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- On January 20, 2009, moments before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States, “Simple Gifts”—a Shaker tune made famous by Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring (1944)—sounded in an instrumental arrangement by Copland’s student John Williams. The tune was significant enough, but still more was its source, given the new president’s well-known appreciation for Copland. The previous week, at the start of the inauguration festivities, the actor Tom Hanks had narrated Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942) on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The composer’s Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) was also performed on this occasion. These iconic works of World War II were played, over six decades later, during the inauguration of a U.S. president who not only inspired worldwide enthusiasm but also inherited a protracted war. For American and global television audiences alike, the musical choices during the 2009 presidential inauguration made audible a connection, however unintended and unacknowledged, between what has come to be seen as America’s “good” war in 1941–45 and the positive musical identity that was forged in its cauldron.