Frontier Figures
Page 21
Nature would seem to have the upper hand in the tone poem's persistently nondirectional motives. The opening, “somber and slow,” crawls and wavers, usually by half steps. Loosely contrapuntal on the page, the passage nonetheless has the Debussyan sheen of parallel voice-leading until the syncopated timpani enter to offer some metric undergirding. By measure 31, the brass have acquired an unmistakably military tone, scored in open fourths and fifths and bolstered by clangorous percussion. This is in turn quashed by the gently circling chromaticism that starkly reasserts itself at bar 37, where the strings initiate a near ostinato composed of twenty-two consecutive half steps constrained within the compass of the minor third between D# and F# (example 20). Floating above this serpentine material is an oboe solo, Prairie's first candidate for a traditionally pastoral tune. Though akin to the reedy shepherd's pipe in tone color, this melody is infected by the coiled-up chromaticism of the underlying ostinato and a syncopation that seems more ruminative than folklike, denatured, or renatured, by the circling fragments underneath.
EXAMPLE 20. Sowerby, Prairie, mm. 35-47 (Boston: C. C. Birchard & Co., 1931)
This passage is typical of the pastoral, not just in its woodwind timbres but also in its playing around the edges of ostinato procedures that, to the dismay of Daniel Gregory Mason, were pervasive in Sowerby's work. Mason critiqued Sowerby's “glib diffuseness, which ends by turning all of his streams of thought (often sparkling fresh at their source) into stagnant fens wherein all landmarks disappear.”26 Prairie does suffer from an absence of distinguishing features or, rather, from the fact that figuration tends to accumulate through repetition and to disappear unceremoniously when its service is complete. The circling half steps of example 20 have their say in measures 37-53, but their oppressive presence here does not ensure that they will appear again later. Instead, Sowerby has other repeated patterns in store, including a variety of closely related figures that begin winding their way through the texture at measure 86 (example 21). More prominent still is the ostinato work that begins in bar 123, where a descending tetrachord creeps through the strings and celesta in a manner worthy of Sibelius while solo English horn spirals above and a bass pedal tone sounds the fundamental pitch below or moves in slowly grinding counterpoint with the upper strings (bars 123-35, 138-45, 299-312).
In the austere outer sections of Prairie, only a few passages stand out to relieve the incessant circling and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most important of these involves an echo. Together with the ostinato or drone accompaniment, the melodic echo is one of the best-established hallmarks of the pastoral topic. As Leo Marx observes: “In the pastoral economy nature supplies most of the herdsman's needs and, even better, nature does virtually all of the work. A similar accommodation with the idealized landscape is the basis for the herdsman's less tangible satisfactions: the woods ‘echo back' the notes of his pipe. It is as if the consciousness of the musician shared a principle of order with the landscape and, indeed, the external universe. The echo, a recurrent device in pastoral, is another metaphor of reciprocity.”27 For composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this reciprocity was most typically personified in the relationship between shepherd and shepherdess or, in sacred works, between soul and savior. But as these echoes are themselves echoed in twentieth-century scores, they often seem to reverberate in ways that are attenuated by nostalgia, distance, or desolation.28
To initiate his echo (bar 88), Sowerby chose a solo trumpet and an augmented triad built on E, sounding a call to arms that stretches the traditional major triad (“nature's chord”) by raising the fifth of the chord from B to B The upper octave of this fanfare is likewise altered by a half step (lowered, in this case to D) to amplify the sense of distortion and to create a harmonic dissonance as this highest pitch is sustained while the echo enters underneath on El. Two muted trumpets answer the call, repeating the augmented triad but adding a timbral distortion to the tonal-harmonic one. The same fanfare figure appears without an echo in measure 119, and again in measure 277, each time marking the end of a section. As was the case in the melancholy countryside Berlioz conjured for his Symphonie fantastique, the unanswered echo signals incompleteness, but here the association tends more toward unresolved struggle than unrequited love.
EXAMPLE 21. Sowerby, Prairie, mm. 86-93
Sowerby's Prairie is no Arcadia; or, it is an Arcadia liberally inscribed with the memento mori “Et in Arcadia Ego.” Death and discord lie just below the surface. In fact, almost all of the tone poem's references to human action are military or mechanical, despite the composer's folk credentials. Dance rhythms are few and far between; the pentatonic melodies and repeated phrases of folk music are entirely absent. Instead, the tone poem sports a full brass complement, together with snare drum, bass drums, kettledrums, and all manner of cymbals, bells, and the like. The buildup to bar 152 is distinctly military in tone, and one of the last ostinato passages of the score (mm. 232-54) uses measure after measure of plodding quarter-note triplets followed by two quarter notes to suggest an inexorable, marching advance.
In the end, even these military moments seem restrained in comparison to the riotous music that Sowerby reserves for the harvesting crew. After almost ten minutes and more than 160 measures of circling, the spring is finally wound and the tone poem unleashes its momentum: the threshers leap to life. With music marked “fast and machine like” at quarter note equals 192, the strings chug like an engine under the clangorous brass. Soon the roles are reversed as strings and bell intone a melody that is almost singable but more or less drowned out by the pure whir of pistons and gears, as if the spiraling figures of the opening have at last tightened and come into focus, now revealed to be the cogs of a giant machine. Sowerby's energetic laborers would probably have pleased Sandburg, who spoke earlier in his prairie poem of pioneers: “the laughing men who ride iron…the worker in flint and clay, the singing women and their sons a thousand years ago marching single file the timber and the plain.”29 But if the women or the workers' dreams are singing, as the poem suggests, they sing of the machine, not the garden.
As a twentieth-century “Garden of the World,” Sowerby's Prairie has the mythic features of a paradise lost. Its innocence has been irrevocably disrupted; its resident serpent is fully audible in the spinning of harvesting machinery and the bluster of military brass. There is more than a measure of celebration in this loss of innocence: the acquisition of knowledge, of techne, of joy in labor. Yet the exuberant mood of the harvesters quickly collapses, absorbed into the stillness of the prairie. This was the chief impression left on a reporter for Time magazine, who summed up the tone poem's vast expanse by stating that the sections of the symphonic poem “follow one another in succession without break or special line of demarcation.” At the end of this continuously receding horizon of themes, the piece turns back on itself to recall “the hush and perhaps monotony of vast stretches of farm…whose beauty mid-westerners too seldom appreciate.”30 Sowerby and Sandburg (both midwesterners) appreciated the prairie and used it to explore a middle landscape that was not just geographical but stylistic. If there is a radical component in Cornhuskers, it lies in Sandburg's rapport with the vernacular: small-scale sing-song patterns and the easy rhetoric of the speechmaker. As for Sowerby, Chicago audiences would never call him “conservative,” and New York critics would not suffer him to play the “ultramodern.” Frankly impressionist in style, Sowerby's Prairie records his ambivalence about musical, agricultural, and technological “progress.”
SANDBURG'S PRAIRIE
Sowerby's Prairie takes Sandburg's text seriously, but flexibly—with no melodic quotations and few direct references apart from the threshing machinery. Yet it manages to capture something of the poem's multivalence on two fronts. On the one hand, the poem suggests the insignificance of time passing: “To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.” On the other hand, “The Prair
ie” is intensely future-focused: “I speak of new cities and new people. I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west.”31 Related to this contrast in attitude toward time is a contrast in poetic point of view. The outer sections of the poem speak with a human, masculine voice: “O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.” For the most part, the inner sections personify the land, inviting us to listen for the voice of the prairie itself (or, as the poem would have it, “herself”): “I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.” Sowerby also contrasts timeless prairie and time-bound working men, but he inverts Sandburg's order of things. The manmade music of the threshing machinery is engulfed by the static music of the outer sections, as though the mechanical residue of pioneering had been swallowed up by forces operating outside of human history.
Sandburg's poem is more optimistic than this. Like other Progressive Era figures, he extended the rhetoric of pioneering to areas of inquiry that survived and perhaps even facilitated the supposed “closing” of the American frontier. When asked to speak at Knox College in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, he responded with “Youth and Pioneers: An Ode,” in which he compared the pioneers of “chemistry and physics” and the “pilots of the night air mail” with the restless western pioneers and “the pony-express riders of the old days.” Sandburg queried: “Because the frontier with the free land is gone, are we to lose the word ‘pioneer'?”32 Sandburg sat on the cusp of nostalgic reverence for the agricultural pioneer and the refiguring of a pioneer better suited to labor in the modern fields of science and industry.
Sowerby spoke little about the pioneer per se, and he measured folk-based composition using a squarely romantic rhetoric of race and sincerity. In his 1927 article “The Folk Element—The Vitalizer of Modern Music,” he wrote: “The world admires, not the eclectic who can adopt anyone's language, but the man who speaks that which is deep within his own soul, and which reflects the imaginings and the very being of his race.”33 In later chapters, we shall see how a similar rhetoric was adopted and adapted by Roy Harris to explain such pieces as his Farewell to Pioneers. But this was not the only option for America's would-be pastoralists. As Sandburg's words suggest, it was possible to give the pioneer distinctly “contemporary” features—to identify the pioneer not as the emblem of a largely Anglo phase of westward expansion, but as a less agricultural and more generally heroic type. We will see this impulse at work in Aaron Copland's music, but first let us examine another treatment of Sandburg's “Prairie,” a cantata by Lukas Foss—a composer for whom the “native soil” and race soul rhetoric that often attached to Sowerby's scores was completely out of place.
LUKAS FOSS ON THE PRAIRIE
Prodigy, pianist, composer and émigré, Lukas Foss would eventually embrace the “eclectic” practices that Sowerby took such pains to repudiate. Born Lukas Fuchs in 1922, he fled with his family from Berlin to France in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Four years later, they arrived in the United States as part of the latest transatlantic wave of westward immigrants searching for religious tolerance and opportunity. After studying piano and conducting at the Curtis Institute, Foss apprenticed with Serge Koussevitzky in the first class to convene at what would become Tanglewood; he played piano for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, became a pupil of Hindemith, and quickly found himself a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. As luck would have it, his residency coincided with one of Charles Wakefield Cadman's trips to Peterborough. Cadman reported back to the readers of the Pacific Coast Musician: “Among the young modernists is one Lukas Foss, Jewish French-German boy about 22, who has been in the United States five years…. A modest, sweet kid who has made an ideal [MacDowell] colonist—fine mentality, innate culture, and much personal charm. His setting of Sandburg's ‘The Prairie' has some grand moments in it, quite individual and rhythmically fascinating; tuneful in many places, and some fine choral writing.”34Cadman's apparent fondness for Foss did not make it easier for him to classify his young “Jewish French-German” colleague, upon whom the alleged American melting pot had barely begun to work.35 Foss himself stated simply: “I was born in Berlin, raised in Paris, but I came here when I was barely fifteen, and I consider myself completely American.”36 Foss became a naturalized citizen in 1942, the same year he began The Prairie, and he later described this work as “American, almost popular at times.”37 Foss was at home with a wide range of vernaculars, and it would be strange not to find Anglo-Americana among them. He returned to American themes in his setting of Mark Twain's The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1950), the bicentennial work American Cantata, and the guitar concerto American Landscapes (1989), which sports moments of sheer bluegrass. But interpreting these elements in and on The Prairie carries special importance because of the composer's youth and because of the wartime tensions that inevitably colored such categories as “native” and “foreign.”
In his praise for The Prairie, Cadman left out (perhaps pointedly) the most obvious influence on Foss. Cadman was not on particularly good terms with Aaron Copland in the 1940s, but the young Foss met and idolized Copland at Tanglewood. Virgil Thomson's review of the premiere links Foss to Copland merely by innuendo.38 In 1945, Donald Fuller observed: “The opening, undeniably effective, proclaims his debt to Copland, but later he has much to say on his own.” Irving Fine concurred, writing that “the influence of Copland is strong, especially in the opening measures, but it can be overestimated, for Foss's writing is more contrapuntal and has not achieved Copland's transparency.”39 More specifically, Fine continued: “There has been much nonsense heard lately about Foss's desire to be ‘one of the boys,' to be known as an indigenous American composer. Some time before he started his magnum opus, The Prairie, his attitude toward musical expression was undergoing a change. He had conducted Copland's Billy the Kid suite during the 1941 session of the Berkshire Music Center and was ready for a new influence anyway. It was natural that Copland and cowboy Americana should fascinate this intensely lyrical young composer.” 40
Fine's statement raises two kinds of questions: What made Foss's fascination with Copland or with the cowboy seem so inevitable? And how was it that the “cowboy” should become the dominant figure in The Prairie, a work with no references to cattle? The lure of cowboy song, and its presence in Billy the Kid, will be treated later, but here it is worth observing that “The Open Prairie” section of Copland's ballet has more in common with Sowerby's ostinato-laden nature-painting than it does with Foss's setting of “The Prairie” (example 22). Foss recalls instead the declamatory style of Copland's Piano Variations or the Fanfare for the Common Man, complete with trumpet timbres at the outset. Unlike Sowerby's fanfares, which were heard as if from a distance, Foss's tenor narrator himself intones the fourths and fifths that span the octave A-E-A above added-note chords that give forceful punctuation to his words. Thanks to Sandburg's text, Foss's statements of identification with life on the prairie were more direct than anything Copland would ever attempt: “I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song, a song and a slogan.”
Foss seems to have encountered Copland's Billy the Kid and Sandburg's poem almost simultaneously. He recalled: “Shortly after I left Europe and emigrated to this country as a boy of fifteen, I fell in love—with America. At nineteen I read Sandburg's Prairie and immediately started to set it to music. A colleague looked at the sketches. ‘Why are you trying to write so American?' I wasn't. I was in love. I had discovered America.” It is noteworthy that Foss “fell in love” with an America hundreds of miles west of where he lived. “Carl Sandburg's poem Prairie (from Cornhuskers) is young and enthusiastic. So was I,” Foss later recalled.41In his exuberance, Foss felt free to engage with the text as if he himself were the poet: “Once I choose a text I become extremely involved in it. The text must be just right for me, and right for me at that time in my life…. I like to ‘play' with a text, combining, omitting, dividing into sect
ions, exchanging the order of paragraphs or verses.42
EXAMPLE 22. Foss, The Prairie, movement 1, mm. 1–13 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1944)
From Sandburg's multisectional poem, Foss devised seven movements (nine sections) lasting roughly fifty minutes in performance:
I. “I was born on the Prairie” Tenor Solo
II. “Dust of men” Chorus—Soloists
III. “They are mine” Alto Solo—Chorus (with Soprano Solo in the Introduction)
IV. “When the red and the white men met” Chorus
V. “In the dark of a thousand years” Bass Solo—Male Chorus
[possible intermission or moment of silence inserted here]
VI a. “Cool prayers” Chorus
VI b. “Prairie girl” Soprano Solo
VI c. “Songs hidden in eggs” Soprano and Alto Duet
VII. “To-morrow” Chorus—Soloists
While most of the movements set contiguous lines or sections of text, “Dust of men” and “They are mine” involve substantial omissions, and “They are mine” combines sections that are far removed from one another in the original. Foss wrote: “The order of these sections is not always true to the order of the poem. Add the many omissions and one will appreciate the hesitance, even fear, with which I approached the poet whose permission had to be secured. To my amazement, Carl Sandburg wrote: ‘You have revitalized the old poem.' He wrote to his publishers: ‘Give the young man a break. It seems he has approached the music in the same sporting way in which I wrote the poem.'” 43
All in all, Foss chose to set 120 lines of Sandburg's 215, adding a one-line reprise (“They are mine”) to round out and reiterate the title of the movement that suffered the most textual alteration.44 No doubt some of Foss's omissions were necessary for reasons of economy: omitting the thirty lines after the text for movement V, and the thirty lines between those that end movement III and those of movement VIc allowed Foss to keep his cantata under one hour in length. But aspects of these long cuts, and other, shorter deletions, suggest that Foss was also interested in modifying Sandburg's prairie to fit his own vision.