Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  “ONCE UPON A TIME RECENTLY”

  Farwell never wrote an opera. Nor did he complete a full-fledged music drama in anything approaching a Wagnerian sense. While his preference for the miniature surely dissuaded him, turning to opera would also have seemed at odds with his vision of the community pageant as the real “music of the future.” His scripts feature souls and seers, but few lovers, villains, heroes, or sidekicks. Farwell's was not a comic muse. Yet his closest approximation to a conventional stage work bears the title Cartoon, or Once Upon a Time Recently. Completed in 1948, it relies on spoken dialogue to advance its quasi-autobiographical story line. The music includes many of Farwell's earlier patriotic anthems and folk arrangements, as well as a parody of European modernism (“Pierrot's Lunacy, or The Blight of Spring”). The central character, “Americus,” an aspiring composer, is spurned by the robber-priests of the Temple of Europus but beloved by “Columbia” and urged by a statue of Beethoven to study folk song. Accordingly, Americus sets out from the corrupt eastern metropolis of “Philabostoyork” for points west. Thanks to the hospitality of the Spanish Californians and the warlike tendencies of the Indians (who agree to follow Americus only after he promises to transcribe their songs for posterity), Americus wins the day.1 With his newfound power, Americus wrenches the plot of Cartoon out of its slide toward operetta and thrusts it into a more typically Farwellian mode, calling upon all assembled to perform a “New World Ceremony.” The Indians' “wild war dance” incites the crowd to overthrow the idol of Europus, replacing it with an “Uncle Sam” bedecked in red, white, and blue regalia and hailed by choral acclamations about “America's musical message to the world in the age to be.” Individual characters recede into a national or universal background; millennial overtones prevail.

  These world-historical themes, so characteristic of Farwell's music and writings, are much harder to find in other composers' western scores. As we shall see, western stage works have usually structured their conflicts around ethnic tension, not spiritual unity; they have featured strongly delineated heroes and villains rather than vaguely symbolic or allegorical ones. While Farwell emphasized the import of frontiering—its place in grand, evolutionary schemes—others more often chose to depict the process of frontiering with its inevitable scenes of discovery and conflict. As the historian Patricia Limerick has observed: “Western historians, like Western people throughout the centuries of contact between formerly separate worlds, have been desperate for categories in which they could place these perplexing ‘others' whose existence made life unmercifully complicated…. Minorities and majority in the American West occupied common ground—literally…. Each group might have preferred to keep its story private and separate, but life on the common ground of the American West made such purity impossible. Everyone became an actor in everyone else's play.”2 Scenes of dramatic encounter littered the western landscape long before such scenes were worked out in literary or movie westerns. Only minor adaptations were required to bring them to the stage, and even these adaptations sometimes had to be hidden behind a veil of ostensible historical accuracy.

  With occasional excursions, I have chosen to focus attention in Part 2 on Charles Wakefield Cadman, Farwell's contemporary and by far the most popular Indianist of his generation. Cadman's frontier music dramas operated with a ready-made cast of characters meant to evoke real people and places. But they also relied on centuries of operatic practice that placed more importance on the suspension of disbelief than on the pretense of realism. In fact, as I aim to show, Cadman's works illustrate very powerfully the tensions at the heart of so many American westerns: between “tall tales” and “true-to-life” stories, between the desire for dramatic effect and the impulse toward verisimilitude.

  Like Farwell, Cadman experienced Alice Fletcher's Indian Story and Song as revelatory, toured the country with an Indian Music Talk, and felt strong ties to the community music movement. Each made a name for himself by way of Native America, and each protested mightily (and ineffectively) when Indian-inspired pieces threatened to overshadow later scores that were pointedly free of borrowed material. In the end, however, Farwell's and Cadman's reputations diverged as critics chose to exaggerate the differences between the idealistic composer and the commercial songwriter. Cadman was most proud of his symphonies and sonatas, and if Farwell did not write “popular songs,” it was not exactly for lack of trying. Yet both men contributed to this critical schism even as they suffered its effects. Farwell joked wryly that it was a good thing the Wa-Wan Press had rejected Cad-man's lucrative American Indian Songs: “Had they been accepted, this ideal enterprise for the ‘publication of unsalable American compositions' might have become a financial success and I might have become a business man.”3 Cadman, in turn, considered Farwell something of a fanatic. After his exclusion from the ranks of the Wa-Wan, Cadman railed against Farwell's rigidity. “Ideals are all right,” he complained to Francis La Flesche, “but they must not be too visionary or impractical.”4

  If Farwell offered up a visionary West—philosophical and introverted to the point of idiosyncrasy—Cadman represents an extroverted West, pragmatic in its aims and material in its rewards. In a sense, Farwell and Cadman exemplify precisely the two types of speculation that drove America's westward expansion: the abstract ideal of Manifest Destiny and the concrete exploitation of natural resources. As we have already seen in our survey of Farwell's career, these two goals overlap, but one often surpasses the other. In Cadman's case, profit was a brighter touchstone than prophecy. These two modes of future-oriented speculation are echoed by two ways of viewing the past, one mythic and the other realist. Living at the turn of the century, Farwell and Cadman knew that western history was simultaneously remote and close at hand. Farwell wrote letters to aging cowboys, and Cadman lived for a time on an Indian reservation, but both were caught up in rhetoric that placed the true West beyond reach. As the subtitle of Cartoon suggests, their western history was a history in which the “once upon a time” of legend bumped up against the “recently” of the newsroom. While Far-well grafted western history onto world history, Cadman chose to dwell on its more immediate effects, as communicated through the faux-realist language of verismo. While Farwell vied with Wagner, Cadman embraced Puccini.

  “IDEALIZING” INDIAN SONG

  Cadman's engagement with Indianism was briefer and later than Farwell's. Not interested in organizing a “new art life for America,” Cadman was content to participate in established American musical institutions. He was carried to fame on the voices of Irish tenor John McCormack (who championed his first hit song, “At Dawning”) and American soprano Lillian Nordica (who sang “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water” all over the country after Cadman had caught her attention with a glowing review titled “Woman of Iron”).5 Cadman never needed to start his own publishing ventures; on the contrary, even after respiratory problems spurred his move from the Midwest to the dry air of Denver in 1911, half a dozen East Coast publishers continued to clamor for his songs, piano pieces, and high school operettas.

  While Farwell took full advantage of print media to spread his ideas on Americanism, nationalism, and Indianism, Cadman did so much less frequently. Glimmers of historical insight crop up in Cadman's opinion pieces, but he wrote only one sustained scholarly article, “The ‘Idealization' of Indian Music,” which appeared in Musical Quarterly, under the editorship of Oscar Sonneck. Written in 1915, well after Cadman's royalties had set him on the path to self-sufficiency, it aims both to justify Indianist borrowing and to distance him from Farwell, Loomis, Troyer, and the Wa-Wan contingent. Cadman invoked the Russian nationalists, noting that “the lilt, the life, and the love of the strange and elemental peoples that make up the great Russian Empire” have been adequately captured by those “whose veins are without a drop of blood of those wild tribes.” All the more, Cadman argued, were composers of the American West justified in exploiting the natural resources of their region: “If the old life and unconquerab
le spirit of the red man were not wrapped up in the history of this continent, how strange that would be! One cannot live in the Great West without sensing it and thinking how it would ‘sound' in terms of rhythm and melody. The composer feels the very pulse of it in his contact with the awesome cañons, the majestic snow-capped ranges and the voiceless yet beautiful solitudes of the desert.”6

  Cadman praised MacDowell's “Indian” Suite as more than “a mere ethnological report set to music,” and he observed (pointedly, given Farwell's preference for piano miniatures) that “Indian music is essentially vocal…. the themes do not lend themselves successfully to piano music and little success has been achieved in this direction. Such attempts generally savor of ‘salon music.’ ”7 Cad-man feigned to undercut his status as Indianist role model, explaining that he had adduced examples from his own pieces only at the request of the editor and not because he wished to set out “a criterion for others to follow.” Despite this disclaimer, however, he did not shy away from offering advice: “Above all, if the composer has not something to express musically, aside from the thematic material he employs, if he can not achieve a composition that is aurally pleasing and attractive, it is better that he abstain from the idealization of Indian themes. Music, interesting music and good music first, color afterwards, should be the watchwords for those who experiment with folk-themes.8 Cadman noted further that “only one-fifth of all Indian thematic material is valuable in the hands of a composer.” The chosen material must be “attractive in its simplicity,” inherently melodic, and “fairly good in symmetry.” Such melodies, he wrote, “are pure gold.” Once the appropriate material had been selected, Cadman advocated a flexible approach, claiming that “the potentiality of a folk-theme is in direct ratio to the ability of the composer to idealize it.”9

  In comparison to his vehement assertions about the priority of artistic quality, Cadman's advice about learning Native American culture is unimpressive. Though he conceded that the “idealizer” would need to “exercise intimate sympathy” in order to achieve “rapport with the native mind,” his language suggests that he himself found such sympathy elusive: “One should, if possible, be in touch with the Indian's legends, his stories and the odd characteristics of his music, primitive though they may be, and one should have an insight into the Indian's emotional life concomitant with his naïve and charming art-creations. And while not absolutely necessary, a hearing of his songs on the Reservation amidst native surroundings adds something of value to a composer's efforts at idealizing.”10 Whether his characterization of the reservation as an Indian's “native surroundings” indicates a willful self-deception or an awareness of the rapidly changing realities of Native American life, Cadman recognized a great gulf between creativity and anthropology. Moreover, he was prepared to view this critical distance as an aid to the idealizing process, not a hindrance.

  “FROM THE LAND OF THE SKY-BLUE WATER”

  Though Cadman may have been reluctant to serve as Indianist ambassador, he was a natural choice after the immense success of his Four American Indian Songs, op. 45, completed in 1908 and published the following January.11 In retrospect, it seems strange that it took him so long to respond to the Indianist call. He had already shown a penchant for New World colors in his youthful operetta La Cubanita. His friend and fellow Pittsburgher Nelle Richmond Eberhart (who penned the text for “At Dawning” and supplied prefatory verses for Cadman's 1906 Prairie Sketches) had worked for a time on an Indian reservation in Nebraska. She prefigured the romantic thrust of Cadman's Indianism in her text for his song “The Tryst” (1904), which relates the story of a lovesick brave keeping vigil on the prairie for a maiden called Shanewis.

  Given his theory that the majority of Indian melody was not “suitable for harmonic investment,” Cadman needed a substantial library of sources. In addition to Fletcher, he consulted Theodore Baker's Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (1882), Frederick Burton's American Primitive Music (1902), Natalie Curtis's The Indians' Book (1907), and various volumes of Frances Densmore. At the beginning, however, Fletcher was clearly the key figure, not only because of her interest in American composers, but also because of her ties to Francis La Flesche. The son of an Omaha woman and a French trader, La Flesche became Fletcher's most important informant, the coauthor of her work on the Omaha, and, strangely, a member of her family after she adopted him in 1891.

  Cadman had probably already begun his first attempt at “idealization” by the time he wrote to Fletcher asking permission to “use the melodies you have gathered in their ‘native state' and also with my own adaptations, guided by your knowledge and with a full appreciation and public acknowledgement in the preface.” Fletcher blessed the project with alacrity and with a recommendation that he send the resulting suite, June on the Niobrara, to the Wa-Wan Press. Cadman complied, despite his misgivings. On one hand, he respected Farwell enough to consider Farwell's approval as proper recompense for his efforts—or so he told Fletcher: “I would sacrifice all remuneration in order to have him get it out.” On the other hand, Cadman asserted his originality: “I have never seen or heard much music founded upon Aboriginal themes, save some of Farwell's efforts and Mac-Dowell's Indian Suite, so I am not influenced by any set method or treatment…. I wanted to be uninfluenced so far as I could.”12

  Far from being a manifesto for the future of American music, Cadman's songs fall into the same exotic mold as his works on Persian, Hindu, and Japanese tunes, the “authenticity” of which is carefully and prominently footnoted in each case.13 Although Cadman told Fletcher that “I endeavored to preserve the spirit of your Indian themes, deviating as little as I possibly could from the primitive melodies,” in reality his adaptations are extremely free, especially when compared with Farwell's.14 The first of the four songs, “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water,” exhibits radical changes to both text and tune. According to Eberhart family lore, Nelle “wrote the lyrics to the Omaha melody by imagining a fascinatingly beautiful girl, part Sioux and part French, whom she once saw cross the Niobrara River in a canoe to attend a leap-year dance and whom she imagined to have been taken captive from Minnesota—or ‘land of the sky blue water.’” Cadman was reported to have employed a similar blend of memory and imagination: “Charles had been practicing his organ music for Sunday…when he went into a small room off the big cold church to get rid of some of the numbness in his fingers by the cheerful open fire. As he sat there alone watching the sunlight on the stained-glass window opposite, he suddenly thought of the theme of the love song, and going to the small upright he quickly started the rippling bars of the introduction…after which the harmonies fell in place.”15 Like Farwell, both Eberhart and Cadman emphasized the role of intuition in their creative processes, perhaps to counter to the fact that the material itself was borrowed, not original.

  A comparison of Cadman's score and the Omaha melody reveals no inconsistency with the story of the song's creation. Apart from the flageolet introduction, the first two lines of the first stanza, and the first line of the second stanza, the tune is flexibly coaxed into newly lyrical and periodic phrasing. Most other phrases draw not on the original melody, but on the rhythmic profile that Cad-man provided for the first phrase of his setting and the distinctive SHORT-long accent of the accompanying rhythmic ostinato (examples 11a, 11b). The text paints a stereotyped image of the defeated hero, or in this case, heroine: “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water, / They brought a captive maid; / And her eyes they are lit with lightnings / Her heart is not afraid! / But I steal to her lodge at dawning, / I woo her with my flute; / She is sick for the Sky-blue Water, / The captive maid is mute.” Already a prisoner, subject to the wooing of the lover's flute, she is unable—or perhaps unwilling—to speak for herself.

  EXAMPLE 11A. “Be Thae-Wa-An (Love Song),” opening phrase (from Fletcher, Omaha Indian Music, 1893)

  The balance between “authentic” Indian material and romantic stereotype is even more precarious in the last of the
four songs, “The Moon Drops Low.” After a brief introduction, the singer enters with a line that is faithful to the Indian melody for its first phrase, but quickly becomes freer, relying to a certain extent on motives drawn from the original tune. The piano accompaniment is again a near ostinato, liberally peppered with inverted-dotted figures and departed from for rhetorical effect. The words blatantly reinforce that invidious cultural construction, the living Indian as the last of a dying race: “Our glory sets like the sinking moon; / The Red-Man's race shall be perished soon; / Our feet shall trip where the web is spun, / For no dawn shall be ours, and no rising sun.”

  Not content to let the text alone depict the vanishing race, Cadman has provided a musical equivalent for the process of resignation to fate. As the second stanza closes, the singer arrives forcefully on a D suspended above the C# pedal that continues until the end of the song (example 12). The power of this moment, however, is immediately eroded. The D quickly capitulates to C#, and the piano figuration descends until the singer returns with a final statement of the already repeated text, “no dawn for us and no rising sun.” Exhausted by its futile resistance, the vocal line is now reduced to near-stasis, hovering on members of the tonic, C#-minor triad until it finally expires in a wordless “Ah—.” It can hardly be surprising that, some years later, La Flesche apparently told the composer that this song was “not representative of the way an Indian sees himself.”16 That had, after all, never been the point.

  EXAMPLE 11B. “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water,” from Four American Indian Songs, mm. 1–19 (Boston: White-Smith, 1909)

  The unrequited Indian lover and the dying Indian warrior: these were the twin icons of Cadman's Indianism. He often began his Indian Music Talk with a rendition of “The Old Man's Love Song”—unaccompanied in the lecture recital's early years and in Farwell's arrangement beginning around 1913. Each half of the talk moved toward its own culmination: the first, a demonstration of Omaha flute calls, which Cadman was soon able to illustrate with his own “authentic” instruments; and the second, “The Moon Drops Low,” functioning as a sort of eulogy.