For a long time, the critical prejudice against film music as a lesser kind of music has marred the study of music history, in particular the study of American music in the 1930s and 1940s. It has left gaps and holes in biographies and surveys of the period because composers themselves, conversely, did not hold similar opinions about the genre. Many composers—such as Antheil, Satie, Meisel, Weill, Milhaud, Britten, Eisler, Blitzstein, McPhee, Revueltas, Gruenberg, Moore, Thomson, and Copland—enthusiastically embraced the aesthetic and financial opportunities afforded by composing for film, especially the new sound film.

Recently, a few scholars have begun to correct this critical oversight. They have begun to paint a more accurate picture of composition in the 1930s and 1940s by considering film music as contemporary composers did—as the equal of concert hall music. Those composers who wrote the most film music, naturally, have been the first to be reexamined. In her book Music for the Common Man, Elizabeth Crist has adjusted Copland's biography by considering in detail the composer's first film score, written for The City (1939), Ralph Steiner's cinematic ode to New Deal urban planning.Footnote ¹ As Crist reveals, the score played an essential role in helping Copland to develop his leftist politics and his populist, rural ballet style. Neil Lerner's article “Copland's Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood” even more significantly considers the impact of documentary film on American composers.Footnote ² Lerner roots aspects of Copland's Hollywood film music and his concert hall works not only in his documentary film music but in the music of another documentary film composer, Virgil Thomson. Just three years before Copland scored The City, Thomson wrote the music for two acclaimed and widely seen documentaries directed by Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). As Lerner points out, these three films shared not only technical personnel (Steiner was one of Lorentz's cameramen) but also musical ideas. Copland drew significantly from Thomson's documentary scores—including the use of preexisting folk music, sparse instrumentation, and widely spaced orchestration—not only for his own score for The City but also for much of his film, ballet, and concert hall music.

To the extent that it makes Lerner's and Crist's scholarly observations meaningful, the new DVD of The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River released by Naxos is worthwhile. By making these films easily accessible (the films are also still widely available in VHS format), this DVD helps to resituate both Thomson and documentary film as essential forces in American music in the 1930s and 1940s. The films themselves do much of this work, but several of the DVD's special features are also informative in this regard. Produced by artistic director Joseph Horowitz, the disc features newly recorded versions of Thomson's scores by the Washington, D.C.–based Post-Classical Ensemble, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. The new soundtracks are interesting, but the necessity for including them is debatable. In the otherwise informative program notes, Horowitz argues that the rationale for re-recording them “is obvious: the original thirties' soundtracks, gritty and opaque, do not do justice to Thomson's scores; the full impact of the Lorentz/Thomson synthesis is undermined.” The original soundtracks may indeed be somewhat noisy by today's digital standards, but they are not at all opaque. To my ears, in fact, the slightly ragged and rustic performances in the original soundtracks match the film's rural imagery much better than the hyperclean and processed sound of the new soundtrack performances.

In the Post-Classical Ensemble's version, the folksy guitar and banjo parts are less prominent and charming, and the strings have a modern, hollow, almost sterile sound that seems strangely incompatible with the historic imagery. The problem is not entirely the Ensemble's fault; Gil-Ordóñez is quite attentive and his musicians are very skilled. Rather, it may be the sound engineer's doing. It is the modern recording aesthetic, which prefers the digital perfection of individual lines over the rough but more integrated sound of 1930s mono-directional microphones, that accounts for the new soundtrack's lack of warmth. The stentorian earnestness of the new narration by contemporary actor Floyd King is also not ideal. Thomas Chalmers's modest and subtle reading in the original maintains a better balance between imagery, text, and music than King's, which is overwrought to the point of irritation in places. Thankfully, this production gives the viewer the choice of watching the films with the original soundtracks by disabling the new soundtrack in the special features section of the DVD.

Of the DVD's other special features, the short interview with Virgil Thomson is informative, especially with respect to Thomson's insistence on observing the expressive power of simple and orchestrally unadorned folk tunes. The two commentary tracks by legendary documentary filmmaker George Stoney, however, are the most revealing. They describe with colorful detail the political climate in which these films were originally made and viewed. Stoney's observation that southern audiences appreciated The Plow That Broke the Plain as a kind of “evangelical sermon” is illuminating, as is his conclusion that both films, while challenging the problems of class, failed, just as Roosevelt's New Deal did, to confront the equally urgent problem of racial inequality. These films, Stoney rightly concludes, still have significant instructional value, especially in a post–Hurricane Katrina world.

Horowitz's interview with composer Charles Fussell, a close friend and confidant of Thomson, might have been more even more interesting if Horowitz had not been quite so anxious to press his own conclusion—that Thomson's scores almost single-handedly altered Hollywood film music practices. Horowitz asserts that these documentary scores inspired Copland, when he finally got to Hollywood, to replace the continuous, neo-Romantic sound of Steiner's and Korngold's underscores with simple, sparse, and selectively placed accompaniments. Although there is some truth to this, the conclusion is overstated. Copland was not the only voice in Hollywood campaigning for a less intrusive and overdramatic musical style. Directors such as John Ford and Frank Capra, for instance, were also adopting a similar aesthetic, exhorting their composers—including Richard Hageman (Stagecoach, 1939), Alfred Newman (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940), and Dmitri Tiomkin (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939)—to make film music more sparse, simple, and folk-tune inspired. Copland was not the only one to recognize that the imagery of the American landscape needed a new and specifically non-Teutonic sound.

The laudable rush to resituate Thomson as a major influence on Hollywood film music has also led the producers of this DVD to somewhat misrepresent these films' position in the history of documentary film. In the opening paragraph of the program notes, Horowitz states that they broke “new ground in seamlessly marrying pictorial imagery, symphonic music and poetic free verse all realized with supreme artistry.” This pronouncement neglects the influence of British documentary filmmaker John Grierson on Pare Lorentz. In many ways, The Plow and The River resemble Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936), films that also combine poetic texts with spare, inventive music—in these cases the words of W. H. Auden with music of Benjamin Britten. Other early documentaries, Joris Iven's New Earth (1934) and Housing Problems (1935), both scored by Hanns Eisler, and Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (1935), with Walter Leigh's folk-laden soundtrack, were no doubt influential. Thomson and Copland were also involved with a flourishing avant-garde and experimental filmmaking community in the late 1920s and early 1930s that produced Ralph Steiner's documentaries Mechanical Principles (1931) and H ₂O (1931), scored by Colin McPhee, and Surf and Seaweed (1931), scored by Blitzstein. They certainly also would have been aware of other significant experimental film music like Antheil's score for Ballet Mécanique (1923), Satie's score for Entr'Acte (1924), and Meisel's score for Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). Lorentz's and Thomson's collaboration, in other words, was not the beginning but the middle of a long and rich tradition of non-narrative, audiovisual collaboration between composers and filmmakers.

A better understanding and appreciation of this larger historical context is needed. Perhaps that is best accomplished not only with more critical commentary but also with more DVDs. Another new collection, Unseen Cinema: Avant-Garde and Experimental Film 1895–1940, has brought some of this forgotten history to the surface, but many of the government documentaries of the 1930s and 1940s are out of print or unavailable. The Horowitz–Gil-Ordóñez team is in a good position to fill this gap. The Post-Classical Ensemble has already reconstructed and performed (but not recorded) Redes (1935, directed by another Lorentz cameraman, Paul Strand, score by Silvestre Revueltas). Producing DVDs containing this work, Revueltas's other nine documentary scores, a reissue of Steiner's The City, Ivens's The Spanish Earth (1937, score by Blitzstein), The Power and the Land (1939, score by Douglas Moore), Lorentz's The Fight for Life (1940, score by Louis Gruenberg), or any of the Grierson-Britten or Ivens-Eisler documentaries, would be not only welcome but essential if we are to have a complete understanding of the music and politics of the pre–World War II period. Being able to screen these films will allow us to finally recognize the tremendous role that not just documentary but the sound film in general has played in the evolution of American music history.