A Symphony of Wheat

The title “A Symphony of Wheat” is an allusion to FW Murnau’s penultimate film, which he described as “a tale about wheat, about the sacredness of bread, about the estrangement of the modern city dwellers and their ignorance about Nature’s sources of sustenance”.  The director had given several of his films musical sub-titles, including “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors” and “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans”. In the same vein, this film was conceived as an epic “silent” film with a fully synchronized symphonic score. Unfortunately before its release in 1930, the studio turned the film into a talkie and renamed it “City Girl”. The film was long considered lost, but a silent version was discovered in the 1970’s. I was given the opportunity in 2009 to create a new score for this silent version that was to be performed live. Logistical considerations led me to write for a quartet of clarinet, violin, viola and cello. In creating this stand-alone symphony for full orchestra, I transformed excerpts of the original chamber music, reordering ideas and movements, adding layers and colors, even creating new music for the finale. In so doing, I was inspired by the magnificent wheat-fields of Kansas and eastern Oregon and Washington, places in which I have lived and traveled. It is my hope this work serves as a fitting tribute to Murnau's vision of the sacredness of wheat, and to the wheat-farming communities that provide us with "our daily bread".

 

I. Allegro: Titles and Introduction

Title screens showing the harvesting of wheat are followed by a marvelously compact scene in which we are introduced to the main characters of the film: Lem (the son) traveling by train to the big city to sell the family's wheat crop, Tustine (the domineering father, through a letter), the loving mother (through another letter and care package), and a city girl (although it is not the same woman he falls in love with several scenes later).

 

II. Intermezzo: Fields of Wheat

This tender scene shows the newlyweds Lem and Kate (whom he met in the city) journey from the city back to the farm. They walk hand-in-hand, enjoying the sweeping vistas of the country-side, breaking into a joyous chase through the wheat in celebration of their new life together.

 

III. Scherzo mecanique: City Music

In contrast to the pure beauty of the country, the film depicts the modern city as impersonal and mechanistic, especially in its impact upon the two main characters. Kate frantically works as waitress in a fast-paced diner full of leering patrons. She dreams of a better life in the country. Lem is devastated by his inability to sell the wheat-crop at a price his father demanded. He wanders alone among swarms of people and cars in the streets.

 

IV. Passacaglia: Harvest

The harvest sequence was filmed in the rolling hills of eastern Oregon. The farm work is depicted with utmost dignity, interspersed with more personal vignettes: the fears, doubts, challenges and hopes of the newly-married couple. Tying the music together is a passacaglia theme based upon a fragment from Malotte’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer: “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread".

 

V. Finale: Hoe-down

Music introducing the hired reapers' arrival at the farm brings the symphony to a joyous conclusion: the hoe-down’s fiddle-music layered below final statements of “Our Daily Bread”.