Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Environments Session Chair: Sabine Feisst | |
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The Pastoral Topic and the “Machine in the Garden” in Portrayals of the American Frontier Michigan State University Early- to mid-twentieth-century musical portrayals of the American West, such as those by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, are generally thought to use compositional techniques such as the quotation of vernacular musics, folk evocations, widely spaced harmonies, and pentatonicism in order to evoke the West (Hubbs 2004; Levy 2012; Crist 2005; Von Glahn 2003; Pollack 1999). In this paper, I build on this scholarship by considering echoes and modifications of the pastoral topic in musical portrayals of landscapes in the American West, demonstrating one way in which early twentieth-century American art music descended—and ultimately diverged—from European pastoral music of the common practice period. I first draw on Leo Marx’s (1964) concept of the “machine in the garden,” a literary metaphor for the American impulse for industrialization and colonization in otherwise idyllic settings. Marx frames the machine in the garden as a textural phenomenon, where, in a literary text, the sensory details of the machine interrupt and clash with those of the garden. By examining modifications of the pastoral topic in works by Copland, Thomson, and Ferde Grofé, I demonstrate that the machine in the garden can also be heard in musical textures that portray the American West, often expressed through textural juxtapositions and contrasts that evoke both “garden” and “machine.” Finally, I show how these modifications of the pastoral topic in American music—which I call the “frontier” topic—reflect wider midcentury perceptions of the American frontier as a site defined by its colonization. | |