The American West in Musical Imagination, 1910-2017

Abstract

This dissertation builds upon scholarship on music and place in American classical music (Levy 2012; Von Glahn 2003), topic theory, and historical criticism to address two primary questions: First, what musical tropes do composers in the Western classical tradition use to represent the American West? Second, what do these musical tropes reveal about how these composers imagine the West? I address music from various genres, including works for concert, stage, and film, and from as early as Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (1910) to as late as Adams’s Girls of the Golden West (2017). Particular focus is given to works from the first half of the twentieth century, such as those by Copland, Grofé, and Thomson. Throughout the dissertation, I connect these works to what I call frontier ideology: the prevailing idea, in the early twentieth century, that the American frontier was an ideal site for the reinvention of Western society, and that the frontier was defined by its colonization. This definition is a synthesis of historical and literary commentary by Marx ([1964] 2000), Slotkin (1992), Smith ([1950] 1970), and Turner (1894).

Chapters 1 and 2 utilize topic theory to propose two musical topics that are common in portrayals of the American West. Chapter 1 draws on existing definitions of the pastoral topic in European art music (Monelle 2006; Ratner 1980) to define the frontier topic, which can be heard in musical portrayals of Western landscapes; I argue that the frontier topic’s musical expressions of frontier ideology distinguish it from its European counterpart. Similarly, Chapter 2 takes as a starting point Monelle’s (2000) definition of the noble horse topic in European classical music, then moves on to define an American West horse topic that has musical and extramusical characteristics distinct from those of the noble horse. I argue that the Western horse topic feeds into frontier ideology in various ways, particularly through the imagery of the cowboy.

Chapters 3 and 4 address other compositional techniques that express frontier ideology. Chapter 3 presents a typology of approaches that composers take in their adaptations of folk musical sources in portrayals of the West, and I propose a spectrum between direct quotations of folk songs and abstract references to folk music. I observe that composers especially draw from cowboy songs and Native American folk music, and that many of these quotations are embedded in presentations of frontier ideology. Finally, Chapter 4 considers portrayals of race and gender in the musical theater works Oklahoma! (1943) and Annie Get Your Gun (1946). I consider the role the West plays as an agent in these characters’ narratives, and I argue that musical analysis reveals details about the narrative trajectory of these characters and their gender and racial dynamics—details that cannot be discerned from the plot alone.

The analyses in this dissertation place these works in historical and musical context. The discussion of frontier ideology throughout demonstrates how these works respond to, and feed into, popular perceptions of the West in the early twentieth century; and my use of European musical topics as touchpoints highlights relationships between European classical music and American modernism. By putting works from various musical styles and genres in dialogue with each other, “The American West in Musical Imagination” offers new, systematized ways of listening to musical portrayals of the American West.