Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 26) STANDARD OIL (NEW JERSEY) COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE compositions. As a Master’s student in LSU’s Department of French and Italian, she completed the bulk of her research in 1934 while conducting fieldwork with John and Alan Lomax, who were surveying south Louisiana’s musical landscape for the Library of Congress. With the aid of Whitfield’s transcriptions and copies of the Lomaxes’ audio recordings, Thomson created an orchestrated portrait of Depression-era Cajun cultural production without leaving the confines of New York City. Thomson’s score provided the film’s final touch. Flaherty organized a private screening at Manhattan’s Coffee House Club for his Standard Oil investors when the final work print of Louisiana Story arrived at the director’s New York offices. With the petroleum giant’s blessing, he arranged for the film’s world premiere at Edinburgh’s Sutton Theatre on September 28, 1948. Audiences and critics applauded as Louisiana Story enjoyed more critical acclaim than any other film in Flaherty’s repertoire. Time, Life, and the New York Times all ran admiring features. An Academy Award nomination for “Best Writing, Motion Picture Story” and the Pulitzer Prize for music awarded to Thomson further added to the film’s mystique. “That my work should be honored by America’s most distinguished award touches me deeply,” wrote Virgil Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour is befriended by newly-arrived oil workers Louisiana Story. The film was was commissioned by the Standard Oil Company. 26 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 Thomson to the Pulitzer Prize committee at Columbia University. The score to Louisiana Story enjoyed distinguished company alongside only a handful of other Pulitzer Prize-winning compositions, including Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, awarded the prestigious prize in 1945. Indeed, Thomson’s Louisiana Story became the first score to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. The award brought fame and distinction to Virgil Thomson, Robert Flaherty and Louisiana Story, and by association, Cajun music. Even the White House sent their “heartiest congratulations and good wishes,” as did friends and colleagues. Congratulations also came from Louisiana. A fan of the Flaherty film, Eldora Gaithé from Lake Charles read about Thomson’s award in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She wrote on May 4, 1949, “I saw that you had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the music of Louisiana Story. I saw this fine picture and the music was so much a part of our people, that for me, it was the most moving thing about it.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning score remade Cajun music in an American likeness, one that pushed local culture to the heights of Gershwin and Copeland. On the other hand, the film also solidified Cajun stereotypes that persist today.
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