Frontier Figures
Page 41
Loring shared Copland's preconceptions about the West, but he had even less firsthand knowledge. To make matters worse, the standard fare of western literature and film was difficult to translate into dance, and Loring recalled being unable to envision staging Billy without horses, guns, and other frontier paraphernalia. The solution he crafted to this balletic impossibility was ingenious: “I thought if you did it like a child playing make-believe that you had guns and horses and cards and all that—that would be a feasible way to do it. But I wasn't sure that adult audiences would take to that.”19 Like Loring, Copland located his personal experience of the West in childhood recollections, justifying his attraction to western folklore by recalling that, like most youngsters, he had enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” with his friends.
Given the absence of concrete props, direct personal experience, or detailed historical information, Billy the Kid instead staged a regression into childhood and the world of make-believe in ways that many critics found illuminating. In his dance column for the New York Times, John Martin readily identified the ballet's paradoxical union of realism and abstraction. “There is no scenery,” he commented.
Jared French has designed a simple back cloth which serves simply to hide the back wall and to suggest a region of sand and cactus. For the rest the dancers themselves make the locales of the many episodes out of their movement and their mood. No scenery of paint and canvas was ever half so genuine. Similarly, when Billy and his bandits crouch with their open hands in front of their faces, it is quite certain that nobody else on stage can see them. It is the stuff of legend, freer and far more eloquent than fact.20
Though Loring had wondered about their suitability for “adult audiences,” his mimetic choreography appealed to viewers of all ages. For Edwin Denby (dance critic and the librettist for The Second Hurricane), these were the most innovative and effective elements of the ballet's choreography: “Looking at the pantomime movements that Loring invented for Billy, I find them more interesting when they tend to be literal than when they tend to be symbolic. The storytelling gestures—those of the cowboys riding or strolling, the gun play, the sneaking up on the victim, Billy's turning away from his sweetheart or lying down—all this has more life as dancing than gestures meant as ‘modern dance.’” 21 From this perspective, the power of Billy the Kid lay not in what was self-consciously “modern” but in its attitude toward representation; its message was best conveyed through a type of imaginary or remembered realism. As Martin put it, “Above all [Loring] has wooed his spectators into the technique of make-believe, where with the genuine, basic magic of the theatre he has led them into creating for themselves the Billy and the Old West that they would like to believe.”22 Like Music for Radio, Billy the Kid gained at least some of its success by allowing listeners room for make-believe. In this case, though, traces of the creators' own attitudes are readily visible. By aligning their spectacle with a remembrance of things past, Loring and his cocreators reinforced their psychologically sympathetic portrayal of the youthful Billy and the popular conception of the West as a site of irrecoverable innocence.
THE OPEN PRAIRIE
Compassion for the outlaw hero and an impetus toward allegory were not the only things Loring and his collaborators drew from Burns's Saga of Billy the Kid. The ballet's striking initial sequence also takes as its model the evocative descriptions of westward expansion that serve as a leitmotif in Burns's book. In situation after situation, his text launches into a litany of city names, each successively more remote from refined East Coast culture. The perilous migration of a family piano from the Atlantic Seaboard to its new home in New Mexico forms one of the comic episodes in the text. Even passages that could be static description take on the narrative function of signaling westward travel: “Mockingbirds still sing in the towering branches of the survivors of these old trees that have seen pass beneath them, as along a king's highway, the pageantry of the frontier past—pioneers, Indians, soldiers of the old army, descendants of Spanish conquerors, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid and his outlaws, Pat Garrett and his man-hunters, John Chisum the cattle king, and the multitude of forgotten men who played their part in building civilization in the Southwest.”23 Such pomp and circumstance was too good to be true, but too hard to resist, and a similar parade found its way into the ballet. Loring's scenario calls for an opening processional designated “Introduction: March into a new Frontier from an old, Gone are the days…. (empty stage fills with men and women pioneers, Indians, Mexicans)” [ellipsis in the original]. The scenario also specifies a “Coda: based on Introduction…March on.”24
The frontier processional in the coda frames the ballet's action in significant ways. According to the scenario, “What takes place between the introduction and the coda…. is merely a single episode typical of many on the long westward push to the Pacific” (HP, 318). Among the many reviewers who also picked up this interpretation, Walter Terry of the New York Herald Tribune offered the most evocative summation:
“Billy” commenced with a powerful dance procession, a stream of humanity which hastens toward the sunlight of the West. There are pioneers and their wives, prospectors, homesteaders, adventurers. Their movements are quick and strong, space-covering, and they are movements which tell of a vast, uncrowded land and of the sturdy, questing citizens, American citizens, who are searching for new thresholds, new frontiers to cross. Out of this westward march comes a story, an episode in the march itself, the story of Billy the Kid. It is a tale of romance, of danger, of lawlessness and of death and when it is over, the march resumes and the beholder again views the westward procession heading toward yet another frontier.25
With its motley crew of participants and its mingling of optimism and nostalgia, the frontier processional allows its diverse participants to be unified chiefly by their westward momentum.
The actions of the westering crowd further enhance its allegorical potential, for as dance historian Marcia Siegel has pointed out, they engage in “canonic movements abstracted from frontier activities like roping and riding, scouting, cradling babies, praying.”26 Denby made similar remarks about the historical pretensions of the opening March: “The energetic horizontal arm thrusts with open palms look as if our ballet dancers were mimicking ‘pushing back the frontier.' The ‘Come on out West' gestures back to the electricians offstage, the praying, digging, running, housekeeping, ever westward, ever westward are meant as a frieze of history; but it is history like that shown us in the slick-paper ads.”27 Linking the processional to ancient Greece and modern mass media in a single breath, Denby recognized this moment's power to overstep the boundaries of the stage, as the invisible electricians are invited to join in the history-transcending action of westward migration.
But the flat frieze and the glossy magazine covers that Denby called to mind also suggest another, more modern media reference: the silver screen. Siegel notes the ballet's evocation of specific film techniques such as close-up, montage, flash-forward, and even slow motion, and she argues that Loring's cinematic vision shaped the opening frontier processional as well. Loring had the dancers move straight across the stage rather than taking a more typical (and longer) diagonal route. As a result, “their figures remain flat, in the same perspective, like the flat images on film or an unfurling olio in a music hall. They can use only a few feet of the stage depth, and that way their numbers look dense, crowded, and by inference, desperately in need of elbow room.”28 The peculiar flatness of perspective gives the participants in the procession a striking but potentially alienating aspect. Unlike the offstage electricians Denby envisioned, actual audiences remain removed from the ballet's westering impulse. The dancers, with their mechanical gestures, do not approach us, and we can only watch from a distance.
Copland's “maestoso” soundtrack for this epic march remains a haunting model for musical evocations of the Great Plains (example 46). It has become a critical commonplace to link Copland's stark intervals with America's wide open spac
es.29 But of course there is more at work here than the famous open fifths: registral range, sparse scoring, and (only in the original two-piano score) echo effects that Copland seems to have transplanted from the mountains to the prairies. As Jessica Burr has noted, the unusual timbre of the opening bars—low oboe underneath high clarinets—suggests the tremendous loneliness that Copland experienced so viscerally on his first trip to Santa Fe.30
The downstage dancers loom large against this sonic horizon. While timbre is a key element in the score's suggestion of alienated observation, its rhythmic and metric elements mirror the dancers' gestures, and by extension suggest the actions of the westering crowd. When he called their opening procession a “march,” Loring seems to have been aiming for a patriotic tone. But Copland's frontier-bridging march sports a number of atypical features—most notably its triple meter. According to Pollack, Loring was taken aback by the composer's decision, but apparently Copland reassured him by citing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as an example. This may seem a less than inspired rejoinder, but at least it reflects the Americanist aspirations of their project. From a somewhat more speculative angle, one might argue that the rhythmic asymmetry of a march in triple time makes the dancers' progress seem unusually labored or unwieldy—as if they were limping or needed an extra beat to catch their breath after each pace.
EXAMPLE 46. Billy the Kid, “The Open Prairie,” arranged for two pianos, mm. 1-24 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1946)
Working in tandem with the march's peculiar meter is the rhythmic ostinato that characterizes most of the “Open Prairie” music. Introduced gradually, the ostinato is fully in place by bar nine and continues unrelieved through the entire section, except for a four-measure respite at rehearsal number 2. As noted in previous chapters, such ostinato figures were a favorite space-generating mechanism for both Harris and the Indianists (as well as for composers with other geographical preoccupations). Insistent repetition heightens our awareness of the passage of time and, metaphorically, suggests the extent of a vast space devoid of distinguishing topographical features. Harris had put these associations to bleak use in his 1935 elegy Farewell to Pioneers, in which autogenetic melody is dwarfed in the hostile environment of repetitive figuration. Copland's prairie ostinato operates a bit differently. First, its mechanical regularity and the fact that it involves the small-scale repetition of measure-long units make it more intense and less leisurely than Harris's landscape painting. Second and more importantly, in Billy the Kid, the opening ostinato is linked, by analogy to the dancers' repetitive gestures, as much to people and their epic efforts as to the wilderness in which they wandered. Copland's layered ostinato produces contrasting accents on and off the beats; horns and upper strings are echoed by bass, piano, and percussion as if the lower group were out of step or staggering along behind.
A tune of sorts frames and enlivens this stark ostinato. In its first incarnation, this material seems to function as an introductory figure (mm. 1-7). Its division of the measure into two dotted quarter notes foreshadows the ostinato's rhythmic limp; its halting phrases are divided between oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, rather than forming a single melodic utterance. In bar 14, once the ostinato is in place, this tune takes flight to a more conventional melodic register and scoring (for flute), clearly distinguished from the repetitive accompaniment below. One might expect this melody to be associated with the pioneer processional since it is the aspect of the soundscape with the greatest forward momentum, but Copland has reversed the usual division of labor which would make the ostinato responsible for landscape depiction and use the melody to signal subjective human presence. Instead, the melody seems strangely impassive, like the landscape out of which it emerged.
This emotional detachment becomes easier to explain as the movement continues, for when the melody comes to a cadence (m. 20), it is interrupted by birdsong. Strident woodwind figures (mm. 20-22) rupture the ostinato, suggesting that even the laboring marchers have finally stopped to listen to their surroundings. What they hear sheds new light on the preceding melody and its remarkable preoccupation with thirds. The cuckoo call of the opening bars may have gone unrecognized up to this point, but in retrospect its avian connotations seem all but confirmed. The striking low oboe/high clarinet sonority that resurfaces here suggests that the birds may have been singing all along.
The interjection of birdsong brings the grinding ostinato of the march to a temporary halt, causing a startling orchestral silence and offering up the opportunity for an echo effect. A solo French horn sounds the call, but the only response is a gradual resumption of the familiar melody as the ostinato-laden mass of humanity parades impassively toward the Pacific. The break in the ostinato at measures 23 through 26 also marks the beginning of a twofold orchestral crescendo that shapes the rest of the section to great dramatic effect. This intensification seem at odds with Loring's processional, however, in which the marchers do not actually approach the audience. While the dance emphasizes the uniformly distant march of history, the music gives this journey direction, moving it not only westward (stage right) but also toward the audience, preparing us for the scene change and opening up the possibility of emotional identification with these characters, and ultimately with Billy himself.
“SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT A COWBOY SONG IN PARIS”
At the climax of the prairie processional, the ominous mood is shattered like a shot. The weary ostinato falls away like a curtain to reveal the bustling activity of the “Street in a Frontier Town” and Copland's very first quotation of a bona fide cowboy song. Freed from the historical burden of embodying westward expansion, the dancers leap into action, accompanied by the tune “Great-Granddad,” which Copland borrowed from Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. With the benefit of hindsight, it is all too easy to spot the varied forces (Lincoln Kirstein chief among them) making cowboy song Copland's folklore of choice.31 Nonetheless, the western turn came as something of a surprise for the composer and his contemporaries.
Copland may have enjoyed both roles while playing “cowboys and Indians” as a child, but where music was concerned, he thought that the “wranglers” had a clear advantage over the “redskins.” In his Norton lectures, he quickly dismissed Indianism as ineffective: “Despite the efforts of Arthur Farwell and his group of composer friends, and despite the Indian Suite of Edward MacDowell, nothing really fructifying resulted. It is understandable that the first Americans would have a sentimental attraction for our composers, especially at a time when the American composer himself was searching for some indigenous musical expression. But our composers were obviously incapable of identifying themselves sufficiently with such primitive source materials as to make these convincing when heard out of context.”32 Copland believed that Native American music's strangeness kept even well-meaning composers from achieving the requisite level of identification with the material. He recognized—in ways that Cadman and Farwell did not—the paradox of building a national music through exotic borrowing. Furthermore, he seems to have realized that using Indian material might entail unwelcome anthropological burdens. “The Indians of today,” he commented, “produce a music that is difficult to authenticate. How much of what they do is the result of oral tradition and how much acquired from the circumstances of their post-Conquest environment is difficult to say.”33 This concern for the purity of indigenous materials stands in sharp contrast to the freedom and flexibility with which he approached jazz and other folk musics.
Although in 1929 Copland had posed the rhetorical query “What do the songs of the Indians mean to me?” it was evidently unnecessary to repeat the question with regard to cowboy tunes in 1938. Like most Americans of his generation, he had plenty of exposure to cowboy heroes. Copland's problem with cowboy song was not so much a matter of sympathy as of musical substance. His first impressions were decidedly lukewarm: “I have never been particularly impressed with the musical beauties of the cowboy song as such. The words are usually delightful, and the ma
nner of singing needs no praise from me. But neither the words nor the delivery are of much use in a purely orchestral ballet score, so I was left with the tunes themselves, which, I repeat, are often less than exciting” (VPAC1, 279). What sacrilege such words must have seemed to Harris! But for Copland, using western folk song was not a foregone conclusion, even in a cowboy ballet. “As far as I was concerned,” Copland claimed,
this ballet could be written without benefit of the poverty-stricken tunes Billy himself must have known. Nevertheless, in order to humor Mr. Kirstein, who said he didn't really care whether I used cowboy material or not, I decided to take his two little collections with me when I left for Paris in the summer of 1938…. Perhaps there is something different about a cowboy song in Paris. But whatever the reason may have been, it wasn't very long before I found myself hopelessly involved in expanding, contracting, rearranging and superimposing cowboy tunes on the rue de Rennes in Paris.34
With an ocean separating Copland from Billy's natural habitat, the composer developed a new fondness for American folk song. Pollack has pointed out the parallel between this passage and Copland's claim that he only warmed up to American jazz after his arrival in France. Taken together, these instances suggest it was not personal proximity but certain kinds of distance that allowed him to feel “at home” with his material.
Although he admitted eventually becoming enthralled by western folk song, Copland still chose to emphasize the technical tinkering required to bring a cowboy ballet to life: “It's a rather delicate operation—to put fresh and unconventional harmonies to well-known melodies without spoiling their naturalness…. one must expand, contract, rearrange and superimpose the bare tunes themselves, giving them something of one's own touch. That, at any rate, is what I tried to do.”35 Copland's rhetoric suggests that he would find ways of calling attention to his creative manipulation of borrowed materials. While Harris chose to let the folk songs he borrowed emerge in a seemingly natural or unimpeded manner, Copland preferred to make his cowboy songs sound comic, surprising, or strange. This is not to say that Copland was incapable of keeping a tune intact; his virtually verbatim orchestration of the square dance tune “Bonyparte” for the “Hoedown” dance episode from Rodeo is a case in point.36 The most literal quotation in Billy the Kid features “The Dying Cowboy” from John White and George Shackley's The Lonesome Cowboy—a different version of the tune that Harris used in his Folksong Symphony (1940). Copland retained both the meter and (for the most part) the melody in Billy's nocturnal scene “Prairie Night” (“Card Game at Night”).37 Even in this case, however, Copland alters the rhythmic values of the melody—lengthening certain notes and calling for relaxed duple eighth notes against the underlying triplet pulse.