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155 PR AIR IE IDYLLS Given Cadman’s geographic imagination and his substantial catalog of operas and operettas, it is striking that none involves a farmer, a homestead, or a family of settlers. The emigrant Hurds in The Golden Trail intend to put down roots once their journey is done, but when we meet them they are still traversing land that is pointedly not their own. The Ortego family of The Bells of Capistrano rely on their land for cattle grazing, but they do not till the soil. The impassioned recitation “I Am the Land” by the Mexican fiesta maker Carlos rouses a certain agricultural reverence among the cast of Meet Arizona, yet this feeling is short-lived and foreign to the everyday workings of the dude ranch. The figure of a “thresher” does make a brief appearance in one of Cadman’s pedagogical piano sets, but it is included as the “characteristic” component of the suite; the farmer is observed rather than personified, as if he were a curious feature of the landscape itself. Cadman did write a handful of “prairie pieces,” but these generally identified the Great Plains with the Indian past, not with an agricultural present. Only in 1939–40 did he approach a recognizably “pioneer” theme, and this came by way of his “Pennsylvania ” Symphony, which had roots in Cadman and Eberhart’s discarded plans for an opera about the steel industry. After an Indianist first movement titled “Forest Primeval,” and a climax depicting the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers, the second movement, “Pioneer Spirit,” featured “homespun Americanism,” “the building up of the Valleys and the hint . . . of industry and the coming of great industry, but through [all] a wholesome homelife and the joy of living , maybe a bit of the old time quadrilles and dance tunes.” 5 West of Eden 156 American Pastorals When the “spirit” of the second movement became rather lighter than Cadman had anticipated—involving barrel organ sounds and reminiscences from his own childhood—the “pioneer” idea infiltrated the first movement instead. Cadman wrote to Eberhart that he wanted “at least a suggestion of somebody human living in all that ‘sylvania’ wilderness.” Privately, Cadman described his desire to reflect “those old settlers who were full of religious feeling . . . Quakers, Scotch Presbyterians , fanatical but practical Methodists like my ancestors.” In the more public forum of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra program notes, one can see an eight-bar ersatz hymn labeled the “pioneer theme” and can read (in words attributed to the composer) of Cadman’s own Anglo-Saxon lineage. The symphony garnered a certain amount of national attention at its Los Angeles premiere; NBC deemed it worthy of coast-to-coast broadcast, and after at least six more Californian performances , the work was heard throughout the Midwest and apparently also in Santiago , Chile. Yet the Modern Music critics were unimpressed, and Eugene Ormandy never followed up on his interest in bringing the work to Philadelphia. Cadman complained: “I have been told five times so far by conductors that doing a symphony ‘laid’ in one state of the U.S. has not made for ready acceptance.” Despite its lack of East Coast success, Cadman’s “Pennsylvania” Symphony marks some telling changes in American composers’ understanding of pioneer and pastoral imagery that began in the late 1920s and lasted through the Great Depression and after. While Cadman’s earlier prairie pieces were landscape paintings of bygone days, in the symphony, he touched on many of the themes that I will treat in the pages to come: the intertwining of industry and Anglo-Saxon pioneering , the religious connotations of the pastoral, and a significant confusion about the extent to which this particular “pioneer” experience could represent a broader “American” experience. Many Americans had long felt a need to recoup the idea of progress without recourse to the factory, or at least with a clearer sense that “progress” might have its downside. Without disregarding the late nineteenth-century “antimodernism ” outlined by the historian H.T. Jackson Lears, I argue that these ideas arose with special force for the generation after Cadman, in part because of the widespread conviction that the Depression had proved the bankruptcy of industrial capitalism, and in part because the machinery of agribusiness that enabled farming in the Far West also threatened deeply entrenched American ideals about the family farm. In the end, the real dangers of the prairie came not from the “lurking Indians” and buffalo ghosts of campfire tales...

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