Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.
Frontier Figures American Music and the Mythology of the American West
About the Book
Reviews
“Music professor Levy looks at how Western Americana has been woven into American culture via music.”—Sacramento Bee
“In this work, Levy offers an amazing amount of scholarship. She has researched nearly every person and event of this period, many now long forgotten. . . . Highly recommended.”—W.K. Kearns, Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder Choice
“Think about the open prairie, or the Western mountain ranges, and music comes to mind. Expansive music, evoking broad vistas. . . . But what makes that music sound “American?” And how did the composers use a symphony orchestra — an ensemble with European roots, rarely heard in the American West during the 1800s — to conjure up images of peaks and plains, cowboys and horses? This is the topic that Beth Levy, an associate professor in the music department at UC Davis, examines in her new book.”—Davis Enterprise
"A fine resource for extending the scholarly dialogue."—Carl Rahkonen Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 507
"A welcome and reliable contribution to the scholarship on Tahiti."—Belinda Thompson The Burlington Magazine
"Frontier Figures tempts us with a great deal of fascinating information and interpretation, and triggers even more questions about the development of American music."—Journal of the Society for American Music
“Big and bold as the terrain it covers, Beth Levy’s Frontier Figures takes us on a gratifying road trip, traversing American ‘classical’ compositions that conjure up landscapes from the Middle West to the shores of the Pacific. En route, we encounter many now-famous composers, such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, along with others who have faded from view. Throughout, Levy treats the ‘West’ as both geographic location and mythologized ideal, demonstrating its power on the American musical imagination.”—Carol Oja, author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Course of Empire
Chapter 1. The Wa-Wan and the West
Chapter 2. Western Democracy, Western Landscapes, Western Music
Part Two. Western Encounters: Charles Wakefield Cadman and Others
Chapter 3. Encountering Indians
Chapter 4. Staging the West
Part Three. American Pastorals
Chapter 5. West of Eden
Chapter 6. Power in the Land
Chapter 7. Harvest Home
Part Four. Roy Harris: Provincial Cowboy, White Hope
Chapter 8. How Roy Harris Became Western
Chapter 9. Manifest Destiny
Chapter 10. The Composer as Folk Singer
Part Five. Aaron Copland: From Orient to Occident
Chapter 11. The Saga of the Prairies
Chapter 12. Communal Song, Cosmopolitan Song
Chapter 13. Copland and the Cinematic West
Conclusion: On the Trail
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Awards
- Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society