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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.

This article explores the intersection and divergence of two composers’ strategies for capitalizing on representations of California as an “American Athens.” For Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), California was a site for cultural rebirth enacted in the form of outdoor pageantry and community singing, each of which stimulated his theories about race and musical renewal. A generation later, Farwell’s student Roy Harris (1898-1979) sought to tap into a “contemporary classicism” that he believed was intimately tied to the soil and soul of California. Both men brought together the “classic” of the GrecoRomans and the “classic” of Bach and Beethoven. Farwell, however, embraced an esoteric vision of the world-historical West, while Harris preferred to pledge his allegiance to the icons of western classical music.

This essay explores how music underscores the twinning of nostalgia and the West at key moments, helping to refine the film’s characterization of family relationships and to deepen its message about manifest destiny.

The turn of the twentieth century came early to America. Still a young country by international standards, the United States seemed determined to celebrate its coming of age in 1892–93 with a cluster of events marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s fabled transatlantic voyage and so-called discovery of the New World. They culminated in the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Drawing on a pointedly diverse range of natural and human resources, the exposition was meant to reinforce the idea of American exceptionalism and to display America’s growing centrality on the world stage.

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 Prairieis 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

At a time when Russian-Jewish immigrants were considered America’s most likely Bolsheviks, Copland’s voluntary association with the left probably came as no surprise. Elizabeth Bergman Crist has detailed the prevalence of communist and socialist ideals among Copland’s associates and has persuasively situated Copland’s own activities within the purview of the Popular Front.¹ For my purposes, the most notable aspects of Copland’s political engagement are the geographical settings that agitated his political conscience and the impact that leftism had on his views about folk music. As Bergman Crist has shown, Copland seems to have developed many of his populist ideals while

“Born in a log cabin on Lincoln’s birthday in Lincoln County, Oklahoma”—this is the inevitable and emblematic opening of any biography of Roy Harris. From the beginning of his career until the present, these phrases have encapsulated crucial aspects of the composer’s life: his humble but self-sufficient beginnings, his association with the rural West, and his almost magical ability to represent anything and everything genuinely American. This was indeed the stuff that myths were made of, and in Harris’s case, fact and fancy were quickly entangled in a journalistic and autobiographical web. Even before Harris returned from his Parisian

Alienation and self-discovery (sexual or otherwise) are major themes in all of Copland’s western scores.Billy the KidandRodeomade these themes visible through dance, but they withheld definitive answers about Copland’s own attitudes. His authorial voice is even harder to tease out of his western film scores:Of Mice and Men(1939) andThe Red Pony(1949). Both are based on previously published works of John Steinbeck, and in both cases the screenplays were substantially complete before anyone thought to approach Copland for the music. Nevertheless, the resulting scores represent his most direct engagement with western character types,

Late in September 1936, the Columbia Broadcasting System offered Aaron Copland his first radio commission. Along with five other composers—Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and William Grant Still—Copland crafted a piece to fit the network’s basic guidelines for length (less than thirty minutes) and instrumentation (fewer than thirty-seven players).¹ Many years after the fact, Copland recalled his excitement at composing for this new medium, claiming to have written “in a style designed to bridge the gap between modern composition and the need for a wider public.”² His initial title for the work,Radio Serenade, was

Marking the apex of Harris’s career was his Third Symphony. Though many listeners single out the Fifth or the Seventh as his finest symphonic achievement, it is the Third and only the Third that remains in the standard repertory. At the time of its first performances, it seemed to represent the fulfillment of all the quasi-messianic hopes that had been vested in the composer. Harris had at last achieved his manifest destiny, uniting his vaunted “personality” with technical innovation in the prestigious genre of symphonic writing. Critics have praised the symphony for its “American flavor” or its organic unfolding, but