CHAPTER 13 | COMPOSERS, THE GOVERNMENT, AND THE MARKETPLACE DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION 309
The Great Depression made a deep impact on musical life. Some larger insti-
tutions such as symphony orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera survived on
patronage and a growing pool of listeners, reached through radio broadcasts
and recordings. New-music activities, however, struggled to attract fi nancial
backing; of the four modernist organizations mentioned earlier, only the League
of Composers lasted beyond the early 1930s. With less money in the hands of
audience members (who could listen to radio broadcasts for free), work for per-
formers evaporated. Meanwhile, the invention of sound fi lm in 1927 removed
the need for the players who had previously accompanied silent fi lms in orches-
tra pits.
Between 1929 and 1934 about 70 percent of all musicians in the United States
were unemployed, a trend the American Federation of Musicians, the national
musicians’ union, was powerless to buck. In 1935, as part of the massive relief
effort of the Works Progress Administration (W PA), the national government
took action, enacting Federal Project Number One as a way of supporting out-
of-work writers, artists, musicians, and historians. Created with public money,
Federal One exposed some parts of the country to original artworks, live the-
ater, and symphony orchestras for the fi rst time. One arm of the initiative was
the Federal Music Project, which at its peak employed sixteen thousand musi-
cians and funded twenty-eight symphony orchestras, as well as many dance
bands and folk-music groups. More than a million music classes were given to
14 million students. As a silver lining to economic distress, the years of the Great
Depression brought more abundant access to classical music than Americans
had ever enjoyed before.
Adversity also led composers to write in more conservative styles and focus
on regional and national subjects. Virgil Thomson, a Kansas City native who
studied at Harvard and then in Paris under the eminent pedagogue Nadia
Boulanger (also the teacher of Copland), displayed his own brand of modern-
ism in the Sonata da chiesa, a dissonant chamber work of 1926. But a decade later,
scores for two government-sponsored fi lms, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)
and The River (1937), confi rmed his credentials as a composer who could write
American-sounding music.
Thomson’s most notorious work was the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934),
to a libretto by American expatriate Gertrude Stein, whom he met in Paris. Set
in sixteenth-century Spain, the opera celebrates the lives of St. Teresa and other
religious fi gures while following no perceptible plot. Thomson declared his
opera’s style “simple, melodic, and harmonious... after twenty years of every-
body’s trying to make music just a little bit louder and more unmitigated and
more complex than anybody else’s.” In one unforgettable moment, a soloist and
male chorus alternate singing, to a gentle, folklike melody, the lyric “Pigeons on
the grass, alas,” words whose incongruity seems calculated to baffl e and delight
at the same time. Thomson’s midwestern roots and Harvard education were
mixed with strong Gallic sympathies; he particularly admired French composer
Erik Satie, noted for satire and musical simplicity.
During the 1930s a sense of cultural unity grew among Americans. Economic
hardship had something to do with this trend, and so did reduced immigration.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 by a coalition that crossed eth-
nic and class lines, including blacks as well as whites and many blue-collar work-
ers. Federal One programs found artistic worth where it had been overlooked inthe Federal Music
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