Virgil Thomson - Louisiana Story Suite (1948)

Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".

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Suite from the movie "Louisiana Story" (1948)
Film directed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty (1948)

I. Pastoral. The Bayou and the Marsh Buggy (0:00)
II. Chorale. The Derrick Arrives (6:55)
III. Passacaglia. Robbing the Alligator's Nest (10:26)
IV. Fugue. Boy Fights Alligator (17:02)

New London Orchestra conducted by Ronald Corp

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story in 1948. In 1949, Virgil Thomson won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his score to the film (which is based on a famous field tape of authentic Cajun musicians and was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). Through 2021, this has remained the only Pulitzer Prize awarded for a film score. In 1994, Louisiana Story was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The movie was also in the top 10 of the first British Film Institute's Sight and Sound poll in 1952.