Eco-ing in the Canyon: Ferde Grofè's Grand Canyon Suite and the Transformation of Wilderness

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many Americans harbored mixed feelings toward wilderness. On the one hand, the recent closing of the frontier increased an already strong affection for the nation's remaining open spaces. On the other, the land's potential for development had traditionally determined its value. The result was a contradiction discernable in both the ideology of the National Park Service and the best-known composition about a national park, Ferde Grofè's Grand Canyon Suite (1931). Borrowing from the relatively new field of ecocriticism, I propose several ways of hearing in the work a simultaneous celebration and conquest of the Grand Canyon. The goal is a better historical understanding of a love for wilderness that forever promises to turn wilderness into something else.

Ecomusicology: Bridging the Sciences, Arts, and Humanities

“…Overall, Von Glahn and her subjects are interested in places represented in art music; issues of environmentalism, while present, are not prominent. Aspects of environmental conservation and preservation do come to the forefront in Brooks Toliver's (2004) study of Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite. Toliver finds tensions in this music that reflect both the early 20th-century debates about land use, which played out in relation to the canyon itself and on a national level, as well as the paradoxes of wilderness as something preserved and conserved, exploited and created.…”

“…Toliver finds tensions in this music that reflect both the early 20th-century debates about land use, which played out in relation to the canyon itself and on a national level, as well as the paradoxes of wilderness as something preserved and conserved, exploited and created. Toliver's (2004) and Von Glahn's (2003) studies are, in fact, historical studies, but I grouped them above in the section on geography because of their more prominent concern with place. But Von Glahn and other music scholars have used historical approaches to engage with past conceptions, both distant and recent, of nature.…”