Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  When a second cowboy ballet appeared while Billy was still in the active repertory—again produced by a company with prominent East Coast or European ties, again relying on Copland and cowboy song—invidious comparisons were inevitable. It required no special genius to predict this reaction, and Copland himself was understandably concerned. Nor could he have been oblivious to the fact that, although he had rarely been west of the Mississippi, he might be risking permanent identification as a cowboy composer. These factors may help explain Copland's initial reluctance to take on the project. Looking back on his first discussion with de Mille, the composer recalled: “When she started to tell me about it being a cowboy ballet, I immediately said, ‘Oh no! I've already composed one of those. I don't want to do another cowboy ballet! Can't you write a script about Ellis Island?’” (VPAC1, 355-56). Though perhaps offered in jest, there is a poignancy in Copland's question that reflects more than a fear of self-repetition or typecasting. De Mille's own writings from the 1950s give us a glimpse of the other issues at stake: “I detailed the scenario…. There was a pause. ‘Well,' I said, ‘it isn't Hamlet.' He giggled. ‘—but it can have what Martha Graham calls an “aura of race memory.” ‘ At this Copland's glasses flashed and gleamed. His body began to vibrate all over with great explosive laughs. ‘Couldn't we do a ballet about Ellis Island?' he asked, his glasses opaque with light. ‘That I would love to compose.'”51 Regardless of the possible pitfalls, writing a score for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was an opportunity not to be missed, and Copland was soon at work on his second cowboy commission.

  Copland and de Mille may have professed their amusement at the notion of “race memory,” but it is easy to imagine a nervousness behind their laughter. In her 1991 memoir Blood Memory, Graham speaks of “ancestral footsteps” pushing her to create and of moments when “your body [becomes] something else and…takes on a world of cultures from the past.”52 De Mille was not especially interested in such transhistorical transubstantiation; and if she were listening for ancestral footsteps, the loudest might have belonged to her uncle Cecil B. Agnes was a child of Hollywood; her early life was far removed from the world of ranching and roping. And as for Copland, he still considered horseback “a dangerous place to be.”

  By the time Copland sat down to write Rodeo, after the outbreak of World War II, he had joined many of his compatriots in composing pieces that abandoned regional references altogether or subsumed them into the all-encompassing Americanism of the Fanfare for the Common Man. In de Mille's case, although it marked her debut as director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (the first American choreographer the troupe had ever employed), Rodeo was not her first or last experiment in Americana. Her reputation stemmed from works like American Street (1938), in which she had employed stylized horseback-riding gestures independently of Loring (HP, 363-64). In fact, her “big break” coincided with the company's desire to make a patriotic statement during wartime.

  Few if any moments in the ballet reflect the seriousness of its time. The scenario's lightheartedness—the fact that it was no Hamlet—may also have contributed to the collaborators' unease. One dance sequence (which was later scrapped) in which the men all rush off to take care of ranch business during the dance seems to have sprung from de Mille's awareness of the many separations suffered by military families (HP, 365). For the most part, however, Rodeo escapes the gravity of wartime, and this left its creators open to a certain type of critique.53 Yet the ballet's ebullience at least had the advantage of obvious contrast with Billy the Kid. De Mille may even have had this in mind when describing her own scenario: “It is not an epic, or the story of pioneer conquest. It builds no empires. It is a pastorale, a lyric joke.”54 From the beginning, Copland was reassured by the differences in the artistic personalities behind the two cowboy ballets. He recalled: “I came to the conclusion that since de Mille was a very different person from Eugene Loring, it was bound to be a very different ballet. Loring was interested in legendary figures and grandiose effects, while Agnes was after something lighter and more bouncy” (VPAC1, 356). After the birth of the younger cowboy ballet, Copland further separated his western progeny by making analogies to dramatic genres and operatic types. He claimed that Billy the Kid had “a certain ‘grand opera' side,” while Rodeo was “closer to musical comedy.”55 Though Copland had a tendency to protest too much, when it came to evaluating his western scores, his near-dismissal of Rodeo was not merely retrospective. In 1942, he wrote to Benjamin Britten: “I'm doing a frothy ballet for the Monte Carlo people on the usual wildwest subject—full of square dances and Scotch tunes and the like” (VPAC1, 364-65).

  Hamlet was out of the question. Even A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been a stretch, but de Mille chose her own Shakespearean precedent by referring to Rodeo as “the Taming of a Shrew—cowboy style.”56 The parallel is apt for a ballet in which traditional gender roles are violently reinforced under the guise of comedy. De Mille had originally wanted the title “The Courting at Burnt Ranch,” and according to the scenario, the ballet “deals with the problem that has confronted all American women, from earliest pioneer times, and which has never ceased to occupy them throughout the history of the building of our country: how to get a suitable man.” Though lonely and infatuated with the Head Wrangler, the tomboy-cowgirl fails to make an impression until she dons a dress and puts a bow in her hair. Suddenly both the Wrangler and the Champion Roper are vying for her affections. The Roper proves quicker on his feet, and she takes up his challenge to dance the hoedown—a dance that the choreographer linked to the sexually charged flamenco (HP, 364). These would-be lovers reach their denouement when he takes her firmly in hand. As de Mille originally put it, “He grabs her, forces her to dance his way and wears her out by sheer brute strength. That's all she wanted. She has met her master.” In later versions of the scenario, a Hollywood-style kiss replaces this aggressive dance duet as the gesture that seals their union.

  Rodeo's gender stereotyping and emphasis on conformism drew strong words from Marcia Siegel, who condemned the ballet's values as “absurd” and “pernicious” and used a comparison with Billy the Kid to drive home her point: “Loring's characters are types, even archetypes. They don't develop or change during the ballet. But what a varied population these types comprise. Loring distinguished them in several ways, by their occupations, their temperaments, their racial origins…. De Mille's community, on the other hand, is entirely homogeneous. In fact, the moral purpose of her ballet is to show the error in being a nonconformist. All the cowboys do the same movements, usually in tight, unison floor patterns.” The heroine's eccentricity is bound to stand out in such a rigid context for, as Siegel relates, “The Cowgirl is the worst sort of misfit, a sexual misfit, and in a highly conformist society she must be shunned until she gives up her peculiar notions.”57

  Why would de Mille choose this view of society for her Monte Carlo debut? Comic considerations aside, it is tempting to link Rodeo's emphasis on conformity with its historical context. Though this interpretation received scant recognition at the time, the ballet's celebration of unity at the expense of self-expression would have been an appropriate wartime message. More particularly, its dramatic crux involves a woman trying to enter a predominantly male profession. Though the Cowgirl ultimately fails to shed her domestic femininity, her attempt to do a “man's job” might have seemed familiar to the many American women who took up factory positions while their husbands and brothers were mobilized for war. Pollack points out that de Mille was preoccupied with the changing gender roles brought on by the conflict. She recalled thinking of “the men leaving, leaving everywhere—generation on generation of men leaving and falling and the women remembering” (HP, 365). But de Mille's Cowgirl does more than remember. In less than half an hour, she acts out one of the country's most striking demographic shifts during the 1940s, when women temporarily swelled the workforce.58

  A more widespread interpretation of the ballet's social philosophy draw
s directly from de Mille's own biography. Siegel is not the only critic to have suggested that de Mille's sympathy for the Cowgirl's predicament had autobiographical roots—especially in the early 1940s, when the young choreographer was frustrated and isolated, struggling to make a place for herself in the male-dominated dance world and to carve out her own niche between ballet and modern or popular dance styles. Like the Cowgirl and the courting couples on the ranch, de Mille's aspirations could be realized only through dance. (The fact that de Mille had married a Texan only the year before she began drafting “The Courting at Burnt Ranch” adds yet another layer to the self-portrait.)59

  Rodeo was de Mille's signature work in more ways than one—she wrote the scenario, invented and rehearsed the choreography, and prepared the lead role for herself. Her controlling presence in the work had serious consequences for Copland. Perhaps with so much of de Mille in the ballet, there was little room left for him—at any rate, he hardly strayed from the detailed scenario she provided and used folk songs and fiddle tunes where she had suggested them.60 Whether because of these constraints or not, Copland invented less music for Rodeo than he had for Billy the Kid, and according to some reviewers, his most “original” contribution to the ballet was an episode with no music at all—where he required the men in the orchestra to clap and tap their instruments in time with the dancing.

  The opening “Buckaroo Holiday” is by far the most elaborate of the episodes Copland contributed to the score. Pollack and others agree that this movement rivals anything in Billy the Kid for its sophisticated handling of borrowed material. Even more than the “Street in a Frontier Town,” it shows the degree to which Copland was willing to alter his folk songs for dramatic effect. This section of the ballet draws upon two tunes taken from Our Singing Country, although only one of them features cowboys. In addition to the topical tune “If He'd Be a Buckaroo,” Copland chose “Sis Joe,” a railroaders' work song notable for its change of meter and irregular speech rhythms. It seems likely that these features attracted Copland, for they are the ones he exaggerated (examples 49a and 49b). In the initial statement of this melody, the middle five bars are omitted and rhythmic values (especially lengths of rests) are altered. As the movement unfolds, these two tunes appear in canon and in counterpoint with one another, and together they provide a host of punctuating devices, characteristic rhythms, and melodic motives.

  If any moment in the ballet could single-handedly justify Rodeo's designation as the comic counterpart to Billy the Kid, it would be the first appearance of the cowboy tune “If He'd Be a Buckaroo” (example 50). After a full stop and a change of key, the arrival of the new tune is staged in a manner worthy of Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice. The trombone seems to awaken and reconstitute its melody phrase by phrase with prolonged, unpredictably humorous silences between the tune's phrases, making it seem awkward and out of kilter. Presumably the comic revivification of “If He'd Be a Buckaroo” originated as a musical pun accompanying the Cowgirl's masculine posturing and misguided efforts to mount her bronco. (One reviewer responded: “The note of humor runs its telling course…and not infrequently some one or other of the instruments does a rubbery-legged walk-on, Leon Errol style.”)61

  Throughout the cowboy ballets, ironic touches serve to denature the folk material, thwarting efforts to “sing along” and continually reminding the listener of the composer's active, “professional” manipulation and recasting of whatever he borrows. In both ballets as well there is often a dramatic aptness in the tunes Copland selected and deployed. Just as the subdued strains of “The Dying Cowboy” had accompanied Billy's lonely card game on the prairie, so the riotous rhythmic energy of “Sis Joe” marks the moment in Rodeo when the cowboys rush onto the stage “like thunder.”

  EXAMPLE 49A. “Sis Joe” (from Lomax, Our Singing Country, 1941)

  Rodeo's other dance episodes are actual dances (figure 8). As befits their dramatic function, they quote folk songs more literally than almost anything else in Copland's oeuvre (with the possible exception of “Simple Gifts” from Appalachian Spring). For the second episode, the “Corral Nocturne,” Copland wrote his own melody in a style that could pass for folk, but in the others he borrowed liberally. After some clever written-out tuning effects in the strings, the third movement, “Saturday Night Waltz,” preserves even the metrical and melodic variants of the version of “Old Paint” that de Mille had provided from memory.62 And as noted above, the final movement is primarily an orchestration of the square dance tune “Bonyparte” whose melody the composer lifted from Ira Forbes's Traditional Music of America.

  No one could blame de Mille for exploiting the strengths of her medium or Copland for allowing his tuneful material to perform its traditional function. Yet Siegel senses an insidious side to the ballet's square dances: “The floor patterns are straight and orderly. Every person has a partner of the opposite sex, and the dance requires the participation of each couple in order to be accomplished. The steps are prescribed in advance and are simple enough so that with a little practice any energetic person could perform them.”63 Like the social dances of other nations and eras, Rodeo's choreographing of conformity puts the values of its participants into motion and on display Edwin Denby said as much—in more words—when he reacted to the work and its many conventional attitudes: “The effect of the ballet…is like that of a pleasant comic strip. You watch a little coy and tear-jerky cowgirl-gets-her-cowboy story, and you don't get upset about it. What you are really recognizing is what people in general do together out West. Somehow the flavor of American domestic manners is especially clear in that peculiar desert landscape.”64

  EXAMPLE 49B. Rodeo, “Buckaroo Holiday,” arranged for piano solo, mm. 114-27 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1962)

  EXAMPLE 50. Rodeo, “Buckaroo Holiday,” mm. 167-93

  What was it about the “peculiar desert landscape” that brought Rodeo's relationships into such sharp relief? In a way, the simple barrenness of the surrounding terrain foregrounds the actions of its human inhabitants. Reading de Mille's scenario for Rodeo also suggests some psychological corollaries to western desolation. Before launching into the details of the ballet's plot, de Mille explained to Copland: “There are never more than a very few people on the stage at a time, and while they generate a lot of excitement between themselves, they are always dwarfed by space and height and isolation. One must always be conscious of the enormous land on which these people live and of their proud [loneliness].”65 It is a tall order to portray such a complex relationship between land and people in dance, but judging from reviewers' reactions, de Mille seems to have managed it. The profound isolation that she had in mind struck a responsive chord in part because of its resonance with the angst of modern industrial society.

  FIGURE 8. Square-dancing couples in Rodeo, set against a backdrop that suggests both the spaciousness and the energy of Agnes de Mille's West. Courtesy of Boosey and Hawkes/ArenaPAL

  Later in the scenario, de Mille described the solo piece that was to fall between the opening rodeo antics and the boisterous collective dancing that fills the rest of the ballet—a contemplative moment that was apparently intended to occur without orchestral accompaniment:

  The show is over, the men dismount. The girls saunter off to meet them…. The cowgirl sits on a post of the corral forgotten. The men and their sweethearts stroll in the evening. The twilight deepens. The sky goes green. They walk in the dusk. (This is a dance entirely of mood, lyric, quiet, almost mystic, a dance of courting, but abstracted, impersonal. It is more a dance between people and darkness than between people and people.) The few stragglers move like moths in the darkness. They are barely visible, outlined only against the deepening sky. The girl still sits. She is lonely. But she is in love with the land around and the great glowing night sky, and the smells and the sounds. She leaves the fence and moves across the moonlit space. Someone hurries by with an oil lantern. She run[s] through the empty corrals intoxicated with space, her feet thudding in the
stillness. She stops spell-bound. A coyote calls.66

  The changing light at sunset reveals the couples' courtships as mystic and abstract—more about their relationship to the natural world than to each other. The Cowgirl alone exults in the self-sufficiency of her relationship with her surroundings. The fact that her moment of self-discovery happens in silence and social isolation—apart from the rough physicality of the ranch house—calls into question the ballet's emphasis on conformity and temporarily inverts its sexual politics. Suddenly, if only for a moment, finding a “suitable man” has become less important than the opportunity for self-realization and the possibility of intoxication by space.

  Though the subversive potential of this self-discovery remains, the Cowgirl's moonlit reverie is short-lived. Her solo is well contained by the episodes of communal dancing that push her back into the comic flux of social relations, redress her in conventionally feminine attire, and drive her toward the expected “happy” ending. Despite its moment of freedom, the plot of Rodeo and its success as a ballet show that there is much to be gained by playing societally sanctioned roles—a moral that is particularly relevant to the biographies of its creators. For de Mille, casting herself as a foolishly romantic heroine offset the fact that she was breaking new ground as a female choreographer. For Copland, who had little if any control over the details of the work's plot and characterization, the situation is harder to pin down.