FDR’s New Deal included the Works Progress Administration, which generously supported the arts in unprecedented ways. Employing writers, composers, visual artists, and performers via Art, Music, and Theater projects, the WPA was a massive employment agency — and the closest Washington had come to emulating European arts subsidies.
The Music Project alone gave 225,000 free or popularly-priced performances, attended by 150 million people, many of whom had been strangers to live concert music.
At the same time, the New Deal made a devil’s pact with race – and the WPA was no exception. For political reasons, it did not challenge Jim Crow.
PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film is “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts: The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River — What can they teach us today?” It takes a close look at a pair of New Deal-sponsored documentary films that became classics. The musical soundtracks, by Virgil Thomson, are iconic Americana. Praised by for their spoken prose by James Joyce, the documentaries embody a rare synthesis of word, image, and music.
In the excerpt at the top of this column – which comes 47 minutes into our 65-minute film – the late George Stoney describes an experience he endured as a New Deal public information officer stationed in the south. He was censured for having touched hands with a black colleague on the steps of a post office in Montgomery, Alabama. And his colleague was warned he risked being lynched.
In our film, that story is subsequently pondered by the New Deal historian David Woolner, who references a series of compromises beginning with the U.S. Constitution and its treatment of slavery..
You can access the full film here. Other topics include:
7:58: The influence of Sergei Eisenstein and montage
18:59: Finding new ways to employ film music, contradicting Hollywood practice
25:50: The New Deal and the arts – and the implications for today’s pandemic-related funding crisis
Produced for PCE by Behrouz Jamali, “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts” features clips from PCE’s best-selling Naxos DVD (“revelatory” – Phillip Kennicott, The Washington Post), in which The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) are presented with the soundtracks newly recorded by PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez.
It investigates the present-day pertinence of twin inspirational government-funded documentaries which engaged the arts to address a national emergency. Today’s national emergency — the pandemic — is also a funding emergency for many orchestras and opera companies here and abroad.
A follow-up Trans-Atlantic zoom chat, at 3 pm (ET) on July 9, will address government arts funding during the pandemic in the US and Europe. The participants include Woolner, film-music historian Neil Lerner, Sir Nicolas Kenyon (UK), Ettore Volontieri (Italy/Switzerland), and Jesse Rosen from the League of American Orchestras. To register, click here.
“FDR’s New Deal and the Arts” is part of PostClassical Ensemble’s More than Music initiative.
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