Frontier Figures
Page 10
Farwell believed that Spanish California songs had given community music a “new lease [on] life” because of “their power to animate and thrill the people.” He wrote in the foreword to Spanish Songs of Old California: “The great present need of the community song movement is to enlarge its scope, to escape from the old ruts and to find new songs of the right kind which the people will take delight in singing.”35 In the spirit of Lummis's “Catching Our Archaeology Alive,” Farwell linked material preservation and musical revitalization. Lummis himself was even more dramatic. In his own preface to the song book titled “Flowers of Our Lost Romance,” he began with an elegy to “old California, ‘Before the Gringo Came,’” praising the region's cultural inheritance from “Mother Spain” and “Step-Mother Mexico.” “For 38 years,” he wrote, “I have been collecting the old, old songs of the Southwest…. It was barely in time; the very people who taught them to me have mostly forgotten them or died, and few of their children know them. But it is a sin and a folly to let such songs perish. We need them now!” Lummis echoed Farwell's urgency and his notion that Hispanic song could transform the community music movement:
There is nothing in the world that could be so “good for what ails us”—the unrest, the social dyspepsia, the de-humanizing and de-homing, the apartness that comes by multitudes—as to Get Together and Sing Together. It brings a marvelous psychological “thaw,” even in a crowd of strangers—and a wondrous welding in a crowd of friends. And for that, these old Spanish songs have, in Mr. Farwell's splendid Community Choruses, become fully as great favorites as their Saxon kindred, “Suwanee River,” “Old Kentucky Home,” “John Brown's Body,” and all that roster of deathless memory.36
Lummis's pointed “Saxonizing” of Foster's most famous minstrel songs suggests what was at stake in the composition of the ideal western community. For most of his career, Farwell wrote of race in the best transcendental tradition—tolerant of difference but resigned to the fact that “progress” might consign certain races to the past. But in 1926, at the height of American nativism, in the midst of the eugenics movement, and a mere two years after the Johnson-Reed Act slashed European immigration to its lowest levels in U.S. history, Farwell's less liberal attitudes surfaced when he argued for the unique artistic potential of the Southwest, where Anglo-Saxon pioneers had superimposed themselves upon “Spanish and Spanish-derivative” populations. “Consider the racial bearing of the matter,” Far-well wrote in a series of essays for the Los Angeles Times.
Welcome as is the leaven of the better element of the “foreign” races in the life of the United States, it remains a fact, interpret it as you like, that the “American” of the Southwest is from the old pioneering colonial stock, north and south, which created our nation and gave it its original characters…. It remains that this stock, as it is found in the Southwest today, is practically without the incumbrance of the hordes of more or less unassimilable aliens admitted by the insufficiently restricted immigration of the past, which constitutes one of its most difficult problems in so many other sections of the country.37
Farwell's multiethnic West was not without its racial hierarchies. Was it accidental that two of the Spanish California songs he chose for his community chorus work—“La Cara Negra” (The Black Face) from Folk-Songs of the South and West and “Chata Cara de Bule” (Darling, Snub-Nosed Face) from the California masque and Spanish Songs of Old California—make reference to physical markers of racial difference? Yet the Hispanic population offered the possibility of revitalization without miscegenation. The Californios were valuable not just because of their history in settling the West, but also because they offered a civilized, European counterbalance to British formality and reserve: “They are Latins, for which we Anglo-Saxons, emotionally stiff-jointed by comparison, should be profoundly grateful. And they come from the Latin country least known and understood today, most mysterious and alluring in its charm.” Given that Spain's allure has always been tied up with its proximity to Africa and the Arab world, and given that Farwell welcomed what he saw as California's “continually increasing attention to things oriental,” the composer's words suggest that in fact the tension between white and nonwhite “elements” was precisely what made the frontier so fertile a site for musical and social experimentation.
THE MARCH OF MAN
In addition to focusing his attention more keenly on Hispanic song, Farwell's California years attuned him to new opportunities for civic arts sponsorship. In Pasadena, he was the recipient of the Composer's Fellowship of the Pasadena Music and Arts Association, which provided a reasonably generous stipend, stipulating only that Farwell continue his creative work while living in the city. Renewed for three successive years, it allowed the composer to draft and complete The Hako and to engage in a host of other, nonlucrative endeavors. He took as a pupil the budding composer Roy Harris, guiding his studies in harmony and counterpoint in 1924–25 and engaging in wide-ranging discussions of aesthetics and society. He also composed music for pageants, often on ecumenically Christian or spiritual texts, such as the Pilgrimage Play (retelling the life of Christ) and a grassroots Gesamtkunstwerk called The Grail Song.
Neither the religious nor the Wagnerian tones of Farwell's pageantry were accidental. On the contrary, his very first pageant-style work in New England treated a Judeo-Christian theme, Joseph and His Brethren (1912); his holiday masque The Evergreen Tree (1917) was meant to be an “American Messiah”; and he led Easter morning “sings” in the Hollywood hills. He considered the community music meeting to be a type of “service” in both senses of the word: an activity for the common good and an event akin to a liturgical celebration.38 As for Wagner, we have already seen how Farwell invoked the master's example when discussing folk-based composition. He had visited Bayreuth in 1897 and was one of America's strongest champions of the Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl.39During the 1910s, Farwell also came to share Wagner's understanding of Greek drama as a model for a communal art. He described the pageant and masque as American “music dramas,” purposefully opposed to opera, “presenting aspirational concepts of the highest racial significance, having the aspect of a ceremonial for the community at large, and involving the participation of the people.”40
For all his Wagnerian tendencies, however, Farwell's Festspielhaus was emphatically outdoors. Back in 1904, during his second “western tour,” Farwell had witnessed one of the so-called Grove Plays of San Francisco's elite Bohemian Club. He made a repeat visit to the grove in 1910, and again during his California years, and he carried impressions of the club's redwood forest ceremonies with him for the rest of his life. Farwell's New England pageants had generally been staged outside or in open-air stadiums, in keeping with the ideals articulated by Percy MacKaye and other famous pageant masters. Once in California, however, Farwell made the western landscape a prominent factor in his dramatic work.
In Farwell's eyes, California was blessed not just with a climate conducive to outdoor concerts, but also with a wealth of natural amphitheaters. After contributing music for a 1921 pageant-drama called California: The Land of Dreams, staged in the Yosemite Valley by the California Federation of Women's Clubs, Farwell was moved to advocate a regular, “utterly uncommercial” “festival drama,” which would “light a torch to brighten the new civilization of the West” (EDC, 206–7). He came closest to this sort of project that same year with The Pilgrimage Play, an open-air extravaganza championed by Christine Wetherill Stevenson and staged in the hills above Los Angeles. Farwell and Stevenson were both involved in the emergence of the famous Hollywood Bowl as a regular concert venue.41 Stevenson was actually one of the Bowl's first underwriters, but as musicologist Catherine Parsons Smith has shown, she withdrew her support and set up camp in the next canyon over once it became apparent that the larger Theater Arts Alliance in charge of the Bowl was more interested in concert-giving than in her sacred dramatic fare. For his part, Farwell led community singing at the Bowl as early as 1919, and he remained cl
ose to the woman known as the “Mother of the Bowl,” Artie Mason Carter, an avid supporter of the Hollywood Community Chorus, which was directly inspired by Farwell's rhetoric about the chorus as a musical embodiment of western democracy.42
In 1924, Farwell found a Bayreuth to call his own in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, on Big Bear Lake. Here Farwell's friend, pianist and composer Fannie Charles Dillon, convinced the real estate developers of a resort community called Fawnskin to help finance a massive outdoor stage-space, complete with colored light projectors and per formance areas scattered over a quarter mile of forest and extending up to points along the canyon rim (some 450 feet above the audience). Farwell became an enthusiastic promoter and artistic director, christening it the “Theater of the Stars,” in a striking echo of the Hollywood Bowl's concert series “Symphonies Under the Stars,” inaugurated in 1922.
Although the “Symphonies Under the Stars” continue into the twenty-first century, Farwell's theater suffered a precipitous decline, and Farwell's own involvement lasted but a single season, reaching its dramatic climax in September 1925, with The March of Man, a masque in which the spirits of the natural world (each illuminated by a different colored light) are threatened by greedy captains of industry and careless vacationing revelers. Farwell wrote the text and the music, he served as stage manager, and he performed some of the musical numbers. He also appeared as the masque's central character: the Seer, a benevolent Man whose arrival (foretold by the World Soul) comforts the fearful tree and rock spirits, and whose intervention (together with a spectacular storm scene) saves them from the manmade threats of axe, forest fire, and dynamite—each of which invites its own special effects. Pacific Coast critic Bruno David Ussher was clearly impressed by the superimposition of nature and technology:
Hidden behind firs, in a little shed, before a cleverly constructed switchboard, bending over an elaborate lighting chart, someone turns the lever of the dimmer and the glow that revealed world-soul or rock-spirit…recedes into the ground, mysteriously as it has come. The conflict between nature and man proceeds. Flames rise, voices of wind and fire hiss. An axe pounds dully, till the crashing fall of a great tree before the eyes of spectators punctuates another chapter in this realistic symbol pageant. Where is another theater where the audience sees a tree felled and remaining on the stage until the last lights are dimmed?43
Little of the music for the masque has survived, and Ussher indicates that at least one portion of the incidental music was by Ernest Bloch, not by Farwell himself. The annotated production copy of Farwell's typescript indicates “soft music,” “string music,” or “music of the night” for the nature spirits and notes that the young revelers “[burst] in…singing a popular song to jazz instruments.” The only score Farwell preserved was his own climactic Prayer, uttered by the Singer, an invisible voice sent by the World Soul to herald the dawn and to proclaim man's potential for union with the divine. The ecstatic text is matched by rapturous harmonies generated by chromatic voice-leading and a tendency to modulate by thirds. Although the Engineer with his dynamite claims to represent the progress of civilization, the true and transcendent march of man must, of course, be led by the Singer.44 According to Farwell's stage directions, “Coincident with the last three notes…three consecutive rays of light are seen to flash upward in a zigzag course, like inverted lightning…a celestial choir bursts forth from the height, while the last upward flash, as it were, ignites at the same place a heavenly light which grows, as the chorus continues, to a stupendous illumination of the entire horizon.”
FIGURE 3. The March of Man, cast photo. Courtesy of the Arthur Farwell Collection, Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music
It is hard to know precisely how this came off in production. Newspaper articles and the community's own magazine, Fawnskin Folks, show the theater's famous lighting effects at the revelatory moment marked by the entrance of the celestial choir. Photos capture the company in costume (see figure 3). Farwell stands as the central figure, sporting a turban and flanked by dryads, hamadryads, engineers, and an array of musicians. His wife, Gertrude (a noted pageanteer), appears as the World Soul, placed above with arms uplifted in the prophetic attitude of a “Wagnerian Erda.”45 The critical reception that survives is dominated by the testimonials Farwell collected in an ill-fated attempt to sustain the Theater of the Stars into a second season. Charles H. Gabriel Jr., writing for Musical America, contrasted its open spaces with the shallow and fashionable foyers of the city concert hall, and Ussher called the production a “great pageant-music drama of the future…of which Richard Wagner has written, in which stage, chorus in the sense of the Greeks i.e., a singing-acting chorus, light and orchestra, form one grandiose unity.” Ussher further predicted: “Drama and opera, cramped so long into the apple-box shaped stage, with its silly mechanized, dimensionally limited spaces, will give way to a music-dramatic rebirth which will restore to art its holiness as in ancient Greece.”46
In the end, then, Farwell's West was not really the “Wild West” of cowboys and Indians at all. It was meant to transcend that West—and yet not to replace it entirely. For the distinctly American West was present in the Spanish California melodies of the community chorus and especially in the thematic use and manipulation of the western landscape, whose personification and protection are central to the plot of The March of Man. In fact, these two western emphases are so pronounced that they seem almost to have erased the Indianist references that were so important to Farwell's earlier career. Perhaps it is not surprising that community choruses took more readily to Hispanic song than to Farwell's Indianist arrangements, which, despite the composer's protestations, always sounded (and still sound) “exotic.” More telling is the absence of Native America in The March of Man. Actual and fictional Indians did make frequent appearances at Fawnskin, and the opening gala week of the Theater of the Stars was set to coincide with what Fawnskin promoters called the “Big Pow Wow.” This Big Pow Wow, acted by Indians, included its own “outdoor play” in which a warlike tribe adopts a white man and promptly cedes its land to him. In a manner that would probably have pleased Fawnskin's real estate developers, The March of Man rewrites this parable about custodianship of the land for an all-white cast. The future history of Farwell's frontier would be written by whites, not in conflict with the diverse peoples of the West, but in battles about mastery and good stewardship over the land itself.
GOD'S COUNTRY
Farwell's love of landscape predated his experiences in the Far West. He frequently recalled the midwestern hunting and fishing trips of his Minnesota boyhood and teenage summers spent in the mountains of New England. He also relied on the healing power of nature during subsequent times of mental or moral crisis. He spent a week of walking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire before taking his “National Music Talk” on tour; he retreated to Saratoga to regain his health in 1907; in 1914, Farwell's friend, pianist Noble Kreider, even took him to Bermuda to recuperate after a disastrous attempt at writing incidental music (now lost) for a Broadway play (EDC, 590–91). As we have seen, the imposing geography of the western United States hit Farwell with the impact of a religious revelation. It was only fitting that, following Lummis's lead, he called the region “God's Country.”
Why, then, does Farwell's catalog during the Wa-Wan years contain so little instrumental nature painting? One answer is that he was preoccupied with folklore. Another is that the miniature forms he preferred were ill-suited to the landscapes he found most impressive. Among his early works, only the piano suite about the Finger Lake region, Owasco Memories (1899, published 1907), offers up loosely geographical titles. In 1911–12, he attempted a slightly more expansive evocation of the White Mountains, a sonata-form movement called “Symbolistic Study no. 6—Mountain Vision,” which he framed as a struggle between “the depths of failure and despair” and “the joyousness of tramping over the mountains in the crisp autumn air.” Though he aimed to suggest “the boldness of the moun
tain scenery, and the mystery of its distances,” his program was psychological, even autobiographical. These were mountains on a human scale.
By contrast, the topography of the West did not enter Farwell's oeuvre for more than two decades. Until his final years in California, all of his western works would be based on folk materials. In 1930, however, Farwell tried to capture a more rugged mountain range in his piano suite In the Tetons. The outer movements (“Granite and Ice” and “The Peaks at Night”) announce their western majesty, with widely spaced, crashing dissonances, spiky chromatic lines, mysterious harmonies, and slow pacing meant to suggest the sublime. The most human and perhaps the most interesting movement is “Arduous Trail,” which Farwell chose to subtitle “Humoresque.” The protagonist seems to be on foot—the 4/4 meter is marchlike, not galloping—and his trudging progress is twice halted for a moment of nature appreciation, marked by a footnote: “Leaning against a tree, breathing, and listening,” first to birdsong and then to the sounds of a brook. Fixing this attitude of contemplation is a quasi-whole-tone chord (D, E, F, C with added A; then A, B, C, G with added E) uttered in soft contrast to the otherwise unrelenting F minor. Ultimately, In the Tetons bursts free from the confines of the piano suite with a pendant piece called “Big Country” that presents eleven pages of rushing octaves.47
The grandiose programmatic impulses that Farwell had to rein in for the piano suite burst out in the large-scale score Mountain Song, which faced no generic constraints. Farwell completed the project in 1931 and later called it “probably much the greatest work which I have produced for the people's musical movement, and one of the chief works of my life.” Some seven years earlier, he had begun sketching a massive choral-orchestral work based on his recollections of northern California's High Sierras.48 In keeping with his ideas about community music and ritual, Farwell labeled this piece a “symphonic song ceremony,” and in an apt analogy, he compared it to the chorale prelude of Reformation Europe. Farwell wrote his chorales first and then crafted an orchestral setting that would heighten the meaning and anticipation of the choral passages. The strong implication of audience involvement is matched by the work's spiritual aim. “We live mostly on the flat country, without the emotions which such scenes inspire in us,” Farwell related. “I have sought to bring the inspiration of these great mountains…to the many who cannot reach them and participate in their beauty and grandeur.”49