landscapes and people of the American West." (Nigel Simeone, hyperion-records.co.uk, 2015)