Wide Open Spaces

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 11

Wide Open Spaces

INE would expect a work entitled "The Prairie" (the Lucas Foss cantata heard from 2YA recently) to give one an impression of vastness and space, of wildness perhaps but not of ruggedness, to be elemental yet not chaotic. But to me this composition conveyed nothing of what would seem to be the

essential spirit of its subject. I found it pretentious, noisy, and dull. The cantata is based on a poem by Carl Sandburg, "The Corn Huskers" with which I am not familiar, though phrases from it ("They are mine, they are mine," "In the dark of a thousand years") seemed to be repeated by the chorus with monotonous regularity, so that they are graven permanently on my heart and may even have penetrated to my subconscious, The cantata aims at giving musical form to the history of the middle states-the early days before the white man, the pioneering period, the wars with the Indians, the ploughing of the land, the machine age, the future of America, But there seemed to me nothing particularly expressive of America about it, and in Part 2 which, thanks to the commentator, I know is intended to depict the prairie just before the white invasion, the thundering herds of bison’ could equally well have been gnus and there is an oom-ba-ba-ba effect’ in the background distinctly reminiscent of Sanders of the River. But I am reserving my bitterest criticism for the final movement, said to express America’s future expansion and prosperity. The jaded listener had the right to expect a certain triumphant serenity in the treatment of this theme, but, as the

a nestil ° critics explain, the work was completed in 1942, and echoes of the war have crept in. The cantata seems to end where it began, and we leave the prairie in one of its more rugged moods.