Virgil Thomson: The Plow that Broke the Plains

Just something I love, which I haven't heard for a very long time. Stumbled on it again while watching a harrowing documentary on the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Virgil Thomson sounds a lot like Copland here (a composer known to appropriate "cowboy music" into his highly-symphonic works), but when the banjo breaks in you know you're squarely in the middle of Americana. I first heard this music eons ago on an outdoorsie-type TV show on CBC called Klahanie.  I had to make a little visual to go with this! 

Go home, George (and take Ira with you)

Review of George Gershwin's masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, by fellow composer Virgil Thomson: "One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business he wanted to learn."