Frontier Figures
Page 26
The film script made a valiant effort to link the Dust Bowl refugees with the pioneers of log cabins and land runs. “On to the West!” the narrator proclaims. “Once again they headed into the setting sun.” The Study Guide joined the cause, forcing the Okies into the costumes of an earlier age: “Once again they headed West. Last year in every summer month 50,000 people left the Great Plains and hit the highways for the Pacific Coast, the last border.”86 But Thomson's score gives the lie to these characterizations. Hearth and home may well be Baptist, but the harvest gypsies move to a different kind of music. There is a disjunction between the psalm-singing settlers of “Old Hundred” and the tango-inflected migrants (let alone the jazz-happy speculators). Simply put, the Okies were the wrong kind of pioneers. Vacating their homesteads, they presented a conundrum for latter-day theorists of westward expansion. Although they were moving in the proper direction, they had no Manifest Destiny to fulfill.
7
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Harvest Home
“PERSISTENTLY PASTORAL”
Thomson's oeuvre is remarkably free of cityscapes. Perhaps the most important near-exception lies in the ballet he wrote for Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan, Filling Station. Here, a gas station attendant vies for attention with two truck drivers, a highway patrolman, and a gangster. Kirstein created some vaudeville-style dancing for the 1937 premiere, including a ragtime “Big Apple” number. Yet the atmosphere is distinctly suburban; in Thomson's words, the ballet aims “to evoke roadside America as pop art.”1 Thomson's evocations of urban spaces—factories, skyscrapers, and the like—occur almost exclusively in his film scores, where they present an antithesis to more pleasant, rural scenes.
Thomson's tangos notwithstanding, how is it that one of America's most urbane composers wrote so little “urban” music? The same is true for Sowerby, but not for Foss and certainly not for the composer whose pastoral soundscapes remain among the best-loved works of American music: Aaron Copland. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Copland made a name for himself in large part through works that were readily associated with urban spaces: the jazzy suite Music for the Theatre (which alludes to “Sidewalks of New York”) and the stony Piano Variations (which critic Paul Rosenfeld likened to skyscrapers). A mere decade later he would be known for his evocations of western and rural life—a shift that has caused such lasting consternation that critic Wilfrid Mellers felt compelled to comment: “The folksy vein of Copland's ballets is not an evasion of the steel girders…of the Piano Variations: for he sees the prairie as symbol of the irremediable loneliness of big cities, the hymn as the symbol of the religious and domestic security that urban man has lost.”2 For Thomson, the explanation was rather simpler: having heard and admired Thomson's Americana works, Copland followed suit. Thomson made his most trenchant case in retrospect, in American Music Since 1910 (1970). Citing in particular Four Saints, Filling Station, and his soundtracks for Lorentz, Thomson concluded: “My vocabulary was, in the main, the language Copland adopted and refined.”3
Thomson's resentment of Copland's success did not develop overnight, and it was almost always mixed with a healthy dose of admiration. One case in point is the ambivalent musical portrait Thomson sketched on 16 October 1942: “Persistently Pastoral: Aaron Copland.” Here Thomson's irritation seems very close to the musical surface, which features nineteen measures of triadic melody, spiraling aimlessly around G major, followed by a thirty-measure canon at the octave and nearly two pages of marching in place. Thomson thought enough of this material to reuse it in his film score for John Houseman's documentary film about the American electoral process, Tuesday in November (1945); nevertheless, it is easy to agree with Neil Lerner's conclusion that this glib miniature might be interpreted as “an indicator of Thomson's growing animosity toward his more successful colleague.”4
When composing the portrait in 1942, Thomson must have had in mind Copland's two “cowboy ballets”—Billy the Kid and Rodeo. These and Copland's other treatments of the Far West will be treated in later chapters, but strictly speaking they are not “pastoral” scores in the sense outlined above. The ballets are rural and western but, apart from Agnes de Mille's brief soliloquy in Rodeo, neither devotes much attention to the symbiotic relationship between man and nature. Copland's film score for Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men comes much closer to the traditional pastoral, with its threshing machines and Lenny's dream of raising rabbits and living “off the fat of the land.” Copland's own celebrations of the middle landscape emerge during and after World War II: the ballet Appalachian Spring (1944), extended passages in the Third Symphony (1942-46), and the opera The Tender Land (1952).
Written while Martha Graham still had a Civil War-era scenario in mind, Copland's “Ballet for Martha,” soon to be known as Appalachian Spring, employs luminescent triads, sparkling woodwinds, and a Shaker tune wholly in keeping with the pastoral ethos described above. Thomson could not help but be impressed: “The style is pastoral, the tone…blythe [sic] and beatific.” With folklore and open intervals, Thomson continued, the score “evokes our sparse and dissonant rural tradition rather than the thick suavities of our urban manner.”5 Appalachian Spring even features a revival preacher, who acts as the shepherd of his “flock” of followers but who also dances to the most militant music in the score. In the Third Symphony, Copland undertook a more systematic alternation between military and pastoral topoi not unlike those of Sowerby's Prairie. With The Tender Land, however, we find articulated a crucial aspect of American pastorals that Sowerby, Foss, and Thomson did not fully explore: namely, the significance of the pioneer family in the winning and losing of the West.
From its earliest phases, the stakes of westward expansion were symbolized by families moving across the plains. The salient stories of the wagon train and America's iconic “captivity narratives” all involve the separation or reunion of families, and Buffalo Bill knew that there was no better way to close his Wild West than with a successful defense of the settlers' cabin against external threats (sometimes Indians, sometimes outlaws). Against internal threats, however, the mythic settler family proved less resilient. In Copland's Tender Land, for example, the family is frustrated and fragmented.6 Square dancing and hymn singing exert a powerful cohesive force, yet the community disintegrates in a storm of suspicion after two strangers arrive looking for farmwork, igniting accusations from the neighbors and self-discovery for the teenage heroine. Douglas Moore's Pulitzer Prize-winning Giants in the Earth (1951) provides a parallel case. Based on Ole Rölvaag's classic 1928 novel Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, the story was suggested and adapted by Norwegian-American Arnold Sundgaard.7 Rölvaag's tale acknowledged the multiethnicity of the pioneer experience; Irish immigrant farmers rival the Scandinavian protagonists more than nomadic Indians do.8 More than this, the story identified the frontier family as both crucial and fragile: for these pioneers, simple pleasures can barely compensate for the pent-up pressures of isolation.
ON NATIVE SOIL
Idealized as the bearer and bulwark of civilization in a new land, the frontier family is besieged by threats from within and without. This is certainly true of the characters that populate Ernst Bacon's opera A Tree on the Plains (1942), with libretto by western writer Paul Horgan. Though less famous than the regional operas of his pupil Carlisle Floyd, Bacon's Tree on the Plains chronicles a long day in the life of a farming community on the high, arid plains of New Mexico. The settlers are close kin to the Okies who move through The Plow That Broke the Plains, but here they have put down roots that are clearly symbolized in the title and the plot. Traditionally associated with strength and stability, the “tree” of this opera is a more complex symbol. A sentinel in the background, it represents the loneliness of pioneering; in some ways, it takes the place of the family patriarch, whose funeral organizes the first act. Yet in this drought-stricken time and place, the tree depends on human cultivation, and the sacrifices required to nurture it become a flash point for family co
nflict.
Though he never lived there, Bacon knew the Great Plains as a traveler, having crisscrossed the country several times in the course of his career. Born and trained in Chicago, he vacationed with his family in the Sierras.9 At age thirty, he returned to take up residence in California, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory, founding the Carmel Bach Festival, and in 1935 becoming director of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project in San Francisco.10 His decade in California (1928-38) was sandwiched between stints at the Eastman School of Music and Converse College in South Carolina. He taught for almost twenty years at Syracuse University but moved back to California, settling in Orinda (east of Oakland), where he lived until 1990.
Always an avid reader and writer, Bacon made a name for himself on the basis of his songs.11 His favorite poets were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but Carl Sandburg, the “poet of Chicago,” ran a close third. Bacon included in his longest song collection a setting of Sandburg's “Omaha,” whose “red barns and red heifers” echo the themes of Cornhuskers: “Omaha the roughneck feeds armies…Omaha works to get the world its breakfast.” Bacon claimed that his arrangement of “The Buffalo Skinners” featured “tune and words personally from Carl Sandburg”; he circulated the anecdote that Sandburg had mistaken one of his own scores for a folk song; and later in life he penned a tribute to the poet, recalling a shared road trip to see redwood trees in Yosemite.12 Sandburg helped inspire Bacon's attention to geography and Americana. Yet the dreamy nature painting and electric intimacy of A Tree on the Plains seem more closely linked to Dickinson. Among his more than sixty Dickinson songs, the aphoristic “To Make a Prairie” is especially memorable. A quiet, contrapuntal opening suggests the interweaving of prairie grasses, while Dickinson states the required ingredients of her prairie recipe: one clover, one bee, and revery. Bacon gives away the poet's punch line with an expansive exhalation on the word revery before stating the truth of the matter with a sly wink and some gentle dance rhythms: “the revery alone will do, / if bees are few.”
While Sandburg and Dickinson inspired songs and miniatures (for the most part), Bacon found in Paul Horgan a partner for more ambitious projects. He and Bacon met in upstate New York while Bacon was in Rochester, and they corresponded about many projects, including a symphony based on excerpts from Horgan's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the sources and history of the Rio Grande. As early as 1932-33, Horgan registered the hope that they might collaborate on an opera. Horgan admired Bacon's down-to-earth seriousness and his devotion to literature. Shortly before the 1934-35 concert season, he anticipated with relish but with no great optimism the notion that Bacon might become head of the Stanford University Music Department: “Do tell me of the late developments in this project. I have a gloomy presentiment that Charles Wakefield Cadman is the average California image of the composer.”13
For his part, Bacon found himself in sympathy with Horgan's interest in regional history and dialect. Much of Horgan's writing is set in the Southwest, he was a close friend of New Mexico painter Peter Hurd, and he was later on the board of the Santa Fe Opera. Given Horgan's and Bacon's concerns about the centralization of cultural capital in a few East Coast cities, there is no small irony in the fact that the score for A Tree on the Plains was commissioned by the League of Composers in New York, a city against which Bacon would register increasingly belligerent complaints over the course of his career. “New York is not the United States,” Bacon wrote in an essay called “Native Soil.” “It is mainly a beach-head for Europe and a banker for America.”14 Elsewhere he praised regionalism as “a national many voiced fugue—where all sections are equal before the Lord—where the winter wheat of Kansas, the grass mountain of Calif., the brick red rivers of Carolina are equal at least to Central Park, N.Y.”15
In the opera, Horgan aimed to tell a story that would be modern, not nostalgic. He delivered the scenario to Bacon, saying “it is a contemporary scene, western, and I want it to use both symbolic simplicities of timeless experience and the modern, jazzy, religious, social folk idioms which our radio and movie and revival audiences know so thoughtlessly.” Horgan continued: “Naturally, the story is very slight. But if people and doings are truly enough seen, it does not take earthquakes and abdications and murders to make drama, or stage-kindle…about this kind of place-and-people.” In fact, Horgan hoped his characters could be not just “truly…seen,” but also truly heard. He wanted Bacon to convey the idiosyncrasies of western speech as powerfully as possible. To this end he borrowed some recording equipment and recited his lines in a manner intended “to test the flavor of the words.”16 While Bacon clearly made strategic use of the idioms that the librettist had suggested, it is somewhat harder to say whether he took Horgan's heightened declamation to heart. In any case, he agreed with the writer's aims, calling it “unfitting” that American singers, “from an athletic, spacious, experimental, resourceful, democratic, room-for-all, ‘catch as catch-can' land such as ours should have to imitate the speech and gestures of the Italian.”17
Bacon likened Beethoven and Handel to Sequoia trees; he was a close friend of western photographer Ansel Adams and, together with his sister Madi, a fierce advocate for the Sierra Club. He took his botanical metaphors seriously. In one of his many updated aphorisms, he explained: “They say we are a new nation, not ready yet to sing its own song. But only the mixture of peoples is new, and the ground we stand on. We are neither Englishmen nor Indians; rather we are the old world, removed to new soil.”18 This was Bacon's middle landscape, and one of its distinguishing features was the prevalence of human and botanical transplants. “In transplanting a tree from one land to another,” he wrote, “the purpose is to have the tree serve the new land and not the new land serve the tree.”19
LIVING DRY
Many operatic settings feature atmospheric phenomena that mirror the psychological states of the protagonists with impending storms, for example, used to mirror growing tension. In A Tree on the Plains, this situation is reversed, or at least complicated, as the characters find themselves fighting the sun, suffering under a devastating drought that wracks an already arid land. Western writer Wallace Stegner observes: “Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one. The distinctive western plants and animals, the hard clarity (before power plants and metropolitan traffic altered it) of the western air, the look and location of western towns, the empty spaces that separate them…those are all consequences, and by no means all the consequences, of aridity.”20 No less than the emblematic wide open spaces, the necessity for communal oversight of natural resources springs directly from the scarcity of precipitation.
The inhabitants of A Tree on the Plains know that they are living in what Pare Lorentz called “a land of high winds and sun, and of little rain.” They identify with the tree entrusted to their care, but for different reasons. The hired-hand Lou describes the nourishment he gets from the soil, and the farmer's daughter Corrie (the object of Lou's eventually requited love) protests that she is drying up on the desolate farm, just like the dying tree. The deceased grandfather, too, used the sapling to make sense of the hardships brought upon him by the Dust Bowl and the harsh indifference of economic institutions, as Pop recalls: “He used to say only when it blew breezy / Did the little tree have a chance to toughen its limb!”
The single tree, the isolated house, the lonely road—all are intensified against the empty backdrop. Horgan's prologue for the opera points out:
This is a play about the people and the hours of one of those little pine board houses that you may see on the plains of the Southwest, standing at the barely perceptible dome of a long rise in that land of level horizons and the most vast of skies. Human possessions seem like signals of life there; and out of all proportion to their value, can carry weight of dignity for what they may mean to their owners: a roof, a tree, a windmill, a barrel to catch the rain in when there is any, a fence that might break the drive of windstorms and sand.21
L
ike the title tree, the clapboard homestead is almost always visible on the stage. Yet all of the action of the opera takes place outdoors: “the great circle of the plains, domed by the sky.” In the yard, Lou nails together a coffin and hopes for a new life with Corrie; running into the sunlight and “tak[ing] the sky in her gesture,” Mom emerges from the house to vent her grief; after an orchestral “essay on the power of the sun,” Buddy comes back from college, full of city stories, and he argues with Lou over Corrie's future. Their conflict is mirrored in the bickering of their dust-choked neighbors, who recall the droughts of years past and dream of the easy life in California. When a summer thunderstorm brings “blessed relief,” no one goes inside. Instead they sing and dance to the rhythm of the rain.
Though Buddy's college is reasonably close by (he hitchhikes home just in time for the funeral feast), it represents three things that are lacking on the farm: water, jazz, and nightlife. When Mom sings of her love for green things and flowers, Buddy thoughtlessly describes “the way it is in town” with hoses, faucets, running water, irrigation ditches, and city swimming pools until his mother is driven to tears. Buddy's experience also stands in sharp contrast to the long-suffering neighbors who complain of dying cattle, dried-up rivers, and parched nightmares about “choking…on dry dust.” Collectively, they imagine moving to Los Angeles, where unending ocean waves would surround “Chewing Gum Island” and fill up “Listerine Bay.”