Eco-ing in the Canyon: Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite and the Transformation of Wilderness.

From shortly after its premiere in 1931 through the middle years of the twentieth century, Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite was regular fare on American concert programs, radio hours, and record shelves.' The work's popularity, combined with Grofé's own genuine affection for it, led the composer to reflect from time to time on his attachment to the Grand Canyon and. more trenenllv. to the American Southwest. Certainly there is nothing unusual about an American artist situating nature in this conceptual framework. Historian William Cronon identifies the settling of the frontier as a central theme in Western landscape painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one sometimes contested and infinitely varied, but nearly always critical to the meaning of a given work.