Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  The presence or absence of water separates town and countryside, the reality of the high plains and the fantasy-land of California. It also marks the major turning points in the plot. The opera begins with a death and ends with a marriage, but in between these rites of passage, the climactic thunderstorm and a jovial bathing scene are two of the most important set pieces, and each unites a community that had been on the verge of disintegration. The neighbors stop fighting and join hands to celebrate the downpour, and the collected rain is recycled as Buddy showers his antagonist, Lou, with pails of bathwater. Together these two scenes also highlight the two most potent forces for relief and cohesion in this western community: religion and folk song.

  SPIRITS AND PLACES

  No factor unites the characters of A Tree on the Plains more obviously than religion. Horgan titled the first section of the opera “God and Death,” and by beginning with a funeral scene, he gave Bacon ample opportunity to evoke Protestant genres. Mom and Pop speak with the emotive, Amen-saying intensity of a revival meeting. When Mom comes outside to greet the neighbors, her sorrow explodes in an aria saturated with half steps. The libretto calls it “a seizure by tongues”: “And the dry wind has blowed through my green thoughts / Amen…/ And the harvest that came no matter what the year was like / Amen / Was the harvest of death cuttin' down the child and the old man, both, / Amen.” Pop functions as a preacher—in fact, his aria is labeled a “Sermon.” There is even a local “Jeremiah,” who aptly performs his prophetic and peace-making roles: “O trouble,” he laments. “The earth of my fathers is dry, / The dirt is powder to my fingers, / The sun is a fiery plow.” The Christian aura surrounding these key figures also colors the chorus, which performs a wide spectrum of congregational behavior from the staid to the ecstatic. Chorus members can be relied upon to answer “Amen” to Pop's and Jeremiah's homilies. They also sing an “Amen chorus” in strict fugal counterpoint and hymns (e.g., “Hymn to Evening”) in chorale textures clearly modeled on Bach—with some harmonic updating. Their final “Hallelujah” chorus seems to partake equally of gospel and oratorio. While preparing a revised version (finished in the 1960s, and premiered by San Francisco City College in 1991), Horgan wrote to Bacon, requesting that the finale be “a glory in the highest Handelian dimension—though of course the idiom must be yours entirely.”22

  Among the most important choral numbers are two “revival” hymns: “The Last Train” at the funeral and the “Rain Jubilation” that welcomes the storm. In the first instance, the cortege gradually transforms itself into an onomatopoetic locomotive. One mourner sounds the call “as if improvised,” and the choral response coalesces into an internal refrain: “Alleluia, all aboard.” Strongly reminiscent of the funeral scene in Act 2 of Porgy and Bess, the chorus chugs through repetitive fragments of text, and the vowels of its final “Alleluia” are stretched into an imitation train whistle, complete with vocal and instrumental glissandi. More thoroughly integrated into the action is the “Rain Jubilation,” which begins as a rather straight-laced hymn (free of counterpoint, syncopation, or any invitation to dancing) but gradually accelerates with the storm: “Wind sky and air hurrying past, dust, all shrieking, and the wind airs across the crowd, blowing the women, and there is a free sort of movement like dance among them all…. They have created the people's-rhythm, the jollity of the clapped hands and the rocking house.” Whatever their ecumenical mix, this choir keeps its distance from the institutional church. There is a bona fide “Reverind” in the script. He makes a brief appearance shortly after Corrie consents to marry Lou, but his music is comic and undignified compared to Pop's or Jeremiah's. His entrance cue is the sound of a car motor, and the quirky march that accompanies his arrival on the scene is marked, in one source, “corny throughout.” The true religion of A Tree on the Plains is grounded in the local and the land. It arises out of Grandfather's ashes, Pop's earthy sermon, Mom's love of flowers, and even the sound of the locomotive speeding past.

  If A Tree on the Plains reinforces the association between Protestantism and proper pioneering, it only exaggerates a thematic strand present in many American pastorals. Whether they feature swords beaten into plowshares or hymns of gratitude for nature's bounty, artistic depictions of the Great Plains are so saturated with biblical imagery that it is tempting to seek some musical reflection of the etymological fact that “pastoral” care is provided equally by farmers/ shepherds and ministers. One might even trace a lineage of pastoral scores stretching back to Corelli's “Christmas” Concerto, the “Pastoral Symphony” of Messiah, and other musical manger scenes. The shepherds who visited the Christian Nativity fulfilled their biblical function in part because they operated at the fringes of mainstream civilized society. They emphasized the universality of the incarnation. By contrast, the works described here suggest more varied missions for the pastoral characters of American music.

  Thomson was keen to extend the umbrella of Baptist Sunday School over his scores both before and after “Old Hundred” made its appearance in The Plow That Broke the Plains. In addition to the Symphony on a Hymn Tune and the “white spirituals” of his film score for The River, he fashioned a more austere, ersatz hymnody for Pilgrims and Pioneers, drawn from his score for John Houseman's movie Journey to America (a single-reel history of immigration for the New York World's Fair in 1964). For Lukas Foss, the religious associations of The Prairie were more generic than nostalgic: chantlike melodies, recitative narration, chorale preludes, and vocal counterpoint strongly reminiscent of the Bach cantata or the Handelian oratorio. Strange to say, the Episcopal Church musician Sowerby created the most secular of the prairie scores described above. Military and mechanical topoi make his counterpoint much more redolent of human effort than Foss's fugues (which seem to stake a particularly musicohistorical claim) or Thomson's, in which an organic order thrives unperturbed by commerce or jazz. Bacon, too, set his Protestant pioneers in an environment where market forces pose a variety of imminent threats, but he did so in a context leavened by a distinctly ecumenical outlook.

  UNPAVED ROADS

  In light of the pervasive religiosity of A Tree on the Plains, one might interpret Lou and Buddy's bathing scene as a casual baptism—the absolution of their violent impulses in a wash of holy water. To overcome their former conflict, however, they eschew religious imagery in favor of folklore. The storm brought an end to their fistfight, but their reconciliation is realized only later when, in easy alternation, they deliver verse after verse of “Frog went a-Courtin'.” It is mildly ironic that this should be the song of choice, for the marriage it recounts ends in tongue-in-cheek tragedy: Miss Mousie is eaten by a tomcat, Master Frog is swallowed by a snake. It is the music, not the text, that gives communal force to the scene. The call-and-response between Buddy and Lou spills out into the community and washes over the boundaries of folk music into an eclectic array of musical genres, as indicated by Horgan's instructions: “The various instruments characterize the different actors in the little folk-tale, and in solo flights call on jazz, hymn, vaudeville vamp, as well as the resources of the classical orchestra.” Presumably of his own accord, Bacon superimposes the “Frog went a-Courtin'” tune and an old-time “Chicken Reel,” perhaps to satisfy his more contrapuntal musical ear or to reinforce a more distinctly rural setting.

  Early in his career, Bacon preferred a broad definition of folk music, not limited by race or region. In 1934, he praised American composers because “instead of studying the latest Parisian fashions at the Boulangerie, the atrocities of Berlin, and the supposed propagandists of Moscow,” they were “beginning to respect their own folk songs, their much-damned Puritan heritage, their great Puritan literature, their negroes, cowboys, hill-billies, Creoles, lumberjacks, their workmen, their own provincialities, and their musical extremes such as stolidity on the one hand and jazz on the other.”23 While he was prepared to consider the pilgrim, the ranch hand, and the jazzman on equal footing, Bacon grew gradually more insistent about the importa
nce of regional specificity.

  In 1951, Bacon sketched his thoughts on geographical influence in the preface to an orchestral suite called From These States (Gathered Along Unpaved Roads). Like a classic pastoralist, he placed the influence of the land above and before the manifestation of national, regional, or ethnic identity: “Do not the vista, the altitude, the humidity, the vegetation, the crops, the desert, the sea-coast, the fertile inland valleys, the characteristic sky and clouds, the temperature, wind and rainfall—all affect the people's song no less than their national, racial and cultural heritage? Indeed these very factors of the land determine in large measure the strains of the people that choose to live in one section rather than another.”24Even granting Bacon's questionable assumption that cultural groups were free to inhabit whatever geography they innately preferred, the proposition is still a peculiar one for a nation of immigrants, who had been (as Bacon put it) “transplanted” to the New World. According to this place-driven logic, the appropriate way to begin questions about the “authenticity” of folk expression is not “who” but “where.”25 Eventually, Bacon simplified his stance, allowing all song to be measured on a single, clearer axis: commercial distribution. According to this scale, the music of rural communities would always come out on top.

  Bacon's emerging ambivalence about folklore is already on display in A Tree on the Plains. The spiritual richness of its hardscrabble characters fits hand in glove with his views on the musical virtues of the pioneer. “Pioneering entails isolation,” he wrote, “as in the farms, the lumber camps, the fisheries, the ranges, the mining camps, the frontier armies, the rivers, the prisons, the religious settlements…. While we may not minimize the price, we should know that poverty too is a preserver and a friend to song. Prosperity means intercommunication and the leveling of regional differences, with its organized and sophisticated entertainment.”26The threat of encroaching commerce is already well established, even in the Dust Bowl era of the opera. It can be no accident that the neighbors, when they yearn for the beachside glamour of Los Angeles in “Chewing Gum Island,” sing out their desires in a “deliberate habanera” rhythm. As was the case for the migrating Okies of Thomson's The Plow That Broke the Plains, the Latin tinge here signals the allure of California and a pointed contrast to the varied hymn styles and square dances that seem more “native” to the frontier community.

  The habañera's remoteness at once constitutes and limits its power. It is a passing fancy, not a pressing danger. But the opera also invites us to interpret stylistic contrasts that are more fraught because they lie closer to home. Immediately following “Frog Went a-Courtin',” the neighbors gather to watch a little girl, Shirley, do a ragtime tap dance. According to the libretto, “the tune is a jaded, out of focus (discordant) satire on jazz tunes.”

  A Woman: She breaks your heart, jazzin what she don't know anything about! Another Woman: She'll know, soon enough.

  A Man: Honey, don't you ever do that for a boy, less you mean it.

  Pop intervenes to praise all manner of joyfulness as a gift from the divine, but he also steers the music toward an evening hymn that returns the crowd to its congregational demeanor. One might identify Pop's liberality with the composer's. “Folk song is Nature in music,” Bacon wrote. “Like the wilderness, men need it, at times, to recover their musical humanity.”27 Ragtime could be justified by its popularity, but in the world of the opera it still presents an invidious point of comparison. While “Frog Went a-Courtin” draws the community together in contented joy, Shirley's tap dance exposes its fissures and appetites. If folk song grows from close ties to the land, jazz suggests instead sex, commerce, and the unsavory combination of the two.

  THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO

  Corrie and Buddy represent opposing paths for the frontier family: one with deep ties to the land, the other eager to escape it, one attuned to the life around her, the other intoxicated by modern technology and jazz. Because she is the only character to undergo a change of heart during the opera, Corrie's decision to remain with Lou, to “dream his child upon the land,” constitutes in some way the moral of the story. At the outset, in Horgan's words, “her heart is set on city ways, and she dreams of luxuries.” The text of her first song flits about store windows, street lights, and beauty parlors, while she prances around an imaginary microphone. The score offers a saccharine parody of radio commercials. Human attachment is trivialized. “When you hear the chime,” an orchestra player intones through a loudspeaker, “it will be exactly love o'clock.”

  With her brother home on the farm, Corrie's temptation grows more concrete. Buddy tells exciting stories about “the college boys” and has at his fingertips the persuasive power of jazz, which is so closely associated with his character that it anticipates his first stage entrance. When Lou upbraids him for rudeness, he responds with “an insolent fillip on clarinet,” and when he talks of getting Corrie off the farm to work in a sweet shop and have a good time in town, he “plays an insinuating line on the clarinet” over Lou's angry protests. As the neighbors return from the funeral service, Buddy executes an “obscene little skirl,” sidestepping Mom's embrace and “piping in self-ecstasy, squeezing his shoulders together, and dancing away in little steps until he has quite finished his jazz seizure.” While the adults keep their distance, Corrie is intrigued, and she eventually joins Buddy's “Night-Time Music” with its “cheek-to-cheek swing.” Bluesy chromatic inflections reach their climax in the vocal glissando that punctuates Buddy's most direct appeal to Corrie's emerging sexuality: “Hot time! Make money. Good kids. Jazz-azz-azz! [wordless slide] Boy! Would they go for you.” Finally brother and sister join in scat singing: “Bi-d'yi, d'yi, da-dee, d'd'd'd'-do, do, do.”28

  According to Bacon's grim logic, there would be little hope for Corrie in an urban environment where all pure things face the contamination of the market. She would suffer the same fate that he later outlined for unspoiled folk song, which he saw being driven “into the arms of the juke box.” Bacon wrote: “We can safely predict that the age of our folk song is coming to an end, a victim of communication, highways, and electricity, and all the enemies of isolation, and finally the appetite of commerce and its immodest mistress, advertising.”29 In the end, however, Corrie achieves salvation—not through the precepts of religion, but through the force of nature. Only when she and Lou are held spell-bound in the thunderstorm does she yield to him, and their much-awaited love duet is sanctified not by the neighbors (and certainly not by the reverend), but by a most unusual mockingbird (example 30a).

  Although Lou is the romantic lead, it is Buddy who emerges with the most strongly etched character, and not just because he knows jazz. From entrance to exit, he is associated with mechanized transportation and fast living. As a hitchhiker, he flouts conventional morality—drinking himself sick in one man's truck, necking with the daughter in another's backseat, and shirking his share of the work when a tire blows out. Even on the farm, he is associated with machines. In his second solo number, Buddy and his clarinet mimic an “idling windmill” after it has creaked to life in the wake of the storm. Amid his absent-minded singing, Buddy is roused by the whir of a distant transport plane, and he launches into an excited catalog of technical data: “Douglas twin-motor / He prob'ly goes over this time every evening / El Paso to Denver / Six hours and fifty minutes.” As Horgan puts it, “He is possessed; the music portrays this; he joins his hands like planes and flies with them, swoops and banks, curves and returns; he dances; he is flight.” The text of the aria, too, pantomimes an airplane in action; it is peppered with fourteen different vocal imitations of motors, guns, takeoffs, and landings. The music is similarly motoric, generated out of circling accompaniment figures with no melodic content of their own (example 30b). Buddy is intoxicated not just by flight, but by acceleration. He exclaims: “My granpa walked, / My papy rode, / And me, I can fly.”

  EXAMPLE 30A. Bacon, A Tree on the Plains, “Lou and Corrie,” mm. 1-10 (courtesy of Ellen Bacon)


  In A Tree on the Plains, the garden has been overrun with machines that are both necessary and destructive. This is the West's catch-22. Traversing its wide-open spaces, Buddy must rely on the highway system to get home from college, but the call of the open road lures him away. Radio advertising stokes desires beyond the bare-bones subsistence that the land can support. The plow is rendered useless in the grip of drought. Even the windmill seems to whirl with double-edged swords—a tool of irrigation sufficient only to hold out false hope for the family farm. In the logic of the opera, technology disrupts the natural order of things. And yet, how striking it is that Bacon chose to represent his machines and his garden with fundamentally similar music. As example 30 shows, the birdsong that sanctifies Corrie's love for Lou is crafted from the same type of scale that Bacon used to depict the “transport plane”—an eight-note scale of alternating whole steps and half steps that scholars today call octatonic.

  EXAMPLE 30B. Bacon, A Tree on the Plains, Buddy and “The Transport Plane,” mm. 68-83

  Bacon never described his opera as octatonic, but in fact many of its numbers use one of the three possible octatonic scales: (C-D-E-E-F#-G-A-B), (C-D-E-F-F#-G#-A-B), (D-D-E-F-G-A-B-B).30 The composer was well aware of the distinct harmonic and melodic possibilities arising from different scales, and he relished the internal symmetries that the octatonic and other “equipartite” scales could provide. In his theoretical treatise “Our Musical Idiom,” written when he was not yet twenty years old, he attempted an exhaustive taxonomy of some 350 scales, and he returned to these tables periodically during his lifetime, mostly obviously in his geographical organ suite Spirits and Places. The movement devoted to “Rattlesnake Bar, California, Gold Country,” for example, involves “indiscretions to an 8-lone scale (Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bloch).”31 While associations between specific scales and topography remain elusive in the organ suite, the opera allows us to conjecture that Bacon's octatonicism was most strongly associated with the divine clockwork of nature, the whirring gears of modern technology, and isolated moments of human awe in the face of these overwhelming forces.32