Land had not fared well, either in its original or revised forms. Choreographer Jerome Robbins never produced Copland's ballet Dance Panels, despite the fact that he had commissioned it. None of his major orchestral works from the 1960s—Connotations, Music for a Great City, Emblems and Inscape—made much of an impact with audiences. Nor do they fit in either the populist or modernist parts of Copland's compositional output. Copland was aware that dodecaphonism did not hold as high a place as it had previously and writes, "By the sixties, serialism had been around for over fifty years; young composers were not so fascinated with it anymore." Nonetheless, he did not want to be pigeonholed. He told American composer Walter Piston in 1963, "People always want to shove me into the American idea more than I really want. Nobody wants to be an 'American' composer now as they did." He told another friend, "Young composers today wouldn't be caught dead with a folk tune!" He heard a considerable amount of new music through his association with Tanglewood and might not have wanted to be left behind. At the same time, he might not have become totally at home with serialism. He confided to Verna Fine, "I don't feel comfortable with the twelve-tone system, but I don't want to keep repeating myself." Ballet Choreographer John Neumier, noted for his ballets based on literary themes, received permission from Copland to use music from Connotations, the Piano Variations and Piano Fantasy for a ballet, The Fall Hamlet (The Hamlet Affair). Staged by the American Ballet Theatre on January 6, 1976, the title role was danced by Mikhail Barishnikov, Ophelia by Gelsie Kirkland, Gertrude by Marcia Haydée and Claudius by Erik Bruhn. The ballet was received poorly, due to ineffective choreography. Critic Bob Micklin noted, however, that Copland's "prickly, restless music" reflected the ballet's story very well. Legacy Despite its initial reception, Connotations was listed in 1979 by Billboard magazine among Copland works that continued to be programmed by orchestras, with subsequent performances by Pierre Boulez, Edo de Waart and Sixten Ehrling received positively. Reaction to the work itself remains mixed. Ross dismisses Connotations as a "barbaric yawp of a piece." Morin calls it a "thorny, riveting patchwork" and listening to it "like the unrelenting pummeling of a prizefighter at times." Adams calls its style "very simplistic ... strident" and "generally unpleasant sounding" and adds that