by Beth E. Levy
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.”9 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.”10 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.”11 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.”12
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!”13Farwell'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.”14
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.”15 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.”16 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.”17 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.18As 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.”19 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.20 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.”21 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.22 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-E 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.”23
EXAMPLE 1A. “The Old Man's Love Song,” as harmonized by John Comfort Fillmore, mm. 1-9 (from Fletcher, Indian Story and Song, 1900)
EXAMPLE 1B. “The Old Man's Love Song,” as harmonized by Arthur Farwell, mm. 1-9 (Wa-Wan Press, 1901)
Significantly, Farwell's ideas about the Indian worldview came not from adult contact with actual Native Americans, but rather from personal intuition (heavily influenced by the harmonic norms of his favorite composers) and isolated immersion in the song as artifact. Farwell was not exactly lacking in ethnological scruples. To a greater extent than many of his Indianist colleagues, he warned against “the folly of any attempt to produce great results without including the religious, legendary or life significance underlying the songs. Any attempt on the part of composers to use the mere notes of the melodies detached from their generating ideas, will lead only to a barren reproduction of the old musical forms, disguised with new colors which have in themselves no vitalizing power.”24
But Farwell's means of coming to understand the songs was decidedly not ethnographic. He minimized the importance of face-to-face contact and empirical observation. He emphasized instead the sufficiency of what was already, so to speak, in white possession: the melody as fixed in notation and the text translated into English. In this light, Farwell's assertions about Native America's role in the development of American music gain unmistakable overtones of imperialism: “The hunger of art growth in a new country is never appeased until every available source of new art life, and especially folk-expression, has been seized upon and assimilated…. Materialistically, America is sufficiently conquered. We have wrested a living from the soil from East to West, and now we must wrest from it its treasure of poetry.”25
“DAWN,” “HURAKAN,” AND THE LIMITS OF ETHNOGRAPHY
Farwell capitalized on his own investment in “The Old Man's Love Song,” producing versions for solo voice (1908) and a cappella chorus (1901, 1937). Shortly after finishing the piano miniatures of 1901, he crafted a more extended piano piece whose title, “Dawn,” is taken from the song's epigraph: “With the dawn I seek thee.” Farwell cited this new work as evidence that “we have a distinctive and beautiful folk-song, born of life amidst our own forests, prairies, and mountains, which may form a worthy basis for musical art-works of larger dimensions.”26 He framed this development as a natural step in the evolution of any national music, listing among his predecessors the ancient Greeks, Josquin, Bach, Beethoven, Dvoák, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and above all Wagner. Compared with any of these composers, however, Farwell placed a greater value on fidelity to the tunes he borrowed. “Dawn” presents a strictly sectional structure (see example 2). “The Old Man's Love Song” appears verbatim over a changing background of accompanimental figurations in measures 1-40 and 65-82, and a contrasting middle section is based on an unidentified Otoe melody (bars 41-64).27 A gradual thickening of the texture leads to sonorous chords and an apotheosis of sorts, but repetition and reverence for the source text overwhelmed Farwell's grandiose hopes, as the composer himself seems to have admitted in a carefully couched disclaimer: “It is with no desire to forestall criticism that we state plainly our attitude toward this work, which is regarded as an essay, a reaching out into new fields, and therefore, but a partial attainment of what it is hoped to gain eventually.”28
EXAMPLE 2. Excerpts from “Dawn,” mm. 1-3, 32-34, 65-67 (Wa-Wan Press, 1902)
Other piano solos from 1902 bear out Farwell's more ambitious aims: “Ichibuzzhi,” which expands on one of the pieces in American Indian Melodies, and a new work called “The Domain of Hurakan.” Like “Dawn,” “The Domain of Hurakan” concerns itself with questions of creation and rebirth. But while “Dawn” depicted the tranquility of an old man's reverie, “Hurakan” offers a stormier picture as befits its namesake, a Mesoamerican wind god, whom Farwell linked to “cosmic and elemental feelings and impulses.”29 “Hurakan” represents a significantly freer and more elaborate treatment of melodic material. One portion of a Vancouver game song is detached and used to begin the central nocturne section, which is otherwise devoted to newly composed material using motives derived from the other borrowed themes: a Pawnee game song and a Navajo “night chant.” Fletcher herself praised “Hurakan” as “large and masterly…American in scope and feeling,” and Lawrence Gilman called it “a fantasy conceived in the spirit of the Indian creation-myths, a finely vigorous and notable achievement.”30
A critic for the Musical Courier observed that despite being a piano piece, “Hurakan” “aimed for orchestral effects,” and Farwell seems to have agreed.31 He orchestrated the work in 1910 and before one of its performances appended an extensive program note, justifying the work's “rhapsodic” character with a fanciful program:
A traveller, at night, enters an Indian lodge near the Pacific. Within, in the glare of the firelight, he sees a company of Indians singing and swaying in the animated rhythm of the game. As he watches them their ceaseless motions seem to represent to him the eternal wash and play of the waves of the ocean, and he remembers the ancient legend which tells that “Hurakan, the mighty wind, passed over the waters and called for the earth.” The traveller goes out into the night and walks along by the seashore, beyond the sound of the revellers. He hears the murmurings of the sea, and far-off melodies come to him—the sound of the wind over the water, or the distant crying of sea birds—dim sounds which die away at last into nothingness.32
It requires no great leap of imagination to identify the traveler with Farwell himself: a visitor, an observer, distant and alone. As it happens, his narrative program mirrors almost exactly Fletcher's prose introduction to the “Vancouver Game Song” in Indian Story and Song.33 In both cases, the perspective is frankly a white one, yet with Farwell, this frankness is complicated by a deeply felt belief in his own capacity to channel “Indian spirit.” An anthropological residue adheres to Farwell's story—the “game” of the game song and the “night” of the night chant remain. But these features now justify a psychological response, not an anthropological one.
Indeed, apart from the transcription work discussed below, anthropology was rarely the goal of Farwell's engagement with Native America. In the introduction to the Wa-Wan's publication Traditional Songs of the Zunis, by the controversial arranger Carlos Troyer, Farwell makes explicit his views on the limitations of ethnography. “We have tried four methods of approach to the Indian,” he writes: “First, by fighting him; second, by seeking to convert him; third, by treating him as a scientific specimen; fourth, by offering him the hand of fellowship.” Of these methods, the first yielded only “wounds, torture and death, and the material for a little superficial romance,” and the second was stymied by bigotry and misunderstanding. But the third method, the scientific method, was equally unsuccessful: “By the third process we have filled the shelves of great museums with rare and valuable objec
ts, all carefully labeled, and the museum libraries with books learnedly written by scientists for scientists. It is wonderful work, but there is an aristocracy, a free-masonry about it all, that constitutes an almost impassible barrier between it and the America [sic] people.”34 Though better than soldiers or missionaries, museum makers preserved knowledge of Indian lifeways in forms that common Americans could not access or understand. Farwell's outlook was both loftier and, in a way, more realistic in its solipsism: Indian folklore had nothing to offer unless it could be made relevant to a contemporary worldview. As he put it in 1903, “Only where Indian life and American life meet at the shrine of the universal, will living art be born.”35
Perhaps to Farwell's surprise, the Indian predilections of the Wa-Wan Press caused more consternation among his critics than his anti-German fulminations. Some critics attacked the very notion of incorporating Indian song into art music. In his first anniversary issue, Farwell countered with the matter-of-fact observation that his “‘Indian Melodies' have made quicker and more universal appeal, and have earned a larger demand than anything we have yet published.”36Later, with the benefit of hindsight, and the candor of old age, he admitted that “the Indian music, because of its novelty, became a powerful weapon of propaganda; it enabled me to reach large numbers of people. Indeed I could not have made this national campaign without it.”37
More difficult to stifle was the perception that the Wa-Wan Press had singled out Indian music as the only viable path to America's new “art-life.” First of all, there was the “Wa-Wan” name and logo. In the white heat of Farwell's engagement with Indian Story and Song, the “Wa-Wan” rubric had seemed not only apt but prophetic. As he recalled in 1909, “I was so filled with enthusiasm over the Indian music…that nothing but an Indian name would do. Had I foreseen at that time that such a name would mislead people as to the broadly American aims of my undertaking, I would probably have chosen otherwise.”38 Farwell pointed out time and time again that folk-based works were only one branch of American composition. But he was on shaky ground when he claimed that all folk materials were equal in the eyes of the press. Indians did hold a special status in the Wa-Wan's pages, especially during the early years. Thanks to the contributions of Farwell and his associates, especially Loomis and Troyer, the number of Indianist works published grossly outnumbered the total of all other folk-based pieces combined. An early brochure described “quarterly publications of American compositions and the Indian music,” and the back cover of Wa-Wan issues regularly carried a concise statement of purpose that singled out Indian lore. Sometime in early 1906, Farwell made one and only one change to his mission statement, replacing “the melodies and folk-lore of the American Indians” with “the melodies of American folk songs.”
