Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Cadman did write a handful of “prairie pieces,” but these generally identified the Great Plains with the Indian past, not with an agricultural present.2 Only in 1939-40 did he approach a recognizably “pioneer” theme, and this came by way of his “Pennsylvania” Symphony, which had roots in Cadman and Eberhart's discarded plans for an opera about the steel industry. After an Indianist first movement titled “Forest Primeval,” and a climax depicting the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers, the second movement, “Pioneer Spirit,” featured “homespun Americanism,” “the building up of the Valleys and the HINT…of industry and the coming of great industry, but through [all] a wholesome homelife and the joy of living, maybe a bit of the old time quadrilles and dance tunes.”3

  When the “spirit” of the second movement became rather lighter than Cadman had anticipated—involving barrel organ sounds and reminiscences from his own childhood—the “pioneer” idea infiltrated the first movement instead. Cadman wrote to Eberhart that he wanted “at least a suggestion of SOMEBODY human living in all that ‘sylvania' wilderness.” Privately, Cadman described his desire to reflect “those old settlers who were full of religious feeling…Quakers, Scotch Presbyterians, fanatical but practical Methodists like MY ancestors.”4 In the more public forum of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra program notes, one can see an eight-bar ersatz hymn labeled the “pioneer theme” and can read (in words attributed to the composer) of Cadman's own Anglo-Saxon lineage.5 The symphony garnered a certain amount of national attention at its Los Angeles premiere; NBC deemed it worthy of coast-to-coast broadcast, and after at least six more Californian performances, the work was heard throughout the Midwest and apparently also in Santiago, Chile.6 Yet the Modern Music critics were unimpressed, and Eugene Ormandy never followed up on his interest in bringing the work to Philadelphia. Cadman complained: “I have been told FIVE times so far by conductors that doing a symphony ‘laid' in one state of the U.S. has NOT made for ready acceptance.”7

  Despite its lack of East Coast success, Cadman's “Pennsylvania” Symphony marks some telling changes in American composers' understanding of pioneer and pastoral imagery that began in the late 1920s and lasted through the Great Depression and after. While Cadman's earlier prairie pieces were landscape paintings of bygone days, in the symphony, he touched on many of the themes that I will treat in the pages to come: the intertwining of industry and Anglo-Saxon pioneering, the religious connotations of the pastoral, and a significant confusion about the extent to which this particular “pioneer” experience could represent a broader “American” experience.

  Many Americans had long felt a need to recoup the idea of progress without recourse to the factory, or at least with a clearer sense that “progress” might have its downside. Without disregarding the late nineteenth-century “antimodernism” outlined by the historian H. T. Jackson Lears, I argue that these ideas arose with special force for the generation after Cadman, in part because of the widespread conviction that the Depression had proved the bankruptcy of industrial capitalism, and in part because the machinery of agribusiness that enabled farming in the Far West also threatened deeply entrenched American ideals about the family farm. In the end, the real dangers of the prairie came not from the “lurking Indians” and buffalo ghosts of campfire tales, but from the very present forces of weather, technology, and the real estate market.8

  All the works treated in part 3 of this volume can be considered pastorals in the broad sense outlined by the cultural historian Leo Marx: their “controlling theme is a variant of the conflict between art and nature—nature being represented by an idealized image of landscape.”9 Yet each piece also disrupts its landscape painting by placing the figure of the pioneer in its foreground or background. Cadman's early pioneer figures passed quickly over the short-grass prairies in order to reach the golden treasures of the Far West. The pioneer figures of this chapter and the two that follow, however, are intent on putting down roots in a new “Garden of the World.” They are neither tourists nor travelers, but settlers, and the residue of their pioneering progress fertilizes the American pastoral landscape with regional and political significance.

  No piece is “western” merely by virtue of its exploration of the relationship between man and nature. American pastorals may be simply rural or grounded only in fantasy. In this chapter, I will explore the pastoral soundtracks of two distinctly midwestern works: one by Leo Sowerby and one by Lukas Foss, both inspired by Carl Sandburg's poem “The Prairie.” Like Virgil Thomson's soundtrack for The Plow That Broke the Plains, each departs from Arcadian pastorals by making conflict a central theme. And taken together, they can be seen to chronicle the impact of technological “progress” on western land that was, despite all previous mythmaking, not very well suited to the family farm. The tensions that shatter the operatic households of Aaron Copland's The Tender Land, Douglas Moore's Giants in the Earth, and Ernst Bacon's Tree on the Plains suggest that even a healthy crop of folk song cannot sustain domestic harmony in the face of personal and national maturation. No matter how pastoral, these prairie landscapes were not idyllic and never timeless. In this chapter and the two that follow we will see their fruits discovered, cultivated, threatened, and remembered.

  THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN

  Although the examples in this chapter date from the twentieth century, the ideals they manipulate were inherited from centuries past. Even before presiding over the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson was the great architect of agrarian America—providing a social blueprint for the new nation: a republic of family farms stretching gradually westward and thereby escaping the evils of the dehumanizing factory and the overcivilized salon. In his classic study The Machine in the Garden (1964), Leo Marx observes that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, “the cardinal image of American aspirations was a rural landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size. Although it probably shows a farmhouse or a neat white village, the scene is usually dominated by natural objects: in the foreground a pasture, a twisting brook with cattle grazing nearby, then a clump of elms on a rise in the middle distance and beyond that, way off on the western horizon, a line of dark hills. This is the countryside of the old Republic, a chaste, uncomplicated land of rural virtue.”10 As geopolitical landscape painting, this arrangement was nothing new, and Marx takes pains to uncover its Old World roots: first in the bucolic atmosphere of Virgil's eclogues, and second in the English pastoral tradition that peopled the early modern imagination with whole hosts of shepherds and shepherdesses.

  Linking these pastoral images is their position between the city and the wilderness—what Marx calls the “middle landscape,” neither savage nor civilized. Citing the French critic-cartographer-farmer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, he notes that the American farmer's demesne is bounded by Europe's “oppressive social order” and “the dark forest frontier.” Jefferson, too, saw the American nation poised between an Old World to the east and an undiscovered country to the west, meaning that, in America, the pastoral was not just a “symbolic setting” but “a real place located somewhere between l'ancien régime and the western tribes. Moreover, it is a landscape with figures, or at least one figure: the independent, rational, democratic husbandman…. He is the good shepherd of the old pastoral dressed in American homespun.”11 With a new costume, a more serious association with agriculture, and a little less emphasis on livestock, Jefferson's yeoman farmer can occupy the same middle ground as Virgil's shepherd.

  However appropriate this particular topos was for the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century exerted several pressures on America's pastoral imaginary. There had always been a hint of dissonance between the Old World and New World types. Marx says as much in a telling footnote that contrasts the “the typical American hero” and the pastoral shepherd. The shepherd is satisfied with a “sedentary life”; he has little interest in exploration, hunting, or other such strenuous pursuits. By contrast, Marx notes, “our heroes do
confront the true wild, and they often become hunters.”12 The proximity of wilderness and the remoteness of the market economy required a new strength, self-sufficiency, and capacity for action. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the wilderness would be beaten back and the market would extend its reach westward with the railroads, yet the American plainsman would never revert to the Old World shepherd's life of ease. Instead, the image of the pastoral hero, the central figure of America's middle landscape, would be permanently grafted onto the mythology of the pioneer.

  The overlaying of these two figures (the shepherd and the pioneer) brought several interrelated changes in mythological apparatus. First and most important, it imbued the pastoral landscape with a sense of direction—literally westward, or metaphorically “upward” to a better future. In both life and literature, as Henry Nash Smith has shown, westward migration often meant a move from indentured servitude to independence. With the so-called closing of the frontier in the 1890s and the ever-quieter beckoning of “free land,” relocation began to seem like an exhausted alternative. Yet the idea of pioneering progress survived because it could denote equally the acquisition of greater tracts of land, the conquest of new markets, or the bringing of formerly barren land under the control of new agricultural technology: dry farming, irrigation, and the plow. Regionally speaking, the imagery of the agrarian West, the fabled “Garden of the World,” drew strength from comparisons with plantation life in the antebellum South. Smith explains: “The fiction dealing with the plantation emphasizes the beauty of harmonious social relations in an orderly feudal society…. Such symbols could not be adapted to the expression of a society like that of the West…where rapidity of change, crudity, bustle, heterogeneity were fundamental traits.”13

  As the pastoral landscape was imbued with a sense of westward or future-oriented direction, the pioneer became a warrior. Having claimed a homestead, he still had to fend off western foes (Indian attackers or encroaching wilderness), but he did so from a new position of responsibility: as a landowner and, more often than not, as a family man. Ownership brought with it an appealing rhetoric of man and nature in symbiotic relationship. Yet the responsibility of family brought with it an even greater harvest of metaphorical riches. As Smith observed, “The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the plow.”14 It requires only a delicate interpretive leap to move from the fertility of the fields to the growth and prosperity of the family. In literature and myth, America's pastoral heroes were not free-loving nymphs and swains, but the nuclear families memorialized by Willa Cather, Ole Rölvaag, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In this respect, the stereotypical pioneer retained the connotations of the contented shepherd and yeoman farmer, but expanded them to wield greater historical force: he became a shepherd not just of livestock but also of future generations; he sowed the seeds not just for wheat or corn but for civilization itself.

  QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

  No single factor can be pinpointed as catalyst for the transformation of Cad-man's peaceful prairie into a place of greater tension and struggle. Nonetheless, World War I seems to have played a decisive role. In its tumultuous wake, the Great Plains became a site of geopolitical significance. Willa Cather takes note of this in My Ántonia when her narrator explains that the neighboring cornfields “would enlarge and multiply until they would be…the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the activities of men, in peace or war.”15 Government propaganda proclaimed more succinctly: “Wheat will win the war!” Before 1914, there was nothing particularly “American” about farming; after 1917, the farmer was recognized as a heroic American type, with tools and virtues that set him apart from those who cultivated the soil of other nations.

  Cadman was too old to serve in World War I, and his ill health would in any case have disqualified him from active duty. Farwell, for his part, brought his expertise on communal singing to the Army Officers Training Camp and led patriotic song fests in New York and California. But for those younger men who did their marching in France and Flanders, fields of corn and wheat would never sound the same. One such musician-soldier was Leo Sowerby, and his tone poem The Prairie will serve to exemplify both the features of an older tradition of musical landscape painting and a prairie newly figured as a site of struggle.

  Sowerby was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and educated in Chicago, where he thrived as an organist and became perhaps the best-known composer of the Midwest, championed by conductor Frederick Stock.16 He volunteered for the army, and his musicianship moved him quickly up the ranks and out of the stables at Camp Grant, where he had been assigned to curry the mules. In the words of his colleague Burnet Tuthill, Sowerby “was shipped off to France in the summer of 1918 as bandmaster and second lieutenant.”17 After he was mustered out in February 1919, he rejoined Chicago's musical life without missing a beat. Yet he apparently recalled the army often and with pleasure, stating that “the experience influenced his whole life, and that through it he learned to live with people.”18

  Like many composers of his generation, Sowerby was drawn to France even before the war. In June 1914, after one Boston reviewer noted the influence of Debussy on his harmonic language, Sowerby himself affirmed his Francophile leanings by declaring d'Indy “the greatest living composer.” After the war, critic W. L. Hubbard thundered a prediction that “America Will Lose Its Greatest Composer If Sowerby Goes Abroad,” stating: “To study with Vincent d'Indy or any other teacher over there would be to put a veneer of French manners and methods upon him which would ruin him.”19 As it happened, Sowerby did return to Europe—but not to Paris. In 1921, he became the first recipient of the new Rome Prize of the American Academy; the following year, he was joined by Howard Hanson, whose friendly influence dovetailed with that of Frederick De-lius and Percy Grainger to instill in Sowerby a love of England so strong that he was known to some as “the Handel of Lake Michigan.”20

  Before traveling to Rome, Sowerby had penned several works featuring Anglo folk music, but the first work he wrote in Rome, From the Northland, was inspired by his 1919 visit to the Great Lakes. As its title suggests, there are hints of Hiawatha about the score. Without borrowing Indian song, the first movement, “Forest Voices,” invokes the magical atmosphere of Indianist forests, and the final movement echoes Longfellow directly in its title, “The Shining Big Sea-Water.” Particularly in “The Lonely Fiddle-Maker,” Sowerby's stance is nostalgic: “It speaks as through a mist, of the long ago, when he fiddled and fiddled as the simple country folk danced the reel at time of harvest.”21

  Immediately upon his return to the States, Sowerby was commissioned by Paul Whiteman to compose two works of more modern Americana: an overture called “Synconata” and a “jazz symphony” named “Monotony.” Inspired by Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt, the latter score reflects Sowerby's opinion that “jazz is a truly American product…[that] has certainly taken hold of the people, and therefore deserves a goodly amount of respect.”22 Sowerby's argument here is well aligned with that of poet and fellow-Chicagoan Carl Sandburg, for whom Sowerby provided more than twenty harmonizations featured in the American Songbag (1927).23

  Sandburg was especially fond of Sowerby's Cello Concerto built on the “Irish Washerwoman,” and he used it as the jumping off point for a remarkable paragraph in his Songbag Introduction:

  [Sowerby] took a favorite folk piece of American country fiddlers, a famous tune of the pioneers, and made an interesting experiment and a daring adventure with it. He was a bandmaster during the World War. Then later he is found doing a happy-go-lucky arrangement for Paul Whiteman's orchestra; it may be an exploit in “jazz” or possibly a construction in “the new music.”…He is as ready for pioneering and for originality as the new century of which he
is a part. One other definite thing is that he does not prize seclusion to the point where he is out of touch with the People. Not “the peepul” of the politicians, nor the customers of Tin Pan Alley, but rather The Folks.24

  With a deft touch, Sandburg acknowledges Sowerby's attraction to an array of Americana types, while still distancing him from the cheap eclecticism of the politico-commercial creatures of Washington and New York.

  THE MIDDLE LANDSCAPE

  Just as Sandburg was putting the finishing touches on the American Songbag, Sowerby was drafting Prairie, an orchestral tone poem based on an excerpt from the poet's Cornhuskers collection. The Prairie preface reads: “Have you ever seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley? / Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my corn-huskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?” Sandburg hallows the middle landscape of corn and wheat, insistent that natural abundance can be well managed by tools of human invention, and both sides of Sandburg's pastoral economy—man and nature, the artificial and the organic—find expression in Sowerby's tone poem. Following critic Burnet Tuthill, many have classified the composer's melodies into two rough types: “tunes” that have “a rhythmic verve and snap”; and longer-breathed melodies that are “wandering, perhaps even meandering.”25 In Prairie, however, there is a purposeful ambiguity about which melodic type should be associated with Nature and which reflects the mind of Man.