Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Copland's relatively elaborate approach to folk materials in Billy the Kid led some reviewers to claim that the ballet used no borrowed material at all. In reality, Copland's quotations are obscured (perhaps even disguised) through two main procedures: first, he placed borrowed materials in contexts full of contrasts and rapid juxtapositions. No tune holds the spotlight for very long, and cowboy songs or their fragments intermingle with newly composed material. Like Cadman, Copland did not make a strong distinction between original and borrowed melodies—Virgil Thomson later remarked that Billy the Kid “even has folklore in it that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb and that doesn't make the original melodies sound silly either.”38 Second and somewhat less frequently, Copland altered the original tunes—not just through fragmentation, but also through melodic, rhythmic, and timbral changes.

  Both procedures are present in full force from the beginning of Copland's cowboy career and his initial western adventure on the “Street in a Frontier Town.” As befits the stage action depicting the hubbub of frontier life, the music is a pastiche of new and borrowed material. To set the whole western carnival in motion, Copland chose a clear reference to the cowboy sphere—the tune “Great-Granddad” played “nonchalantly” on piccolo (and tin whistle in staged performances). At first his treatment of the melody is relatively literal, with only rhythmic alterations and occasional note substitutions, usually to eliminate repeated notes—C-B instead of B-B in bar 3, F instead of E in bar 4, and so on (see examples 47a and 47b). The tune's ending is more substantially altered to avoid closing on the tonic.

  After this initial statement, Copland begins what might be considered a catalog of the many available options for folk song manipulation. As the tune reaches its natural close in the piccolo, Copland inserts a transitional episode or extension based on a three-note fragment of the tune (drawn from bar 2). When the tune reasserts itself in measure 16, it has gained the support of clarinet and plucked strings, but after two of its four phrases it suffers the first of the many interruptions that Copland has in store for it (and for us). Muted trumpet and oboe enter with a phrase that the composer modified from “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies.” Though the melodic rise and fall are preserved, the rhythmic and harmonic character are so altered that it seems like new material—as if Copland wanted to provide his own answer to the open-ended phrases of “Great-Granddad.” The cycle repeats itself, but this time the “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” material infects other sections of the orchestra and begins to gain momentum before lurching into a jaunty volley of grace-note figures that become static enough to serve as the accompaniment for the next entry of “Great-Granddad,” which appears in a humorous guise—perhaps a harmonica or street organ—harmonized à la Petrushka in parallel triads for flute, piccolo, and clarinet.

  EXAMPLE 47A. “Great-Granddad” (from Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 1938)

  The brusque jostling between “Great-Granddad” and “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” is but a foretaste of the many kinds of visual and musical mixture essential to the tumult of the frontier town. At first, this hybridity takes the form of awkward and usually humorous juxtapositions, but as the scene continues, its cross-fertilizations take on greater significance. After an aggressive rendering of “The Old Chisholm Trail” (readily recognizable despite being truncated and rhythmically altered), the “Great-Granddad"/"Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” complex returns—this time with its comedic potential enhanced by cartoonish semitone clashes between trumpet and oboe and a reprise with sleigh bells of the grace-note-based rhythmic vamp heard earlier. The brief buildup that begins at rehearsal number 19 leads not to more cowboy tunes, but to an episode of Copland's own invention. He called this sequence a “Mexican Dance.” Evidently Loring had suggested a jarabe, and Copland complied with one of the catchiest tunes in the ballet—a 5/8 trumpet melody over rustling accompaniment of muted winds and col legno strings. This moment is a visual as well as a musical climax at which point the chaotic stage action coalesces into an ensemble number for “Mexican women” (or, in some reviewers' minds, “dance-hall girls”). Thus the folk potpourri presented by the scene is an openly multiethnic one. For those who hear submerged jazz idioms in the ballet's rhythmic language, the musical evidence of cultural mixing runs deeper still. It is not unusual for listeners today to discern an African American influence in its pervasive syncopation—from the opening ostinato to the ragtime inflections in the treatment of “The Old Chisholm Trail.” Copland's contemporaries, however, were less inclined to hear things this way; Irving Kolodin surely had a different agenda when he cited Billy the Kid as proof that “not all the dance impulse in this country originated below the Mason and Dixon line.”39 Whatever its proportion of black, white, and Latino elements, Billy the Kid involved cultural collisions. In Copland's hands, even a frontier town could sound cosmopolitan.

  EXAMPLE 47B. Billy the Kid, “Street in a Frontier Town,” opening (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1941)

  BOY BANDIT KING

  As the Mexican women end their dance, our attention is drawn to a young boy and his mother. According to Copland's “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet,” Billy is about twelve years old when he enters the frontier town and commits his first murder. Documentary evidence of the famous outlaw confirms this age—which together with his unusually boyish appearance earned him his nickname “the Kid”—but different authors have attached different meanings to the early inception of his life in crime. While some portrayed him as innately depraved, others saw his youth as a mitigating factor. Burns's Saga of Billy the Kid belongs emphatically to the latter camp, and his attitude rubbed off on Loring. Burns informed his readers that Billy was not “an inhuman monster revelling in blood,” but rather “a boy of bright, alert mind, generous, not unkindly, of quick sympathies.”40

  Burns's extravagant language gained both literary and musical admirers, helping to spread his forgiving view of the outlaw to audiences across the country. When he claimed that “a rude balladry in Spanish and English” had already surrounded Billy the Kid, his words actually helped stimulate this ongoing process. For example, one fan commissioned the Reverend Andrew Jenkins to compose a song that took Burns's characterizations to heart:

  Fair Mexican maidens play guitars and sing

  A song about Billy their boy-bandit king;

  How ere his young manhood had reached its sad end

  Had a notch on his pistol for twenty-one men.41

  Whether they had encountered Jenkins's song or not, Loring and company were nothing if not captivated by the boy hero. They took further steps to generate good feeling toward Billy and to arouse spectators' sympathy for his unique psychology. Most importantly, as Pollack and others have observed, the killing of Billy's mother triggers his lethal act in the ballet (in the book she was only insulted)—giving added justification to his aberrant and perhaps compulsive talent for murder. The ballet's explicit identification between Billy's Mexican sweetheart and his absent mother adds depth to his inner life and makes the devastating death of his mother central to all aspects of his character. A single dancer performs as both Mother and Sweetheart; likewise, all Billy's victims are danced by the same man, Alias, who was responsible for her accidental death in the frontier town. Thus, a maternal shadow falls not only on his murderous acts, but also on his most visible attempts to enter into human relationships—with the (quasi-paternal) sheriff Pat Garrett, and with his (probably fantasized) sweetheart.

  Copland's music plays a significant role in arousing and maintaining sympathy for Billy as a child, an outcast, and ultimately as a tragic hero. Though Billy and his mother have been on stage for some time, at rehearsal number 24 a shift in musical material alerts us to their new importance (example 48). At the close of the jarabe, Copland inserts a lovely moment of metric disorientation, reinterpreting the already irregular meter in preparation for the prominent pickup notes of the next cowboy tune on his list: “I Ride an Old Paint.” “Old Paint” is the third cowboy song to appear on the sc
ene, and it stands apart from the others in the tenderness with which Copland treats the melody. Gentle string brushstrokes and rocking figures in the flute and harp envelop it in sweet lullaby sounds. After a complete iteration of the melody, he crafts a circling accompaniment figure for upper woodwinds from the song's last four notes. Together with the glockenspiel entrance, this whirring figuration lends the clockwork sounds of a music box to the second statement of “Old Paint,” completing the nursery rhyme mood and making Billy seem even more childlike than his twelve years would require.

  EXAMPLE 48. Billy the Kid, “Street in a Frontier Town,” end of jarabe

  Potent as this musical characterization might be, there is more at stake here than our compassion for Billy. Copland and Loring did not need much prompting to absorb Burns's “nostalgia for a bygone America” or to recognize Billy as a symbol of lost innocence (HP, 317). For them, Billy's lethal coming of age transcended the personal to take on universal and national implications. As the stage action becomes more menacing, the statements of “Old Paint” become more dissonant. In the midst of what Pollack has called an evolution “from pastoral innocence to mechanistic violence” (HP, 321), the cowboy song persists over an ostinato that combines grinding semitones in the bass with the same rhythmic profile of the pioneer processional. The allusions to the opening processional remind us that somehow the process by which Billy loses his carefree childhood parallels the movement of the westering crowd—and that the violence that creates and destroys him is an inescapable consequence of nation building.

  Stopped cold by the twin murders that bring the scene to its dreadful end, the ostinato and the townspeople freeze, and all our attention must focus on Billy. Loring described the gestures he devoted to Billy's dastardly deeds: “In Billy I worked out a sequence—double pirouette, then double air tour—just before Billy shoots each victim. This is followed by an almost pantomimic gesture of revulsion and sickness. Those steps relay how Billy feels emotionally before he kills, because I believe that Billy did care that he was killing, that he was revolted.”42 Through this choreographic inspiration, Billy manages to express both excitement and revulsion at the behaviors to which he has been driven.

  The emotional understanding Loring musters for his hero stands in sharp contrast to the ballet's caricature of the townspeople rejoicing after Billy's capture. Their justifiable feeling of triumph is effectively quashed by a musical and choreographic treatment presenting them as utterly unnatural. While the inchoate milling of the frontiersmen during the earlier street scene was harmless enough, when they unite in pursuit of Billy, they become less human than the criminal himself. Loring suggested a “macabre dance” at this point in the action, and Copland rose to the occasion with stilted rhythms, shrieking piccolos, and wrenching bitonality. In response to such sounds, the posse engages in what Siegel describes as “a sort of Virginia reel, a very mechanical, doll-like, and completely unnatural barn dance.”43 With such raucous revelry in the background, it becomes easier to believe Denby's interpretation that “Billy's real enemy is the plain crowd of frontiersmen, who being a crowd can ignore him and whom he ignores by an act of pride.”44

  Apart from Billy's soliloquy, the pas de deux for Billy and the Sweetheart represents the longest and most coherent episode characterizing our antihero. Both of these set pieces were omitted from the orchestral suite, though the waltz tune (based on the cowboy song “Trouble for the Range Cook (Come Wrangle Yer Bronco)” appears in the two-piano version as well as the cello showpiece that Copland excerpted from the work. Even more than the “Card Game at Night,” this is an episode devoted to seemingly straightforward melody and the lyrical depiction of Billy and his girlfriend. Yet a number of factors problematize the couple's closeness. Most important is the status of the Sweetheart. Is she real or a fantasy? Though the scenario is somewhat ambiguous on this point, most viewers have interpreted the various disjunctions of the duet as signs that Billy is dreaming. Does this enigmatic female figure represent lover or mother? Because they are represented on stage by the same dancer, the duet would appear to carry both innocent and oedipal connotations.

  In keeping with this mood, Copland's score reflects a surreal wistfulness. It gives little flesh to the rhythmic skeleton of oom-pah-pah waltz accompaniment, except in passages where brief countermelodies intertwine, suggesting the physical proximity of the two dancers. The cowboy song that circles above this indifferent figuration is a peculiar choice; Pollack has noted a certain irony in the mismatch between the humorous “Trouble for the Range Cook” and the serious purpose that it serves in the ballet (HP, 322-23). Subsequent solos for bassoon and trombone hardly reinforce the timbral expectations for a traditional love scene. Mosaic rearrangement of the tune's phrases superimposed over harmonic vagaries or cul-de-sacs introduce what Arthur Berger deemed “fruitful distortions” comparable to cubism.45 The dream state of Copland's music finds ample support in Loring's choreography. The Sweetheart is the only dancer in toe shoes, which sets her apart from the rough and ready “real” characters. Moreover, her interaction with Billy is curiously otherworldly, as Siegel observes: “At first they dance back to back, and during much of his supporting action she is in a position where they can't make eye contact. Even when they can see each other, they have a far-off look, their contacts are remote.”46 The ever-present possibility that Billy is dancing with his dead mother makes the waltz a more than plausible candidate for the ballet's true “danse macabre.” Yet the contrast between the disjointed sweetness of Billy's waltz and the jarringly mechanical reel of the frontiersmen could hardly be greater, and Billy is clearly one who deserves our sympathy.

  Westerns in other media had already confirmed that the American West was the natural habitat for the badman who is good at heart, the hero who resists societal norms. Already in 1925, Burns had recognized this potential in Billy, calling him “the hero of a Southwestern Niebelungenlied” and noting that “he is destined eventually to be transformed by popular legend into the Robin Hood of New Mexico—a heroic outlaw endowed with every noble quality fighting the battle of the common people against the tyranny of wealth and power.”47 Equally typical of the western are the conflicting feelings Billy engenders toward progress as a cultural imperative. In Billy the Kid, this tension resides somewhere between the gritty optimism of the frontier processional and the cruel jubilation of the “civilized” townspeople after Billy's capture. Reading through a rather grand historical lens, Burns claimed that “[Billy's] life closed the past; his death opened the present…. After him came the great change for which he involuntarily had cleared the way. Law and order came in on the flash and smoke of the six-shooter that with one bullet put an end to the outlaw and to outlawry.”48 Copland, Loring, and many of the critics who praised the ballet fed on the western's tremendous nostalgia for an older social order (or disorder) in which chivalrous outlawry remained a viable option.

  Despite these stereotypical features, the psychological complexity that music and gesture lend to Billy is remarkable among westerns. With him, we see how the freedom of outlawry brings a fracturing of human relationships. Not all western heroes are so unlucky in love; in Copland's and Loring's hands, however, the boy bandit eschews the heterosexual masculinity of Hollywood cowboys in favor of something decidedly more complicated. The ballet still pays its own variety of homage to the traditionally central (if often silent) role of women in the western. What has changed in Billy the Kid is the female figure around which the hero is constructed. When the eternal feminine migrates from lover to mother, the sexual valences of the typical western go awry, changing what should be a crucial present-day relationship (between lovers) into a remembered one. And with this shift in temporal priority comes a sense of distance or disjunction that persistently drives the ballet into surrealism and fantasy. Always poetic in his treatment of such themes, Denby recognized the contemporary motivations of the ballet's move toward myth. He wrote: “Billy is about the West as it is dreamed of, as it is imagi
ned by boys playing in empty lots in the suburbs of our cities. And for this reason Billy is unreal in its local description, but real in its tragic play. An anthropologist would recognize it as an urban puberty ritual.”49 In Billy the Kid, the western hero has himself become nostalgic, making him at once more poignant and, strangely, more modern.

  ANOTHER COWBOY BALLET?

  Denby appreciated the subjective distance and ritual tone of Billy the Kid, and his review encapsulates much of what set the ballet apart from the few existing Americana dance productions (most notably Virgil Thomson's Filling Station). At the time of his writing, he was particularly interested in distinguishing the ballet from its closest sibling in the dance world: Agnes de Mille's Rodeo, for which Copland wrote the score in 1942. Denby considered the later work far removed from Billy's panoramic West, asserting that “Rodeo is about the West as it is lived in” not “as it is dreamed of.”50 Though his description of Billy the Kid seems uncannily on the mark, his claims for the “realism” of Rodeo are harder to swallow. The ballet is a virtual Cinderella story with no historical antecedent, but it did rely on more naturalistic dance gestures, and it did abandon at least some of Billy's epic and psychological pretensions.