The Dark Side of the American Frontier

My latest visit to the DSO Replay Web site of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) was motivated by the electronic mail I received about a “watch party” programmed for the Memorial Day weekend. Ostensibly, this was a program of “celebratory Americana;” but those familiar with the planned selections probably knew that the “grand finale” was anything but celebratory. I thus decided to view it in isolation, allowing it more “room” to unfold its dark narrative.

That narrative comes from a 1936 documentary written and directed by Pare Lorentz entitled The Plow That Broke the Plains. Virgil Thomson worked with Lorentz to provide music for the film, after which he compiled a six-movement suite for concert performance. That suite was first performed in the summer of 1946 at a concert by the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra led by its founder and first conductor, Leopold Stokowski. There is also a four-movement piano version, presumably prepared by Thomson himself, which I was once agile enough to play.

The original version of the suite was conducted by Leonard Slatkin at a concert given on February 8, 2019; and that is the performance that was captured on video for DSO Replay. Between the movements Slatkin read passages that were extracted from the narration for Lorentz’ documentary. The title of the film might lead one to suspect that it was a celebration of the pioneer spirit. However, between Slatkin’s narrations and the titles of the movements, it is clear that this was a far cry from any tub-thumping patriotism.

The titles of the movements provide a useful abstract of the film’s narrative:

1. Prelude
2. Pastorale (Grass)
3. Cattle
4. Blues (Speculation)
5. Drought
6. Devastation

While the narration never acknowledges that the plains to the west of the Mississippi River had indigenous inhabitants, contemporary historical perspective is less kind to that “pioneer spirit” our country used to be so fond of celebrating. The descendants of those that had worked the fields and forests to the east were initially confronted with grasslands that were not suitable for past farming practices. Nevertheless, the pioneers tried to force the land to yield for their own purposes (ignoring, and frequently eliminating, those that had established a more viable relationship with that land). As the title of the fourth movement suggests, those that worked the hardest were often motivated by speculators for whom short-term profit was all that mattered. Ultimately, the film says little about pioneering and much about those circumstances that eventually led to the Dust Bowl.

Monica Fosnaugh playing one of Virgil Thomson’s cor anglais moments (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Thomson’s score never tries to underscore any point that Lorentz tried to make that was best made in text. Instead, the music draws on familiar folk tunes, which Thomson then arranges with enough ironic rhetoric to make it clear that all was not well in the garden (or out on the plains). His approach to instrumentation is particularly inventive, almost as if he was determined to favor instrumentalists that seldom have much to do. Some of those instrumentalists, such as the cor anglais player, benefitted from the video work. Unfortunately, there were also too many shots that were looking in one section of the ensemble while the “action” was taking place somewhere else. Fortunately, even when the camera work was not up to snuff, Slatkin’s sense of balance always allowed the attentive listener to appreciate the full impact of every emotional gesture that Thomson established in his score.

Ultimately, The Plow That Broke the Plains is a film about environmental crisis, making it a valuable object lesson in the context of our current crisis situation.