Programme Note
Composer note:
While I was a student in Paris the choreographer George Balanchine had two weeks of Balanchine ballets in the Champs Élysée. A man I'd known in college, Lincoln Kirstein, was very much impressed by this and it was he that got George Balanchine to come over to the United States and start the New York City Ballet. In the early days, I was a musical advisor to that for a while. I was commissioned actually to write one ballet for them, which was done in 1939 on the subject of Pocahontas.
— Elliott Carter