Frontier Figures
Page 23
Even when Thomson's travels in the Basque region coincided with the final stages of composing Four Saints, Thomson made a point of lingering on the French side of the border until the score was complete. In July 1928 he crossed over into Spain and found the landscape reminiscent of Texas.6 Yet the opera sounded neither Texan nor Spanish (leaving aside a couple of Latinate Montmartre tangos). “The music evokes Christian liturgy,” Thomson later wrote. “Its local references, however, are not to Spain, which I had never seen, but rather to my Southern Baptist upbringing in Missouri.”7 In keeping with his interest in the musical “subconscious” and his Stein-inspired practice of “automatic writing,” Thomson looked inward for his musical material. And whether he saw before him the neatly manicured lawn of a city park or the grasslands of middle America, Thomson heard with keen ears the perpetual tread of the popular—sometimes fertilizing, sometimes corrupting—upon things sacred.
AFTER FLANDERS
Like other composers of his generation, Thomson solidified his birthright while in France—a fact that he liked to advertise. It is common knowledge that World War I helped make France the destination of choice for U.S. artists and entertainers. Those with pastoral leanings, including Sowerby, found there both an established school of musical landscape (sometimes seascape) painting that was easily adaptable to the waving grass of the American plains and an interest in the primitive, “collective” past that could serve as an antidote to Viennese psychologizing. Sowerby's midwestern “impressionism” suggests a parallel between the rippling waves of La Mer and the swirling grasses of his tone poem Prairie. Thomson's iconic hymn-singing saints exemplify the impersonal principles of primitivism with a certain neoclassical nonchalance. Unlike many of their Parisian counterparts, however, Thomson and Sowerby did not look outward toward exotic borderlands but rather gravitated inward toward a midwestern middle landscape that could be autobiographical as a matter of fact, without the fervor of emotional expressionism.
In the 1940s, Thomson explained: “During my second twenty years I wrote in Paris music that was always, in one way or another, about Kansas City. I wanted Paris to know Kansas City.”8 As Steven Watson has observed, Kansas City was itself poised on the brink between East and West: “By the turn of the century, the bustling city lay at the edge of eastern culture's reach. The starting point of the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, Kansas City mixed the brassy independence of a frontier town with the amenities of culture, touring Wild West shows, religion, and open vice.”9 According to biographer Anthony Tommasini, Thomson recalled seeing “cowboys and Indians hanging around the railway station.”10 Yet the composer would also gain an experience of the arid West from a less likely source: his National Guard and army service during World War I.
It was a source of great chagrin to Thomson that his entire military service during the Great War was performed stateside: training with the Army Medical Corps at Camp Doniphan in southwestern Oklahoma, with further work in radio telephony and aviation in New York and Texas. Watson describes Thomson's weeks in Oklahoma as providing the composer's “first taste of close living in a community where erudition counted for little.” Thomson wrote to his friend Alice Smith (great-granddaughter of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith): “Living in such intimacy with fellows is bound to be an experience.”11 He craved privacy and found the landscape both exhilarating and bleak, as he conveyed to his sister, Ruby: “The mountains to the west are beautiful, just freckled with trees, and the rest of the reservation is perfectly bare, that is, bare of trees.” In the section of his autobiography titled “My World War I,” he called the camp “a desert paradise of sun and dust, high winds, and hard ground…and the dust storms, which penetrated everything—your clothes, your shoes, your gloves, your fur-lined goggles—blew just as hard in cold months as in others.”12
Thomson had enlisted in large part because of a “yearning toward novel expe-rience.”13 Disappointed when the armistice was signed before his ship set sail, he reached France under distinctly postwar circumstances: as a member of the Harvard Glee Club on tour in 1921. Carol Oja has written about Thomson's Harvard years, noting both the emphasis on early music in the Glee Club repertory and the Francophile predilection of his chief mentors, Archibald Davison, Edward Burlingame Hill, and S. Foster Damon.14 Lingering after the Glee Club's departure, Thomson got his first taste of Nadia Boulanger's tutelage and immersed himself in Parisian musical culture. When he returned to Harvard, Thomson nurtured a lively interest in France. In 1925 he made his way back to Paris, where he would retain an address until the installation of the Vichy government made it prudent to return home. In 1940, Thomson took up his new post at the Herald Tribune, and critic Samuel L. M. Barlow reintroduced him to the readers of Modern Music as a “trans-Atlantic liaison officer,” a laborer for the cause of “fundamentally democratic music,” one who “reposes comfortably on the bosom of the eighteenth century,” although his subject matter is “curiously homegrown.” Barlow concluded: “Thomson moves, unexpectedly but decorously, across the musical skyline like a baroque covered wagon. More unexpectedly, there's a pioneer inside.”15
HOW FIRM A FOUNDATION
The pioneering stance that Barlow identifies has two chief musical components: one readily accepted and one more contentious. While Thomson is universally acknowledged as a master in setting the English language, his claims to have “discovered” musical Americana have always been controversial.16 Certainly, composers like Farwell with his “Lone Prairee” (also arranged by Charles Martin Loeffler) had made small-scale settings of Anglo Americana while Thomson was still a child. Even with Charles Ives relatively unknown, Amy Beach had created large-scale works with borrowed folk materials, and George Whitefield Chad-wick had experimented with the recreation of Anglo Americana independent of actual borrowed tunes. Nonetheless, Thomson helped prepare the way for a number of his closest colleagues, including Copland. Writing in 1929, Paul Rosenfeld reserved special praise for a new symphony that had “the quaintness of a Currier and Ives print.” He continued: “The symphony is pervaded by a mysterious feel of the American soil and past; and with the organ pieces suggests that in Thomson, too, the eclectic may eventually make way for the earth-born.”17
The symphony that Rosenfeld had in mind was the idiosyncratic Symphony on a Hymn Tune, which occupied Thomson both before and after Four Saints. An outgrowth of (or perhaps a rebellion against) his position as a young church keyboardist, the symphony was a proving ground for the techniques that he would bring to his documentary film scores: quotation spiked with “wrong note” doubling, contrapuntal combinations of tunes, and a mélange of sacred and secular, “high” and “low.” Like Four Saints, whose title vastly underestimates the number of saints in question, the Symphony on a Hymn Tune actually treats a much broader swath of Americana, as musicologist Michael Meckna observes: “Thomson cuts and pastes bits and pieces of the hymns, as well as marches, cowboy songs, and dance hall melodies, all of which suggest the broad spectrum of American life.”18 The same creative collage would characterize The Plow, and especially The River, which in fact takes the final movement of Thomson's symphony as the soundtrack for the last half reel of film.19 Even the thematic confrontation between the pastoral and the mechanical—a crucial feature of The Plow—is in a way foreshadowed in the symphony, as its second movement ends with the wistful depiction of a passing locomotive. Thus, once more the “machine” rears its head and is subsumed in the garden.20
Though his prior evocations of saints and Sunday school may seem far removed from the gritty realism of the documentary film, Thomson had in fact acquired many of the musical tools he would use in collaboration with director Pare Lorentz well before the two men met. In his youth, Thomson had filled in playing piano and pipe organ for “silent” films.21 By 1933, he had even done some theorizing about the role of musical quotation in film, maintaining that diegetic music (music that the characters can also hear, or, in Thomson's words, music used “as part of the drama”) could yield
even more potent effects: “The quotation of familiar hymns or popular tunes to accentuate or to comment a [sic] situation is of course an old and very useful device. Here the music becomes more than tune. It speaks its name. It is present on the stage.”22 In Thomson's documentary film scores, there are few characters to make or hear diegetic music. Yet each tune or genre he alludes to “speaks its name” with historical and often ironic significance.
EXAMPLE 25. Thomson, The Plough That Broke the Plains, Four Pieces for Piano, “Prelude,” mm. 1-16 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1942, 1980)
In the middle of the first sequence of The Plow, the well-known “doxology” tune, “Old Hundred,” asserts itself as part of the “Prelude” in two stately phrases for a wordless woodwind chorale.23 Many listeners no doubt supplied for themselves the familiar words of thanksgiving for blessings received—a text greatly at odds with the film's images of devastation. Further interpretive layers arise from the material that frames “Old Hundred” (example 25). In the opening nine measures and again at the end of the “Prelude” a melody unfolds over a steady foursquare drumbeat. The parallel fourths recall Thomson's evocations of medieval organum, but the pulsing drum, together with the gentle syncopation and descending melodic contour, may suggest, as Neil Lerner has argued, “invisible Indians.” Lerner calls our attention to the voice-over narration later in the film: “By 1880 we had cleared the Indian, and with him, the buffalo, from the Great Plains, and established the last frontier.” As Native Americans are never depicted on screen and never mentioned again in the narration, he observes, “this subtle musical presence exaggerates their otherwise conspicuous visual absence.”24Whether the ominous ostinato is understood to reflect the uncanny emptiness of the landscape, a ghostly echo of the Indian Wars, or simply the tattoo of impending disaster, the message is substantially the same: on the Great Plains, the would-be settler (presumably Protestant) has come to a place of danger.
FARM SECURITY AND THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE
Pare Lorentz was not a filmmaker when he took on The Plow. He was a film critic with an interest in politics. He attracted government attention through personal connections, an article about the Dust Bowl in Newsweek, and his book The Roosevelt Year (1933), which was originally intended as a news film, but given the lack of funds, took shape instead as “a picture book in the form of a newsreel” instead. Armed with this book as a gift, he set out for the office of Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, to plant “the seed of [his] idea about photographing…the New Deal.”25 Not long after, Lorentz was summoned to work for the new Resettlement Administration (RA), later renamed the Farm Security Administration. From the start, the RA was a creature of Roosevelt's New Deal, funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and led by polymath economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, who counted among his staff John Franklin Carter, Roy Stryker, and the photographers Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, and Dorothea Lange.26 Tug-well was raring to go, and when he prompted Lorentz for a subject, the director had a ready answer: the Dust Bowl. Lorentz had been trying to find backers for a film about the Great Plains. This vision was finally realized in The Plow, the first government film to be widely distributed to the public, shown in almost 20 percent of the nation's fourteen thousand theaters. According to Time magazine's May 1936 account, President Roosevelt himself was “brimming with enthusiasm” over the film. He suggested an unprecedented screening before a joint session of Congress, but his plans were thwarted partly because neither chamber was equipped for “sound cinema” and partly because of “Republican opposition.”27
Although he was a novice in the director's chair, Lorentz quickly developed firm ideas about the documentary genre, which he preferred to call “the factual film” and whose potential he pointedly opposed to that of the movie industry: “Hollywood doesn't know anything about the United States,” he told the readers of McCall's in 1939.28 More important than geographical verisimilitude was the documentary genre's attempt to capture “realities of great social significance.” Lorentz did not belabor this point, but it was taken up and amplified in the discussion guide that the U.S. Film Service produced and circulated along with the film reels. This fascinating document hails The Plow as “the first documentary production to cover the facts of American life and dramatize events and conditions without resorting to any boy-meets-girl motif.” While acknowledging that the documentary ought to sound a “persuasive note” (in contrast to the merely “objective” aims of the newsreel), the Study Guide explains:
[Lorentz] wrote a scenario showing what has happened to the grasslands of the West at the hands of plowmen pioneers…. They “shot,” or filmed, scenes in the Panhandle of Texas, and in Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Oklahoma and California. No actors were used, although a number of native plainsmen appeared in the picture. It is an important attribute of documentary films that actual people and actual places rather than stars and stage sets are used to portray the social and economic lessons of the film. The plains people showed great natural talent and dignity in their difficult sequences.
Lest anyone miss the point, the following page states: “It must be emphasized that…real people in real places portraying a real problem were depicted.”29 In response, Thomson would create a soundtrack with a liberal smattering of “real” tunes.
Thomson was well aware that Lorentz had not gone looking for him in particular. “I was not the first one he had interviewed; Copland, I know, and Harris, I think, he had already not got on with.” In fact, Thomson seems to have been the twelfth man on Lorentz's list by the time the two met for lunch in January 1936, but as Thomson recollects in a chapter of his autobiography called “Show Business for Uncle Sam,” they quickly saw eye-to-eye:
Our conversation went like this. He first explained this film, asked could I imagine writing music for it. My answer was, “How much money have you got?” Said he, “Beyond the costs of orchestra conductor, and recording, the most I could possibly have left for the composer is five hundred.” “Well,” said I, “I can't take from any man more than he's got, though if you did have more I would ask for it.” My answer delighted him. “All those high-flyers,” he said, “talk nothing but aesthetics. You talk about money; you're a professional.”30
Whether Lorentz wanted Thomson's clear-eyed pragmatism, his ability to work to deadline, or merely the assurance that he would not interfere with the film's aesthetic (or political) stance, once the team was in place Thomson and Lorentz worked together well and closely, as indicated in their correspondence and in Thomson's recollection of the filmmaking process.
Building on the work of documentary film historians Robert L. Snyder and Richard D. McCann, Neil Lerner has presented the most detailed analysis of the music for The Plow, including the manuscript materials that chronicle its gene-sis.31 Lorentz had begun filming in September 1935, based on an outline approved by Tugwell and John Franklin Carter (head of the RA information staff). By the time he engaged Thomson, he was almost done with a rough cut of the film and had specific ideas about musical cues. In this and his other films, Lorentz exercised broad authority over the soundtrack. He had studied music for ten years and had even entertained the idea of becoming a music critic. His contract with Thomson grants that “selection of thematic material, popular songs, sound effects, and the general score, wherever it is reasonably and physically possible, is to be under [Lorentz's] direction and supervision.”32
Despite Lorentz's controlling hand, Thomson felt that he had considerable input in the later stages of the process, as he described in correspondence with Snyder. After getting Lorentz's approval for the basic musical materials, Thomson elaborated each section to fit the rough cut of the film. He played through a piano arrangement while the film was projected and only then turned to matters of orchestration. The soundtrack was then recorded, and, Thomson says, Lorentz recut the film to fit the orchestral score.33 Only after the synchronization of music and image was complete did Lorentz introduce the spoken narration. For the voice-over, Lorentz hired his fri
end Thomas Chalmers (a baritone whose career at the Metropolitan Opera was curtailed by injury), but strangely, Chalmers only heard Thomson's score and did not see the film itself before recording the narration, in which Lorentz aimed “to use a minimum of words and to reiterate them in rhythm with the music wherever possible.”34
Thomson composed the score in less than a fortnight, and he justified his rapid progress not just on the basis of his vaunted professionalism, but because of his life experience: “The music of The Plow had poured forth easily,” he wrote. “I knew the Great Plains landscape in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas; and during the War I had lived in a tent with ten-below-zero dust storms. I had come to the theme nostalgic and ready to work…. The subject, moreover, was highly photogenic—broad grasslands and cattle, mass harvesting, erosion by wind, deserted farms.”35 Though Thomson described his attitude as “nostalgic,” this is only part of the story; operating in tandem with the film's political argument, the score offers its own commentary on the people and places of the plains.
LANDSCAPE OR PORTRAIT
Though the script for The Plow was not as widely acclaimed as that for The River (which James Joyce called “the most beautiful prose I have heard in ten years” and Sandburg counted “among the greatest of the psalms of America's greatest river”), Lorentz's words were still powerful.36 When he was later assigned to review his own film, Lorentz modestly described it as “a brief history of the Great Plains from the time of the first cattle ranches to the present day,” with two clear objectives: “one, to show audiences a specific and exciting section of the country; the other, to portray the events which led up to one of the major catastrophies [sic] in American history—to show, in other words, the Great Drought which is now going into its sixth year.” Though uncomfortable extolling his own handiwork, Lorentz praised his photographers, Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand, for taking “some of the most beautiful pictures ever made for any production,” and he was no less complimentary of Thomson's work, calling it “the best musical score ever composed for an American movie.”37