by Beth E. Levy
Of greater import is Farwell's uncertainty about how best to preserve and accentuate the song's unusual features. He recalled in 1909:
With the accompaniment of this song I had a vast deal of difficulty, providing for the necessary rhythmic license of the melody, the free and easy way of singing it which alone could preserve the effect of the song as heard on the plains; to do this without interrupting an accompanying effect which should suggest the continuity, the unbroken loneliness of the plains, was a knotty problem. It was finally solved…by a species of compound tremolo which alone could represent the constant limitless plain, while the melody should go its own characteristic way.12
Two pairs of open fifths make up the most stable sonority in the piece, a shimmering F#-minor seventh chord from which added-note harmonies radiate outward, always preserving at least two of the focal pitches: F#, C#, A, and E. Unlike the Indianist double drumbeat, the strumming of guitars, or the iconic clip-clop of the dusty trail, Farwell's compound tremolo evokes landscape, not movement—the cowboy is swallowed up in the prairie. A different version of “The Lone Prairee” tune forms the central section of Farwell's untexted “Prairie Miniature” in From Mesa and Plain, and again, the setting seems idiosyncratic in retrospect. While the framing sections are lively and matter-of-fact in their progress, the middle section begins with a mysterious (funeral?) march. Staccato articulations and an off-kilter oscillation of fourths give way to an instance of romantic excess: a soft but dramatic glissando.
Two years before publishing these settings, Farwell observed: “The cowboy songs which have come to our notice are free from Indian, Negro, or Spanish influence, and are among the most stirring and poetic folk-songs we have heard.”13Gauging this poetic appeal is not easy, however, for Farwell did not speak often about the cowboy. He was surely aware of the cowboy figures who worked together as a team to defend the Deadwood stagecoach in Buffalo Bill's Wild West—to which he made intermittent references throughout his career. He knew the western novels of Bret Harte, and it would have been hard to miss the gun-slinging cowboys who circulated so widely in the dime novels of his youth. Yet Farwell's settings suggest an isolated and introspective cowboy, one whose charisma is more visionary than jocular or violent. His scores also remain ambiguous about the racial identity of America's cattlemen. Wa-Wan composer Benjamin Lambord described the minor mode and Scotch-snap rhythms of “The Lone Prairee” as “peculiar to negro music.” He continued: “Its outstanding ethnic character, if it has any, is, however, Irish. It is not improbable that the cowboy song should have acquired a certain tone from the Indian, though a generous admixture of the Celtic idiom is most certainly to be expected from the racial character of its cast.”14 Only Spanish America is absent from Lambord's list, yet Hispanic influence might also be heard in the melodic doubling at the sixth that Farwell employed in the central section of “Prairie Miniature.”
What Farwell himself did choose to say about cowboy song concerned its preservation. “It is becoming more and more difficult to get these songs, which ought to be saved before it is too late,” he wrote in 1908 to J. L. Hubbell, a friend of Maynard Dixon.15 There are unpublished cowboy materials among Farwell's papers, and he compiled a typescript listing thirteen songs for which he had acquired both texts and at least partial melodies, seven texts still lacking melodies, and four titles about which nothing else was known. His plan was to make “a complete collection of cowboy songs, words and music,” beginning with what he had “obtained in my sojourn in the west,” but the collection never came to fruition.16
If Farwell borrowed his rhetoric of preservation from Alice Fletcher and Charles Lummis, he also let them guide his decisions about folk repertories, preferring Indian and Hispanic song. Black music and cowboy song were more than passing fancies, but they were almost always approached through multiethnic sets like Folk-Songs of the West and South and From Mesa and Plain. By contrast, Far-well's engagement with Hispanic music received more sustained attention—first via the Lummis transcriptions and then from Farwell's activities in the community music movement.
Farwell published only two “Spanish California” songs during the period he spent under Lummis's roof: “Las Horas de Luto” and “La Cara Negra.” In light and lively fashion, each one echoes Farwell's recollection of the after-dinner music at El Alisal: “The guitars rang out with magic which can be imparted only by Spanish fingers and song after song, in inexhaustible array, floated or danced upon the air” (WJ, 108–9). Accordingly, Farwell abandoned his usual chromatic palette in favor of triadic habañera bass lines, spiced with modal mixture and the occasional diminished chord, but generally straightforward in harmonic function, as Koegel has observed. Rather than providing a poetic accompaniment (like the prairie tremolo), Farwell aimed for greater transparency, arguing that artistic subtleties “belong not to folksongs in their primitive presentation, but to developed musical artworks based upon them.”17
It is curious that Farwell himself never attempted such a “developed musical artwork.” In contrast to his varied engagement with Indian material, he seems to have found “Spanish California” song either unmalleable or impossible to dissociate from its texts. Nevertheless, he seems to have felt the same sense of “ownership” regarding Hispanic material that he felt with other folk materials, and for roughly the same reason: these songs belonged above all to “American soil.” It was conquest that made them fair game for interracial borrowing, or so he told the readers of Lummis's Out West in 1904. Here Farwell identified three processes that had generated America's “undeveloped musical resources.” First was “racial inheritance, natural genius, Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic or otherwise.” Second was a process of “racial accretion” that Farwell attached to “the folk music of the negroes—the plantation song,” which he inexplicably identified as “a derivative form originally from the Spanish.” Third came the “territorial acquisition and consequent racial accretion,” which gathered up the many musics of Native America. And finally, “the characteristic songs of the cowboys, railroad makers, voyageurs, sailors, etc., all of which must be hauled into court and tried before American musical growth will be satisfied. Also there are the folk-songs of Mexico, qualified by Spanish influence as they must be, yet which cannot but exert a powerful influence of the musical life of our Southwest.”18
In Farwell's eyes, as American composers emancipated themselves from the European masters, all the music of the land they now occupied would find a similar freedom. But ensuring this greater liberty required the proper perspective. Farwell declared:
Let the composer stand on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. Let him ask himself, an intruder, what those men must have felt, who through generations inherited that wonderland and the freedom of it. Let him study and learn what they thought and felt and sung. Then let him look for himself—and sing…. Who cares any longer if his song be Indian or American? If the truth is to be known, in that song, which the future is reserving for us, the Indian, the American, the European, the African, all, will live again in a universal expression which will be the collective voice of America's world-wide humanity.19
LISTENING TO AMERICA
In his essay “Toward American Music,” Farwell exhorted: “There must be a willingness on our part to be, in our imaginations or our sympathies, at a moment's notice, a cowboy ranging the plains, a Southern planter taking his leisure or his slave at work, an Omaha chief watching the approach of the Thunder god.”20 Although this approach effectively glosses over racial difference, it could never fully escape the grip of nostalgia. The composer struggled mightily, however, to chart a way forward, first in a more aggressively polemic lecture recital and second through his involvement in the community music movement. So serious was Far-well's demeanor that he issued a warning to prospective audiences wishing to hear both his old standby, the Indian Music Talk, and the new lecture recital: “The first, while being educational in a marked degree, is also distinctly an entertainment,” he explained. “The
second, while not being without entertaining features, is primarily an earnest discussion of the uppermost questions in American musical development.” In Farwell's mind these questions were “Is a national musical art desirable for the United States of America? What is ‘American spirit' in music? Have we any American folksongs? Shall folksongs enter into a national musical art?” and finally, “What shall we do?”21
As a “national” program meant for a “western” tour, the lecture advertised a wide variety of examples, “many of them the result of Mr. Farwell's musical explorations in the far west and south-west.”22 In addition to playing “German, Russian, Scandinavian, and French music,” Farwell included two of his spiritual settings. The rest of his illustrations came from Indian or western sources, including one Spanish Californian song, his two cowboy pieces, and no fewer than nine Indianist scores. While he resisted defining American music by “any particular style or type,” he argued that if a composer “sings of the Mississippi, it must be incapable of being mistaken for the Rhine.” Farwell had faith that a “national American music” would be identifiable “by nothing else than its freedom of manner and spirit,” to which portion of his typescript Farwell appended a crucial clarification in ink: “which means virtually, freedom from the known European methods.”23Hand in hand with this freedom came a democratic spirit that Farwell found in the community chorus and the community pageant.
From the 1910s through the 1920s, Farwell was increasingly involved with what he called “the movement for community music,” which he considered the only antidote for a proliferation of artistic ills that he enumerated for the Music Teachers National Association: “the shams, artificialities and pretences of our social and professional music world, the exploitation of musical art for private gain…the attention given to all manner of sterile and degenerate musical outpourings of modern Europe, the ignoring of the greater part of the sincere and beautiful music that is being produced in this country, the coteries that spend money upon musical nothings for their own entertainment while the people go hungry.”24 From 1910 until 1913, Farwell was Supervisor of Municipal Concerts in the city parks of New York, where he had moved in 1909 to write for Musical America. Here he began a systematic campaign for free concerts of “good music” and biweekly amateur chorus meetings called “sings.” In 1911, he staged his first successful Fourth of July celebration, which by 1912 had ripened into plans for a full-fledged community pageant under the influence of America's pioneer pageant master, William Chauncy Langdon. The first president of the American Pageantry Association and the director of the 1911 Pageant of Thetford (for which Farwell had served as musical adviser), Langdon defined the historical pageant as an episodic, locally generated drama, in which “the place is the hero and its history is the plot.”25
Bolstered by his connections both with Langdon and with pageant master Percy MacKaye (whose father had helped stage Buffalo Bill's Wild West), Farwell's involvement in community music reached a highpoint in 1916. The New York City Community Chorus concluded its inaugural season with the spectacular Song and Light Festival, and Farwell collaborated with MacKaye on a gargantuan pageant in celebration of the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, which filled New York City's Lewisohn Stadium for fourteen performances involving, by Farwell's count, five thousand community actors, a five-hundred-person chorus, and a one-hundred-piece orchestra.26 With the U.S. entry into World War I, Farwell's activities gained government approval as the War Department enrolled him in an officer's training camp to develop a plan for army group singing. Farwell was soon proclaiming “international democracy through song,” as reported by the Los Angeles Times under the title “Kaiser's Defeat by Singing Army Seen.”27 Farwell's rhetoric of democracy was already a rhetoric of “western” democracy. While he remained in New York, this rhetoric persisted in tension with his proximity to the bastions of music education and concertizing in the European mold. Once he moved to California in the summer of 1918 it would slip easily into a valorization of the trans-Mississippi West as the most American part of America.
CALIFORNIA
Farwell acquired his community music credentials in the East; he then brought these skills west to California communities that were eager to employ him. After six weeks of teaching summer school at UCLA (where he also organized and conducted a community chorus), Farwell was invited to spend a year as head of the music department at UC Berkeley, filling in for Charles Seeger while the latter was on leave. Farwell took charge of singing for the University's Student Army Training Corps. He led public singing in local movie theaters, and (after delays necessitated by the 1918–19 flu epidemic) founded the Berkeley Municipal Community Chorus. In addition to producing a very successful postwar Fourth of July pageant called The Chant of Victory, Farwell presented extension lectures outside the university with such titles as “Musical Government by the People,” “The People's Music Drama,” and “Shaping America's Soul through Song.” One local newspaper commented, “It was only the Spirit of priesthood that could have sustained Mr. Farwell's enthusiasm for Community Music through four of the five lectures in the face of the small audience…But it was as apostles of this newest (and oldest) faith that his listeners received his message.”28 Indeed Farwell must have gained a following rapidly, as he was elected president of the San Francisco chapter of the Music Teachers National Association less than six months after his arrival in the Bay Area. Immediately upon the completion of his yearlong term at Berkeley, he was invited to Santa Barbara—not on the basis of his skills as a teacher or as a composer per se, but because of his proven enthusiasm for community music on the West Coast.
In an article dated 1919 in the Berkeley Times, an anonymous reporter took pride in proclaiming that “since his first visit to California in 1904, it has been [Farwell's] intention to become a Californian, but his work and engagements in the East have made it impossible until now. He is animated by an intense belief that because of climatic conditions and freedom from older traditions, the Pacific Coast is destined to become the scene of the greatest developments of the community chorus and the community pageant and music drama, and he will now devote himself wholly to the promotion of this movement on the coast.”29 The reporter's words must be taken with a grain or two of salt—any intention on Farwell's part to relocate westward in 1904 is at best unclear. Nevertheless, Far-well's experiences in California transformed his career in two important ways, intensifying his interest in what he called “Spanish Californian” songs and intertwining his ideas about community spirit and the natural landscape.
Spanish Californian songs were a centerpiece of Farwell's community chorus activity, particularly in Santa Barbara. Musical America described them as the “novel feature” of a concert involving three thousand singers and featuring works by Handel, Haydn, Wagner, and Gounod, as well as Farwell's own “Prelude and Chorale, Joy! Brothers, Joy!” and the “Entrance and Processional of Country Folk” from his First Pageant Suite. The song sheets he prepared for his Californian community choruses are peppered with such titles as “Peña Hueca,” “La Golondrina,” and “La Noche Está Serena,” and Latin themes also infiltrated his pageants as, for example, in La Primavera, produced in Santa Barbara in 1920. Some in the Santa Barbara area encouraged Farwell to collect and transcribe those tunes still remembered by the city's oldest Hispanic residents. Mary Louise Overman, perhaps a chorus member or just an appreciative listener, visited two elderly ladies (including a descendent of Governor Pico), attempted to transcribe a melody, and tried to arrange for Farwell to make a visit of his own. Farwell in turn asked his choristers to alert him of any “Spanish songs” known to them.30
Farwell's papers also suggest that he planned a semicomprehensive but unfinished catalog of Spanish American song, just as he had for cowboy tunes fifteen years earlier. As Koegel has meticulously shown, Farwell transcribed almost three hundred Spanish-language items from Lummis's collection for preservation and study. Farwell and Lummis's report
to the Archaeological Institute in 1905 stated that of the three hundred songs, roughly half were ready to be engraved.31 Yet their collaboration eventually bore a different kind of fruit. Their academic publication foundered—probably, as Koegel suggests, due to lack of funds and each man's habitual overcommitment. Instead, the public came to know these melodies in Farwell's harmonizations, first through his folk song sets and his incidental music for Virginia Calhoun's dramatization of Helen Junt Jackson's novel Ramona (1905); next through Farwell's community sings and pageants during the 1910s and early 1920s; and finally in the 1923 volume Spanish Songs of Old California.32
Early in their collaboration, Farwell and Lummis had earmarked about fifty tunes for what Farwell called a"popular song book” with piano accompaniment. Despite his plans to devote a Wa-Wan issue to a dozen such settings, only fourteen of the Spanish California songs saw publication outside of Farwell's early folk song sets.33 And even these might never have seen the light of day had it not been for the community music movement. Farwell explained in 1922: “Now that I am living here on the Coast, where I have been active in song movements of the people, the matter has come forward with great vitality…. These same Spanish songs (for which I wrote accompaniments) which I taught the people by rote, as they are unpublished, became one of our most enjoyed and important features of the chorus, and a source of unfailing delight to the thousands who attended our Sunday ‘sings' at the Plaza del Mar.”34 According to Koegel, Farwell and Lummis approached four other publishers before deciding to issue the arrangements themselves, enabled by a five-hundred-dollar loan from one of the Southwest Museum benefactors. More than forty-five hundred copies were printed by 1925, earning the composer modest royalties and exciting interest from composer F. S. Converse in Boston, Carl Sandburg of Chicago, and publishers of books for schoolchildren in California and Texas.
