by Beth E. Levy
As if recapitulating an episode in western history, Indian music began disappearing from concert music during the late 1920s, when American composers seemed to lose interest in the “noble savage” and instead turned their attention toward the pioneering settler and the western cowboy. In part 3, “American Pastorals,” I touch on two treatments of Carl Sandburg's prairie poetry, the first by the Chicago-trained Leo Sowerby (whose tone poem of 1929, The Prairie, continues a European tradition of instrumental landscape painting), the second by the émigré Lukas Foss (whose choral paean on Sandburg's text was penned in 1944, almost immediately after he arrived in the United States). Two chapters are devoted to Virgil Thomson's score for the Depression-era documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1937), and Ernest Bacon's 1942 opera A Tree on the Plains, with libretto by Paul Horgan. Both of these scores place (traditionally African American) blues and (supposedly Anglo American) folk song in service of a skewed opposition between unscrupulous or irresponsible urban life and disadvantaged but wholesome farming families. Despite their different media, each exposes a distinctly twentieth-century vision of the disruptive “machine in the garden,” fracturing the traditional identification between proper land stewardship and political or personal maturity.
Thomson's nostalgic treatment of Americana—from the 1928 Symphony on a Hymn Tune to Pilgrims and Pioneers of 1964—forms the basis for his contentious claims of insufficiently acknowledged influence on his colleague Copland. Whether his score for The Plow That Broke the Plains represents the first use of a cowboy song in large-scale classical composition depends on the definitions of “large-scale,” “classical,” and “composition.” (Farwell could have made the same claim with his arrangements of “The Lone Prairie” in the 1910s.) But there is no question that Thomson's work situates him at the beginning of a shift in the relationship between the “folk” and “classical” repertory and in the type of folklore composers favored. Using published folk song collections, composers like Thomson, Elie Siegmeister, Ross Lee Finney, and Morton Gould brought cowboy melodies into classical symphonies, choral works, and ballets not long after the “singing cowboy” rode onto the Hollywood scene. The familiar tunes and simple harmonies of cowboy songs allowed them to enter the popular repertory in ways that Native American tunes could not, providing American composers with a link between the populism of the 1930s and a new western mythology. Moreover, in the cowboy's bravado—independence and good humor, but also aggression and alienation—America found heroic qualities that could sustain it through both the military conflicts of the Second World War and the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. In parts 4 and 5, I investigate this new mythology as revealed in the music of Roy Harris and Aaron Copland.
In Harris's case, turning to cowboy song was a logical extension of the strategies that had brought him to the center stage of American musical life by the mid-1930s. Western images shaped his early career by providing a rich vein of metaphors in his critical reception and scenarios for his programmatic works. Creative self-fashioning solidified his claims on western folk song, framing it as his artistic inheritance and thus imbuing his pieces on western themes with an aura of “authenticity.” In the “Western Cowboy” movement of his Folksong Symphony (1940), he took care not to disturb the singable qualities, consonant harmonies, and regular phrasing of the traditional cowboy songs he borrowed. Referred to as the “white hope” of American music, Harris bore a mantle of musical and moral authority when he approached cowboy song that relied heavily on his Anglo heritage and rural upbringing. He invited concertgoers to hear autobiography in his western works.
As a second-generation immigrant living in Brooklyn and a prominent exponent of self-consciously modern music, Copland relied on alternative sources of prestige when meeting the challenges of Depression-era Americanism. His engagement with western Americana came in reaction to specific commissions and to the new audiences provided by radio and other mass media. The public appeal of cowboy tunes helped win unexpected nationwide acclaim for a composer who might otherwise have been marginalized on the basis of his Russian-Jewish heritage or his homosexuality. As if capitalizing on his personal distance from the aggressively heterosexual masculinity of the stereo typical western hero, Copland chose to modify and distort many of the cowboy songs he incorporated into his ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), placing them in contexts full of abrupt juxtapositions and humorous surprises. But his turn toward western folklore also coincided with a move away from the African American materials that had characterized much of his earlier music, suggesting that even in its musical guises America's fascination with the West was in part a nostalgic escape from the burden of contemporary racial tensions.
LEGACIES OF CONQUEST
In the past, a scholarly preoccupation with the overarching category of “Americanism” has often obscured specific decisions that composers have made about what could and should sound American. Experiments with western Americana carried a racial message very different from pieces that mixed jazz and classical idioms. Similarly, borrowing a Native American melody had different social implications from quoting a cowboy song—not only because of the ethnic associations of the material but also because of cowboy tunes' presence in the mass media. Musical manifestations of the West remain entangled with questions of national identity, but the sheer variety of methods and motivations for turning westward reminds us to question the usefulness of homogenizing labels for region and nation. It was perhaps inevitable that the American West should provide an impetus for this reevaluation. No region of the country is so relentlessly plural in population and connotations, and none has been crossed by so many contested frontiers. There are both musical and methodological reasons for exploring the places where America's music, geography, and mythology meet.
Although my case studies can stand alone, the book is intended to be more than the sum of its parts. As this project has unfolded, I have been pleasantly surprised at the connections that have emerged from comparing composers whom patterns of historiography have often separated and distinguishing between those whom historians have often lumped together. Of course, there are biographical links among my protagonists: Harris studied with Farwell; Copland's first teacher studied with Dvoák; Farwell and Cadman viewed each other as distant rivals, while Thomson, Harris, and Copland began their careers as colleagues and friends despite their different backgrounds. The musical corollaries of these straightforward facts stretch further a field. Copland's and Thomson's flexible treatment of cowboy song resembles Cadman's “idealization” of Indian music, while Harris followed in Farwell's more cautious footsteps. Such observations suggest that we might identify “cosmopolitan” and “provincial” schools of borrowing, the former characterized by cavalier freedom and a desire to mix folk materials into international or modern contexts, and the latter committed to preserving local references, often as a means of resistance to a perceived mainstream.44 Even when composers relied on the same folk sources, their individual definitions of creativity and authenticity gave them wildly divergent career trajectories. While Farwell is recognized as a progressive figure in the history of American music, Cadman is often dismissed as merely commercial. More striking still is the gulf that has opened up between Copland's and Harris's reputations—a gulf widened by changing opinions not just about musical style, but also about race and patriotism.
Above and beyond my attempt to bring together stories that might prove mutually illuminating, the case studies I have selected reflect an important shift in the imagery composers chose to associate with the West—from Indians at the turn of the century to pioneers and cowboys during and after the Great Depression. I believe this change mirrors transformations in American society occurring as the nation moved through war, economic fluctuation, and demographic upheaval. In Harris's and Copland's cowboy compositions, the maverick individual came to the forefront, and the western landscape receded to become a picturesque backdrop for the adventures of its human inhabitan
ts. This represents an intriguing reversal of earlier depictions in which Native Americans disappeared into the landscape. Like Turner's successive waves of frontiering, these different character types depend on the land in different ways. It is hardly surprising that, during a half-century of sweeping alterations in the demography of the West, artistic imagery reflected changing relationships between people and nature. American music thrived on such complexities.
Examining the shift from Indian to pioneer to cowboy imagery, my book traces a move from orient to occident—a westward migration that recalls not only the forced removal of Native Americans to reservations, but also the world-historical vision that drove imperialism from the Old World to the New. Early in the century, composers using Indian themes relied on strategies that had much in common with orientalism.45 They depended upon an exaggerated separation between observer and exoticized object, and their stances often verged on voyeurism. During the 1930s and 1940s, when composers incorporated pastoral tropes and cowboy tunes into classical music, their strategies had been transformed by the alchemy of the West. They depended upon a false identification between observer and commodified object, and their intentions were often masked by mass media. The same processes that allowed Copland to convert his Russian-Jewish heritage into a convincingly pastoral populism also allowed American consciousness to move westward—away from regions where the indigenous was inescapably foreign and into regions where hybridity was inescapably native.
But the celebration of cultural mixing has a darker side as well, for the manufacturing of populism could have unexpected costs. In his study of Jewish immigrants' appropriation of blackface minstrelsy, Michael Rogin noted the extent to which the popular culture of the United States reinforced the patterns of colonial exploitation: “In yet another permutation of American exceptionalism, our national culture rooted itself—by way of the captivity narrative and the frontier myth on the one hand, of blackface minstrelsy on the other—in the nationally dispossessed.”46 Mining the musical resources of minority populations may have solidified a national identity based on frontiers of cultural exchange, but in America—as in other nations—it also carried the moral weight of empire. This book aims to interpret that legacy.
PART ONE
Arthur Farwell's West
The book was open at a hymn not ill adapted to their situation, and in which the poet, no longer goaded by his desire to excel the inspired King of Israel, had discovered some chastened and respectable powers.…The air was solemn and slow. At times it rose to the fullest compass of the rich voices of the females, who hung over their little book in holy excitement, and again it sunk so low, that the rushing of the waters ran through their melody like a hollow accompaniment.…The Indians riveted their eyes on the rocks, and listened with an attention that seemed to turn them into stone. But the scout, who had placed his chin in his hand, with an expression of cold indifference, gradually suffered his rigid features to relax, until, as verse succeeded verse, he felt his iron nature subdued, while his recollection was carried back to boyhood.…His roving eyes began to moisten, and before the hymn was ended, scalding tears rolled out of fountains that had long seemed dry.
—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
1
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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.”1
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.”)2
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.”3 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.”4By 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.5 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.”6 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.”7 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.8
