Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Keeping in mind the mechanical moments of Sowerby's score, and Marx's governing metaphor of “the machine in the Garden,” it is noteworthy that the first substantial passages Foss chose to omit from Sandburg's text involve railroads: first, an account of “the overland passenger train” with its hissing pistons and cursing wheels; and second, a description of the headlight of the Pioneer Limited train crossing Wisconsin. Given his relatively recent immersion in English, Foss may have chosen to omit some colorful phrases simply because they seemed unnecessarily obscure: coonskin caps, “chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,” and many of the details related to corn and cornhusking. But the downplaying of machinery also suggests that Foss valued a pastoral mode that was more nostalgic than Sowerby's or Sandburg's, a prairie closer to Jefferson's American Arcadia. Along these lines it is not surprising that, although he retained references to “railroad cattle pens,” “smokestacks [that] bite the skyline with stub teeth,” and “the flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills,” Foss declined to set the stanza that Sandburg devoted to the slaughterhouse, which ends with the grizzly injunction “Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear. / Hack them with cleavers. / Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.”

  Perhaps the most telling pattern in Foss's deletions is the erasure of geographical specificity, in marked contrast to Sandburg's litanies of place names. Within the text of the first movement, the only omitted phrase is the one that includes proper nouns: “Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.” In movement II, Foss retains an allusion to World War I, “I fed the boys who went to France in [the] great dark days,” but cuts the subsequent battlefields: “Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and / the Marne and Verdun.” In movement III, Foss passes over lines naming “Towns on the Soo Line, Towns on the Big Muddy,” “Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul,” “Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo.” Foss sought to universalize the prairie, idealizing the landscape without limiting it to the places Sandburg had known and loved. Cultural references to the Fourth of July, skyscrapers, and “a thousand red men,” situate Foss's text firmly within the United States, but the remarkable fact remains that France is the only place he calls by name.

  In a related move, Foss skips over two stanzas of poetry that mention American songs: “You came in wagons…/ Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw,” and a series of three parallel statements that end with the titles of spirituals or popular songs. It is easy to imagine the mature Foss taking advantage of such moments for musical quotation and parody, but in The Prairie, he let such invitations fall by the wayside. Although his score has more folksy moments than Sowerby's did, Foss made sure his audiences knew that he had borrowed “no native tunes.”45 The youthful composer instead followed his own recipe of stylistic and generic ingredients. As critic Richard Dyer puts it, “The Prairie is a work of paradoxes…. it is populist in its reach, but the compositional resources are those of high art, romantic in its attitudes and effect, neo-classical in its disciplines.”46 Time magazine was more direct, noting in 1945 that “Foss's music is far from Sandburg's prairie: it is modern, glittering, sophisticated, plainly rooted in Europe. Critics were somewhat baffled by the cantata which mixed Foss champagne with Sandburg cornbread.”47

  THE PRAIRIE PARADOX

  From the start, Foss acknowledged a twofold purpose for the cantata: it should represent something “native” to the United States and yet should transcend a narrowly geographical understanding of the prairie. He called Sandburg's poem “a new expression of an old faith drawn from the native soil. The protagonist, simply, is the prairie, but through this poem the prairie grows until it becomes the symbol for the all-embracing principle of growth itself.”48 Foss thus skirts the question that Leo Marx suggests had eluded generations of pastoralists before him: how much growth can the pastoral landscape sustain before it loses its “happy balance of art and nature”? Marx writes that “no one, not even Jefferson, had been able to identify the point of arrest, the critical moment when the tilt might be expected and progress cease to be progress.”49

  After the score of The Prairie was published, Arthur Berger complained good-naturedly that “The Prairie…is already a familiar affair. The repetitiveness of its motives, the recurrence of its melodic devices (e.g. the syncopated third at phrase-endings), made it familiar, in fact, after the first performance.”50 Irving Fine also singled out for mild critique Foss's “propulsive ostinati, repetitions and frequent squareness of phrasing.”51 Writing in 1945, Fine saw these features as typical of Foss's recent music, but they clearly also recall the pastoral works of Sowerby and earlier composers, and Foss himself had no desire to hide this fact. “The opening movement,” he wrote, “speaks of the prairie as we are accustomed to visualize it. The author, in a pastoral tenor solo, sings of open valleys and far horizons and the music breathes fresh air. After this pastoral introduction, a fugue.”52 In keeping with the complexity of its program, however, each of Foss's traditionally pastoral traits—drones and harmonic stasis, ostinato and motivic repetition, even echo effects—bear multiple interpretations.

  Foss reserved his first and last movements for the human storyteller and the inner ones for the voice of the prairie. As the opening measures suggest, Foss kept a careful eye out for recitative-like moments in which the solo narrator (a tenor, like those of the Bach Passions) could deliver his text over sustained chords, usually including the pitch A. The static harmonic underpinning of the opening measures acquires a more conventionally pastoral sound in bar 26, where octave A's recall a bagpipe drone, sounding underneath the reedy lines of an oboe melody. The tenor's next entrance (m. 38) echoes the oboe line, but ties its melody to poetry of nature: “Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.” Already an analogy is suggested between the birth of the narrator and the genesis of the prairie, forging a link between natural and human events. Is it coincidental, then, that the émigré Foss singled out for extra repetition Sandburg's mention of migration? “Here the grey geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.”

  Sandburg's text suggests a fairly clean break between the human voice and the voice of the prairie. Foss acknowledges this division, but he blurs the boundaries between man and nature in part by suggesting that the first two movements do not represent separate worlds but instead are linked in the manner of a prelude and fugue. Over a backdrop of bustling counterpoint, the chorus of the second movement (“Dust of Men”) recites text that might be considered the prairie's own catechism: “I am here,” “I am dust of men,” “I am dust of your dust.” Even at a molecular level, man and the landscape are here indistinguishable.

  Also contributing to the confusion of human and natural impulses is the only movement Foss himself described as “folk-like.” Devoted to the same text that Sowerby chose for his epigraph, “They are mine” consists of a recitative duet for alto and soprano soloists followed by a da capo aria for alto, with choral interjections. Open-fifth drones in the winds set the stage for melodies that are plausibly “folk-like,” not by virtue of quotation or repetition but because of their pentatonic flavor. Yet the poetry springs not from some imaginary folk singer, but from the mouth of the prairie herself, personified by the two female soloists. The division (or multiplication) of the prairie voice into a duet helps forestall the danger of assigning too personal a psychology to the prairie voice, who speaks so tenderly of “my cornfields” and “my threshing crews.” In case this vocal duplication is not enough to carry the point, Foss also calls for the two soloists' voices to be echoed by a third, offstage chorister at the word “horizons” (example 23a). The textual invocation of a visual vanishing point is thus given an aural counterpart that seems to emerge independent of perceived human agency.

  The offstage echo ushers in the aria proper, w
hich contains the only dancelike material in the entire cantata. The open-fifth drone sounded subtly by bassoon and horn at first sets up a more raucous open-string evocation of folk fiddling at bar 81 with woodwind melodies chattering away on top (example 23b). Although the passage is short, it operates in the best of rustic traditions and shows that, like generations of composers before him, Foss assigned pastoral connotations to the woodwind timbres. This is most obvious in the triptych of movement VI (“Cool prayers,” “O prairie girl,” and “Songs hidden in eggs”), which in the composer's words form “a lyrical intermezzo…held together by a dreamy little shepherd's lay, a nostalgic woodwind refrain of the prairie.”53 Of course, the reciprocity of the shepherd's pipe accounts for only half of the woodwinds' pastoral potential; the other half involves the evocation of birdsong. In movement VIc, “Songs hidden in eggs,” alto and soprano lines overlap one another in imitation of the mockingbirds whose “follies of O-be-joyful” are immediately rendered more directly by clarinet and company.54

  The metamorphosis of women's voices into birdsong has a substantial concordance in classical mythology, but this allusion to the antique pastoral is rare in the cantata as a whole. Far more often, Foss concerns himself with Sandburg's twentieth-century vision of history, in which even the most potent signs of technological advance are witnessed by the prairie as if from a great distance. In the cantata's brief and rather ponderous depiction of industry (movement V), a quasi-ostinato bass line in 5/4 and 7/4 measures grinds relentlessly, undergirding references to grain elevators, flame sprockets, and steel mills. Likewise, in movement IV (“When the red and the white men met”) the pounding of a low C pedal conjures up an atmosphere both “Indian” and funereal but also carries listeners through the moments when “a thousand red men cried” and “a million white men came” with little pause for sentimentality or pathos. Even before The Prairie turns its attention to the growth of midwestern cities, the impersonal churning of history depersonalizes the cantata's references to war and peace (“I last while wars are fought, while new wars arise”). In contrast to the sustained military topos of Sowerby's prairie, Foss passes over the “great dark days” of World War I quickly. His ostinato links his transatlantic soldiers to the discordant militia-work of trumpets and drums but also, through a recurrence of related ostinato material, to the geese who move according to the annual cycles of the prairie world.

  EXAMPLE 23A. Foss, The Prairie, movement 3, mm. 24-36

  EXAMPLE 23B. Foss, The Prairie, movement 3, mm. 81-89

  As suggested by Foss's program note, the controlling metaphor of growth is diffused through The Prairie in such a way that it is hard to distinguish between human and geological “progress” and even harder to tell when this “progress” will fold over onto itself in cyclic fashion. With the cantata's last movement, even the passage of time is drawn into this prairie conundrum by Sandburg's closing lines: “I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: To-morrow is a day.” In keeping with the theme of renewal—and with the poetic return to a human narrating voice—this last movement opens with a recollection of the fanfaring trumpets of the prologue. The solo tenor reidentifies himself as a son of the prairie, and a compressed set of echoes (mm. 70-77) marks the shift from his recitative to the choral proclamations that fill the remaining 342 bars of the score. From unified declamation, Foss gradually splinters the final text into fragments of just a few words, assigning them to a welter of overlapping voices. Anchoring the perpetual breaking of new days is a series of pedal points, some lasting just a few bars, others unifying stretches of forty measures or more (mm. 196-235 [on A]; mm. 291-332 [on D]). When the pedal points lapse, their function is generally taken over by rhythmic ostinati, plodding at first but accelerating along with the stringendo of verbal disintegration; a climax is reached at “an ocean of tomorrows” where words and days lap like waves at the shore (example 24).

  EXAMPLE 24. Foss, The Prairie, movement 7, mm. 349-54

  The cantata as a whole is profoundly end-oriented. “Tomorrow” lasts nearly twice as long as any of the other movements except for the da capo third movement. In Foss's own description, “everyone joins in the final hymn to the future, expressing the healthy and sunny optimism unique to this country.”55 For Arthur Berger, however, Foss's “sunny” optimism also had a darker side. Though he considered Foss “guiltless of such insincere designs on his listeners,” he nonetheless wrote that “the young composer has inherited some of the rhetorical tricks which sprang, in their originators, from a concert with audience persuasion.”56Indeed, Foss's tendency to isolate and repeat bits of poetry that reference human speech (“I speak,” “I tell you,” “who say at sundown”) solidifies the feeling that “To-morrow” is music for a great, vocal army on the march. If Foss's optimistic peroration draws upon the rhetoric of propaganda, however, it does so in a distinctly pastoral context. The mottled antiphony of his shouting crowd is the endgame of all the echo effects in The Prairie. Although Sandburg's final line (“Tomorrow is a day”) was spoken by the human narrator, the choral climax identifies the forward-looking slogan with the land itself, which answers back with the reciprocity that Leo Marx identified in the echo moments of literary pastorals. After iteration and reiteration, the text fragments seem to emanate from a source no longer human: perhaps mechanical, perhaps natural—either the machine or the garden.

  6

  _______

  Power in the Land

  “PIGEONS ON THE GRASS, ALAS”

  Foss's cantata reinforced the idea that the prairie has a voice of its own. But in his sixties, the composer looked back with a more introspective understanding of the prairie allure. “The Prairie is still a favorite work of mine,” he told Vivian Perlis in 1986. “I'm not ashamed of it even now…it did a lot for me.” He further recalled: “I felt like a refugee, but then a refugee learns to call anything his home, wherever he is. So America very quickly became my home, and I am sure Aaron had something to do with it, and Carl Sandburg…. My Prairie is very Coplandesque…I fell in love with America and why did I fall in love with America? It wasn't just the landscape obviously. It was people like Aaron.”1 Yet the “Coplandesque” was not the only source for impressions of rural Americana, and as many have observed, it was not the first. Among those with a claim to the right of first discovery, Virgil Thomson was perhaps the most vocal.

  Thomson's vocabulary for America's middle landscape was made up primarily of Protestant hymn tunes. According to Steven Watson, Thomson linked the American hymn tunes in his oeuvre not just with childhood experience but with a certain kind of rootedness: “When you reach down in your subconscious, you get certain things…. When Aaron [Copland] reaches down, he doesn't get cowboy tunes, he gets Jewish chants. When I reach down, I get southern hymns or all those darn-fool ditties we used to sing: ‘Grasshopper sitting on a railway track.’” 2 In the mid-1930s, Thomson rightly considered himself a pioneer in the incorporation of Americana into classical music. Later famous for his role as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, Thomson did some of his earlier “heralding” from the composer's pulpit. His Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1926-28) gave him a claim on Americana that he felt an increasing need to protect from urban interlopers.

  As chance would have it, these themes are subtly interwoven in Thomson's first and most famous treatment of the plant family that he would later memorialize in the grasslands of his documentary film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the orchestral movement Wheat Field at Noon (1948). In Gertrude Stein's play-libretto Four Saints in Three Acts, which Thomson began setting in the late 1920s, she indicated: “Make it pastoral. In hills and gardens.”3 Yet even after he had finished the music some years later, Thomson had little sense of how their “Opera to Be Sung” might be staged; the work of crafting a “plot” was largely left to Thomson's friend Maurice Grosser, who directed the first production. One of the few passages for which Stein actually did intend specific narrative content is the Vision of the Holy
Ghost that St. Ignatius experiences near the beginning of Act 3. For her incarnation of the Holy Ghost, Stein replaced the serene dove with its gawky, urban cousin: “Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas.” Whether short or long, the grass is yellow, suggesting that the Holy Ghost descends either out of season or onto a lawn seriously marred by overuse. The chorus conjectures that “it was a magpie in the sky,” but this move merely substitutes its own set of unholy connotations: a shallow attraction to shiny objects and a tendency toward theft.

  Although Stein sets the scene in a “Monastery garden with…a bare Spanish horizon and an empty sky,” the associations of her text are urban. Thomson's music follows suit. Part of what makes this passage so fetching is its jaunty contrast to the chantlike lines that fill the rest of the score.4 He does not choose here to recall the four-square phrases of Protestant hymnody or the vocal inflections of the Negro spiritual. Thomson's pigeons move neither to the nursery rhyme tunes of Sunday school song nor to the high, heavenly strains that affirm their fall to earth. They flutter instead to music that resembles nothing more than a cabaret song, complete with a chorus of male backup singers.

  Although Stein linked the birds in the Luxembourg Gardens to the imagery of Annunciation, Thomson seems to have preferred the Pentecostal moment—perhaps because he recognized that the creation of musical Americana required a certain kind of “speaking in tongues.” Thomson understood the appeal of stylistic costuming. His love of Erik Satie, his own midwestern je ne sais quoi, even the cellophane garb that enveloped the black cast of Four Saints—all these suggest a fascination with ironic surfaces that short-circuit any attempt to penetrate an “authentic” interior. Nadine Hubbs has commented on “the extent to which Thomson's diatonic idiom could evoke a distinct religiosity even while maintaining an extraordinary blank-screen quality, subject to its viewers' projections,” and she has argued persuasively that this “interpretive pluralism” was a crucial factor not just in the Stein settings, but in his music more generally.5