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179 “PIGEONS ON THE GR ASS, ALAS” Foss’s cantata reinforced the idea that the prairie has a voice of its own. But in his sixties, the composer looked back with a more introspective understanding of the prairie allure. “The Prairie is still a favorite work of mine,” he told Vivian Perlis in 1986. “I’m not ashamed of it even now . . . it did a lot for me.” He further recalled: “I felt like a refugee, but then a refugee learns to call anything his home, wherever he is. So America very quickly became my home, and I am sure Aaron had something to do with it, and Carl Sandburg. . . . My Prairie is very Coplandesque . . . I fell in love with America and why did I fall in love with America? It wasn’t just the landscape obviously. It was people like Aaron.” Yet the “Coplandesque” was not the only source for impressions of rural Americana, and as many have observed, it was not the first. Among those with a claim to the right of first discovery, Virgil Thomson was perhaps the most vocal. Thomson’s vocabulary for America’s middle landscape was made up primarily of Protestant hymn tunes. According to Steven Watson, Thomson linked the American hymn tunes in his oeuvre not just with childhood experience but with a certain kind of rootedness: “When you reach down in your subconscious, you get certain things. . . . When Aaron [Copland] reaches down, he doesn’t get cowboy tunes, he gets Jewish chants. When I reach down, I get southern hymns or all those darn-fool ditties we used to sing: ‘Grasshopper sitting on a railway track.’” In the mid-1930s, Thomson rightly considered himself a pioneer in the incorporation of Americana into classical music. Later famous for his role as 6 Power in the Land 180 American Pastorals music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, Thomson did some of his earlier “heralding” from the composer’s pulpit. His Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1926–28) gave him a claim on Americana that he felt an increasing need to protect from urban interlopers. As chance would have it, these themes are subtly interwoven in Thomson’s first and most famous treatment of the plant family that he would later memorialize in the grasslands of his documentary film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the orchestral movement Wheat Field at Noon (1948). In Gertrude Stein’s play-libretto Four Saints in Three Acts, which Thomson began setting in the late 1920s, she indicated: “Make it pastoral. In hills and gardens.” Yet even after he had finished the music some years later, Thomson had little sense of how their “Opera to Be Sung” might be staged; the work of crafting a “plot” was largely left to Thomson’s friend Maurice Grosser, who directed the first production . One of the few passages for which Stein actually did intend specific narrative content is the Vision of the Holy Ghost that St. Ignatius experiences near the beginning of Act 3. For her incarnation of the Holy Ghost, Stein replaced the serene dove with its gawky, urban cousin: “Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas.” Whether short or long, the grass is yellow, suggesting that the Holy Ghost descends either out of season or onto a lawn seriously marred by overuse. The chorus conjectures that “it was a magpie in the sky,” but this move merely substitutes its own set of unholy connotations: a shallow attraction to shiny objects and a tendency toward theft. Although Stein sets the scene in a “Monastery garden with . . . a bare Spanish horizon and an empty sky,” the associations of her text are urban. Thomson’s music follows suit. Part of what makes this passage so fetching is its jaunty contrast to the chantlike lines that fill the rest of the score. He does not choose here to recall the four-square phrases of Protestant hymnody or the vocal inflections of the Negro spiritual. Thomson’s pigeons move neither to the nursery rhyme tunes of Sunday school song nor to the high, heavenly strains that affirm their fall to earth. They flutter instead to music that resembles nothing more than a cabaret song, complete with a chorus of male backup singers. Although Stein linked the birds in the Luxembourg Gardens to the imagery of Annunciation, Thomson seems to have preferred the Pentecostal moment— perhaps because he recognized that the creation of musical Americana required a certain kind...

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