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Frontier Figures

American Music and the Mythology of the American West

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

The Wa-Wan and the West

THE RAGGED EDGE OF HISTORY

If on the afternoon of 27 April 1919, you found yourself seated at the Greek Theatre on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, you would have witnessed and most likely been asked to participate in California: A Masque of Music. With musical numbers and libretto crafted by Arthur Farwell and personnel recruited from the ranks of the Berkeley Music Department, the masque places a toga-clad personification of California in the company of the muses: "California! 'tis a name Worthy of Apollo's nine; 'tis music's self/Soft syllabled upon the silent air." Only six of the nine muses grace the stage, but California seems destined to join their number if she can pass the musical "tests" set forth by Apollo and the Spirit of Ancient Greece. Having produced the requisite instrumentalists from isolated corners of the outdoor amphitheater, California musters her forces for the final test: choral song. "From hill, from canyon, shore and fragrant grove,/From city, vineyard, white Sierras' snows,/With summons far I call you to this shrine/ ... O noble children of our Western world."

Springing as it does from the mouth of California, "our Western world" is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, and this ambiguity lies at the heart of Farwell's West. If early twentieth-century California represented the endpoint of westward expansion in the United States, the golden reward of America's Manifest Destiny, it also occupied a special spot on the continuum of "Western civilization." Though mythological, the masque is set explicitly in "the present," and it privileges symbolic meanings over strict adherence to chronology. In the first scene, for example, three groups are conjured up in turn to sing Farwell's own arrangements. Each chorus features a tune transcribed by an ethnologist, and each setting reflects the tension that would forever mark Farwell's approach to the West: on the one hand, a scientific emphasis on anthropological fact; on the other, a subjective identification bordering on rapture:

"First let the [inserted: red] race speak, whose plaintive strain/Charms the divinities of wood and plain." (The division of the chorus on one side, accompanied by the orchestra, sings the "Bird Dance of the Cahuillas")

"The black race now, redeemed from slavery's smart,/Pathetic-humorous in its artless art." (The division of the chorus on the other side sings the "Moanin' Dove")

"Last the bold race who bore across the main/To California's shores, romantic Spain."

(Both divisions of the chorus together sing "Chata cara de bule.")

This gradual introduction of ethnic groups reflects something other than actual demographic data. While it might make historical sense to give Indians pride of place, the Spanish settled California long before there was a substantial black population—let alone an English-speaking, spiritual-singing black population. Instead, it is tempting to see in this ethnic procession Farwell's implicit judgment about the relative usefulness of each group's music to the task at hand: ensuring that the western United States could take up the artistic mantle of ancient Greece.

For Farwell, Indian song represented a uniquely valuable resource and a necessary starting point in the creation of "a new art-life" for America—a project in which black music occupied an explicit but historically uncomfortable middle ground. While Farwell recognized the spiritual as a resource for the community singing movement, he preferred to speak of "Spanish folksongs" whose value was in his eyes "beyond all power to estimate or predict." Therefore, in the masque, it is "romantic Spain" who eventually ascends to stand beside California and the muses.

But this is not where Farwell's California masque ends. After the choral groups unite and ascend the stage, they perform music that emphasizes the union of diverse populations and draws the largely Anglo audience into Farwell's vision: a medley of university fight songs, followed by "Hail California." The Spirit of Ancient Greece reminds California that song holds the key to national cohesion. The chorus responds with Farwell's wartime anthem "Our Country's Prayer," sparking an on-stage discussion of religion. The Spirit of Ancient Greece invokes Almighty Zeus, but her plea goes unanswered. Instead, the audience is invited to join California's chorus, singing praise, in Farwell's words, to "the God that IS." All present rise and sing an amply foreshadowed "Battle Hymn of the Republic." By the end, the regional has been subsumed into the national and even the supranational through the invocation of a larger, vaguely Christian world. The western vantage point seems all but forgotten. Yet its human and natural resources were crucial at every step of the way.

The same might be said for Farwell's career. His early and most influential years were almost wholly identified with Indian-inspired material and the Wa-Wan Press (1901–11). At midcareer, his involvement with the community chorus movement, initiated during World War I and reaching its height during his years in California (1918–27), placed him on the front lines of a national campaign. By the 1940s, Farwell was inclined to express himself in polytonal experiments and ruminations about creative intuition that bear no regional references. While the composer's later projects seem to leave the West behind, their outlook remained consistent with his Indianist aesthetic and his community chorus work. Indeed, I aim to show how deeply and purposefully intertwined these visions were.

A "NEW ART LIFE" FOR AMERICA

Although his attitudes toward Indians would never completely slough off their skin of exoticism, Farwell found in Indian ritual a valuable example of the power of music to unify and sanctify a community. He chose to name his signature achievement, the Wa-Wan Press, after an Omaha ceremony of unity and coming-of-age; under its banner he wished to bring together American composers and to celebrate their new artistic maturity. Farwell founded the press in Newton Center, Massachusetts, two years after returning from his European studies and finding no ready publisher for his scores. As he remarked in his "Letter to American Composers," "Either American composers must inspire some one else to build up this work or they must do it themselves." The latter was evidently the easier project. Farwell's unwavering commitment earned him repeated encomiums from the start. The critic Lawrence Gilman hailed the press in 1903 as "probably the most determined, courageous, and enlightened endeavor to assist the cause of American music that has yet been made." During the decade before its copyrights were ceded to G. Schirmer, the press issued vocal and instrumental pieces by some thirty-seven composers, usually young and often unpublished, among them Henry Gilbert, Edward Burlingame Hill, Harvey Worthington Loomis, and Arthur Shepherd, not to mention Farwell himself.

Throughout his life, Farwell described the Wa-Wan enterprise as a challenge to mainstream commercialism. "Salability," he recalled in the 1940s, "had nothing to do with the matter whatsoever." Yet his idealism always went hand in hand with a certain defensiveness. Midway through the press's third year, Farwell answered potential detractors: "The Wa-Wan Press does not represent itself as a collection of masterpieces. It does not aim to be that which critics praise. It does not propitiate the gods of traditional culture. It does not seek to elevate the masses. It respects no coterie. It does not attempt to 'cover mediocrity with a cloak of patriotism.' It is not a financial scheme masquerading as a 'noble cause.'" Instead of stating what the Wa-Wan was, Farwell emphasized what the Wa-Wan did: namely, to foster American composition, which he called "the goal, the core, the very grail of life." Though he denied being a "nationalist," Farwell wanted to cultivate specifically American art with "convincing qualities of color, form, and spirit from our nature-world and our humanity." Evaluating the press's first year, he noted that the Wa-Wan already exhibited a character "different from that of the music of other lands," stating that its works were "independent of old-world prejudices, yet remembering old-world victories."

Farwell's anti-European stance soon grew stronger. In 1902, he argued that the main hindrance to a "new art-life" for America was the overwhelmingly and exclusively German influence on the nation's musical institutions, an obstacle "so large that it is difficult to see": "since our national musical education, both public and private, is almost wholly German, we inevitably, and yet unwittingly, see everything through German glasses.... Therefore the first correction we must bring to our musical vision is to cease to see everything through German spectacles, however wonderful, however sublime those spectacles may be in themselves!" Farwell's resistance to things German had its exceptions, especially when he could point to the presence of folk influences (which he usually could): Thus, "Beethoven demonstrated, and Wagner both insisted and demonstrated, that the greatest music must eventually arise from a Folk." And again, "No one has penetrated more deeply than Wagner himself, the nature of the folk-spirit, nor drawn more freely from the wealth of folk-expression."

Folk-based efforts were always an important part of Farwell's plan, and often a point of contention with his critics. At times, he defined folk song narrowly. In preparation for a lecture tour, he explained that "only the songs of Stephen Foster, George Root and a few scattering songs, such as 'Dixie,'" could properly be called American folk song (WJ, 140–41). More often, however, folk expression was so broad and pervasive a category for Farwell that even original art music could fall under its purview. He noted that "the folk" have "no monopoly" on the creation of folk song: "The composer of culture, prompted by new feelings in a new land, and untrammelled ... by obsolete or alien traditions, will accomplish the same end upon another plane, and, so to speak, create folk-song of a second degree." Divested of the "obsolete" and "alien," the American composer would of necessity turn inward, both psychologically and geographically.

SPIRITUAL ARTIFACTS

Farwell framed the close relationship between folk and art music in terms of historical inevitability. For him, the incorporation of Native American influences into American music was not a matter of choice, but simply a matter of time. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his ideas about Indian music and its "assimilation" according to what he called "the natural law ... of the impossibility of annihilating race spirit," namely, "When one race conquers, absorbs, or annihilates another, the spirit, the animus of the destroyed race invariably persists, in the end, in all its aspects, —its arts, customs, traditions, temper, —in the life of the conquering race." That same year (1903), in an essay for a wider audience, Farwell explained: "Because we have conquered them, mingled with them (to an extent not dreamed of by the dwellers in our Eastern cities), have been thrilled in turn by the land which thrilled them, we will inevitably have inhaled great draughts of their splendid optimism and faith, their freedom of spirit and largeness of feeling, and their power to appropriate nature's teeming stores of energy. This is not only a poetic but also a scientific fact." The thrill of the land, facilitated by the subjugation and relocation of its original inhabitants, was for Farwell both necessary and sufficient to inspire a truly American art.

What those Eastern city dwellers could not imagine, Farwell believed he knew from personal experience. Even in the frankly midwestern context of his youth, Farwell found a combination of spiritual and physical proximity to Indian life. As he put it in 1909,

The Indian, his life, customs, romance—in books or in real life—constitute a world in which every American boy revels at one time or another. I had lived in an Indian village on Lake Superior, seen the Sioux in strange sun dances, and heard the impressive speeches of the old priests. On my father's hunting expeditions, we had been taken into the great woods by Indian guides; and I had seen Sitting Bull in captivity and had heard of his exploits.... To this day I never see an Indian, especially an Indian on horseback, even in a "Wild West Show," without a tingling thrill coursing up my spine, such as I experience from the climaxes of certain music. (WJ, 77–78)

It was convenient for him that late nineteenth-century Minnesota harbored its fair share of Indian mystique, but Farwell also considered "playing Indian" to be a birthright of American boyhood. Moreover, his language reveals that, for him, the experience of seeing Native Americans in the flesh always had at least as much to do with aesthetics as with anthropology.

Despite these formative experiences, Farwell's initial approach to Native American music was hesitant. Alice C. Fletcher's modest tome Indian Story and Song from North America was the catalyst in his Indian adventures. Farwell took to heart her suggestion that these "aboriginal songs" (harmonized by John Comfort Fillmore) could become "themes, novel and characteristic, for the American composer." Farwell happened upon the collection around the time of its publication in 1899, and by 1901 he had completed the ten pieces included in American Indian Melodies, nine of which took their melodies directly from Fletcher. In fact, his setting of "The Old Man's Love Song" so resembles Fletcher's printed page that at first glance it is difficult to say whether it qualifies as a new composition at all (see example 1). Farwell was strictly faithful to Fillmore's choice of key signature, meter, and rhythmic notation, adding only expressive and dynamic markings.

As if to compensate for his literal borrowing of melodic material, Farwell dramatized his account of the impact Fletcher's book had on him. At first, he was more impressed by the strength of Indian stories than by the beauty of Indian song. In his 1902 article "Aspects of Indian Music," he described his frustration with Fillmore's harmonic settings, which he considered "too general in character to bear out the special significance of the different melodies." After a summer of ruminating on Wagnerian mythology, he "picked up the book of Indian songs again":

This time, however, I did not play these melodies over on the piano, with the elementary harmonies with which they had been provided. Divesting them of these harmonies, I sang them, as actual songs, softly to myself, taking pains to carry out the rhythms exactly as indicated. Here was a revelation! The melodies took on a new meaning. Primitive as these songs were, each now appeared to be a distinct and concentrated musical idea.... Nothing was more natural than to take advantage of the situation. In fact the combination of circumstances fairly called out for action of some kind. (WJ, 79–80)

With a combination of religious fervor and good business sense, Farwell framed his vocation as an opportunity but also a calling to "take advantage" of his newfound Indian sympathies.

As Farwell described it, his "insight into the Indian character" depended both on his own emotional investment in the material and on a strict adherence to what might be considered the sacred texts of his experience; he internalized the melodies and carried out the rhythms "exactly as indicated." But if Fletcher became his Bible, Fillmore was a false prophet who could not or did not want to allow Indian song the "heightened art value" that Farwell was sure it possessed. The chief point of contention was harmony. Farwell owned a copy of Fillmore's book The Harmonic Structure of Indian Music, but he seems to have gone out of his way to subvert Fillmore's theoretical principles. His harmonic choices veer instead toward the Wagnerian. In Farwell's setting of "The Old Man's Love Song," the third beats of measures that Fillmore had allowed to float unperturbed over tonic G-major chords have become almost spasmodic, clutching not at the expected D–F# but slipping instead to C#–E in bar 1 and C–Eb in bar 2 before settling uneasily on the C–E that rests against the open fifth drone (G–D) of the left hand. Farwell enlivened what Fillmore had left static, first through bass arpeggiation (bars 7–8) and then with a striking diminished seventh chord (bar 9). He explained: "We are driven to chromatics and modern effects in harmony in order to represent those various feelings characterizing, for the Indian himself, the various emotions underlying the different songs."

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Excerpted from Frontier Figures by Beth E. Levy. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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