Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  EXAMPLE 54A. The Red Pony, film suite, “Walk to the Bunkhouse,” mm. 24-33

  EXAMPLE 54B. Billy the Kid, beginning of the jarabe

  While Billy the Kid was a great favorite with the Mexican girls, Billy Buck has no such colorful associates to complicate our perception of the region. Instead it is young Tom who shares Billy's barnyard migration. He is practically following in Billy's footsteps, confirming that the future of the western ranch lies in his innocent hands—whatever its complicated past might have been. This excerpt might be said to enact western history—by placing Latin and African American elements in the service of the white ranchman and his metaphorical descendants. But whether anyone hears this history, whether these elements signify, depends on us. Within the world of the movie, circumstances conspire to make such a historically conscious reading difficult. When Grandfather speaks explicitly about “westering,” multicultural allusions are absent, filtered out by his fading memory, silenced by official history, or factored out of social theorizing. (“It wasn't the Indians that were important.”) When Tom imagines the West, he envisions an “impossible world” not a historical one—a “heroic time” inhabited by a “race of giants.” Surely the real West must lie somewhere between the child's play and the old man's remembering. But when Fred and Billy are on screen, it is the implied conflict between them that comes to the fore: Billy's expertise with horses, his closeness to Tom, and his active sexuality—all these things call attention to Fred's inadequacies, not to regional history. In The Red Pony, as in so much of western Americana, conflicts between generations and different types of masculinity overshadow any interracial interaction more complicated than the stereotyped play of cowboys and Indians.

  EAST MEETS WEST

  Though The Red Pony engages most directly with the idea of westward expansion, Copland's other western works also rehearse the theme of conquest in subtle and unsubtle ways. With the “Saga of the Prairies,” Copland launched his own westward migration as if by accident. Looking backward, he transferred the optimism of contemporary leftist politics onto a mythic vision of pioneering that had captured his listeners' imagination. In Billy the Kid, westward expansion became an abstract and alienating process, which united its participants but rendered them mechanical and grotesque. Even Rodeo made a statement about power relations in the West, though here the stakes of its “conquest” are personal rather than national. When the Cowgirl yields to her man, she fulfills a social contract that remains central to western mythology.

  The Red Pony picks up on these themes in ways that reflect profound changes both in the political and cultural life of the United States and within the narrower scope of Copland's life and works. What sounded like progress in 1937 had become lonely nostalgia in 1947. The isolation that set the outlaw Billy the Kid apart from civilized society has penetrated to the very core of the Tiflin family, separating husband from wife and leaving the most engaging character, Billy Buck, with no family of his own. There is a world of distance between Rodeo's cheerful social dancing and the uncomfortable silences and fractured fantasies of The Red Pony.

  By choice or chance, The Red Pony contains Copland's last musical thoughts on the West. As he worked on the film score, looking out on the ranch that served as a backdrop for Of Mice and Men, he might have taken a moment to ponder the turn his career had taken. It meant something quite different for him to write a western score in the late 1940s than it had a decade earlier. In 1939, Steinbeck and Milestone were taking a chance on Copland's western credentials; when they were preparing The Red Pony, after the resounding successes of Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, Copland had become the logical man for the job.

  Much has been made of Copland's later ambivalence about his populist scores—their fraught reception and his supposedly wavering faith in their artistic and social worth. Yet given the degree of critical angst about style and audience exhibited by most of his contemporaries, Copland's confidence in his stylistic flexibility seems all the more remarkable. Rather than endorsing his colleagues' sometimes awkward attempts to view his diverse oeuvre as the product of a single-minded artistic sincerity, Copland hit upon a solution that was more radical and, in a quiet way, more courageous. Recall his admission of the audience's role in the formation of his so-called simple style: “It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”24 Building on this candid confession, Arthur Berger took the argument a step further, noting that Copland's individual style “has undergone a series of striking transformations, partly determined by a rare critical faculty and partly by a sense of responsibility to musical audiences. Copland is not of the line of artists who, after following a dubious creative urge, justify their course by saying merely that they ‘felt that way.’” 25

  By departing from the rhetoric of sincerity, naturalness, and isolated inspiration (all code words for different kinds of authenticity), Copland allowed himself to be a man of many conversions—from modernism to populism, from urban to rural, from East to West and back again. The imagery of the American West provided a suitable sacrament for Copland's cultural conversions, for it has always been a favorite backdrop for journeys of self-discovery. Like the cowgirl heroine of Rodeo or the outlaw Billy the Kid, Copland found himself in the West. But unlike them, he had to travel to get there.

  Conclusion

  On the Trail

  Along his path from orient to occident, Aaron Copland shed old identities and invented new ones. It is this symbolic flexibility that best identifies him as a hero of the mythic West we still know today—a world in which aspirations toward authenticity so often dissolve into souvenirs and simulacra. Mediated by the History Channel and Hollywood, by education and entertainment, by travel and tourism and television, the souvenirs of westward expansion are all around us, and the simulacra too: in the rhetoric of our politicians and the attractions at our theme parks, in our highway system and on our restaurant menus, in the names of our athletic teams and our sports utility vehicles, and in our visions of conservation and multiculturalism.

  The cultural mythology that has consistently linked the West with opportunities, both lost and found, takes its particular force from the land and its resources, whether those resources are understood as natural or human, economic or spiritual. More important still, the mythology of the West takes the abstract telos of opportunity and infuses it with both motion and direction. As a replication or “false copy,” the simulacrum points toward a nonexistent original, carrying with it a sense of impossible distance to be traversed. Even the souvenir, which might be supposed to fix our attention on some particular time and place, gains its true significance only through movement and migration—only as a remembrance of things passed.

  Motion and direction. How else to explain the trails and travelers that have figured in every chapter of this book? Arthur Farwell gave us the unnamed traveler of his Domain of Hurakan, the seeker of “The Old Man's Love Song,” and above all the Seer who forges a path to the divine in The March of Man. Charles Wakefield Cadman began his western career with an evocation of displacement (“From the Land of the Sky Blue Water”) and continued to commemorate travel in all its forms: The Sunset Trail, “The New Trail,” The Golden Trail, and The Pageant of Colorado with its epochs—“The Coming of the Runner,” “The Coming of the Horse,” and “The Coming of the Wheel.” We have seen how the American pastoral featured trailblazers whose pioneering energy could not be contained in the Arcadian pastoral frame—Sandburg's farmer-soldiers, the caravan of dusty Okie autos in The Plow That Broke the Plains, and Ernst Bacon's frontier family reunited but ultimately fractured by planes, trains, and automobiles. Roy Harris represented both the tragedies and triumphs of Manifest Destiny, bidding farewell to his trudging pioneer parents and celebrating the gunshot conquest of the Cimarron. The frontier processional of Billy the Kid unfolds as a chapter of western history that pits t
he colorful outlaw against a motley but mechanical crowd. Yet, echoing Steinbeck, Copland's Red Pony also reminds us that the Great Crossings of the West are largely past, codified in stories for recollection and reenactment.

  Given this extensive travelogue, it is hardly surprising that the most famous orchestral evocation of the West bears the title “On the Trail.” This central movement of Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite, premiered by Paul Whiteman in 1931, has for generations represented the quintessential western soundtrack. In typical occidental fashion, its popularity springs from at least three sources: the colorful and pictorial surface of the score, the “real-life” connotations of its ersatz cowboy song; and the influence of new media and clever marketing. Over the course of two decades, it reached millions of radio listeners courtesy of the Philip Morris Company's tobacco advertisements (perhaps spurring a later cigarette spokesman and rodeo hero, the Marlboro Man, into action).

  More than any other portion of Grofé's suite, “On the Trail” celebrates the human presence in the West.1 The other movements trace a day in the life of the West, from “Sunrise” and the broad light of day shimmering on the “Painted Desert,” to “Sunset,” and a dramatic nighttime “Cloudburst.” As a whole, then, the suite rehearses the natural cyclical passage of time in ways that we have encountered in other western scores: in the pioneer's diurnal routine, the cowboy's weary day and sleepless night-herding songs, and above all in the logic of racial inevitability that shaped Indianism, freighting it with the sunset ideology of “the vanishing race” or the sunrise impulse meant to mark the dawning of a New Age. While the basic facts of celestial motion clearly link the western horizon with twilight hours and the closing of a day or an era, the tenets of terrestrial history have more often focused on the West as a site of renewal.

  In Grofé's suite, “Sunrise” and “Sunset” both give way to companion movements devoted to landscape painting in the most vivid of orchestral traditions: the flat, hot, crystalline noontime desert, and the sudden thunderstorm. Instead of marking the liminal moments of dawn and twilight, these picture postcard movements capture the extremes of light and dark, weather and topography in a pattern entirely typical of western works both before and since. Recall the “Crags” of Farwell's Mountain Song, the melodramatic storm of Cadman's Daoma, the “Open Prairie” of Billy the Kid, or the silent desert reverie of Rodeo's Cowgirl. In 1938, Grofé tallied his own “recollections of grandiose Nature” in an expansive program note called “Story of the Grand Canyon Suite”: “Vast areas of eloquent solitudes, towering heights, silent deserts, rushing rivers, wild animal life; of health-giving ozone, magic dawns and resplendent sunsets, silvery moonshine, iridescent colorings of skies and rocks; and before all else, of a stock of men and women who breathe deeply and freely, live bravely and picturesquely, speak their minds in simplicity and truth, and altogether represent as typical and fine a human flowering as this land of ours has inherited from its pioneer days.”2 By including the “human flowering” of pioneer stock in his catalog of the West's natural resources, Grofé recaps more than a century of rhetoric about the evolution of an American “type” based on the mingling of racial and botanical metaphor. He also goes some way toward explaining why, in the decades after its premiere, “On the Trail” became, as he put it, “the ‘best-seller' of the series.”

  “On the Trail” places man and animal front and center. More specifically, it shows burro and cowboy in motion, jostling down their dusty way. Presumably, they are descending to the canyon floor, but their destination seems less important than their iconic gait: a jaunty common-time clip-clop, achieved by using coconut shells “muffled on leather” and set into relief by the prevailing 6/8 meter of the melody associated with the braying burro.3 Like the reeling cowboys that Rosenfeld associated with Roy Harris or the multiethnic clockwork of The Red Pony's “Walk to the Bunkhouse,” Grofé's signature rhythm is neither a dance nor a straightforward march. Lively but mechanical (the composer claimed to have modeled it on the off-kilter pile drivers that he heard at a Chicago construction site), it carries the obstinate momentum of the Indian double drumbeat without the menace.

  More important still, Grofé introduces his cowboy protagonist onto a musical stage just as aptly framed as the parlor where Mrs. Everton hosts Shanewis or the self-referential “Hoedown” dancing of Rodeo. A sweeping “hee-haw” from the ensemble alerts us to the burro, but what comes next is neither onomatopoetic nor folksy. It is a violin cadenza. Though obviously an elaboration of the disjunct “burro theme,” the gesture is utterly incongruous unless understood as a celebration of performance itself or perhaps a moment of suspense before some musicodramatic arrival. Indeed a new character enters right on cue: the cowboy. Supported (appropriately enough) on the back of the burro's characteristic clip-clop, a mellow brass melody typically identified as a “cowboy song” enters in nonchalant counterpoint (example 55).

  EXAMPLE 55. Grofé, Grand Canyon Suite, “On the Trail,” mm. 78-88 (New York: Robbins Music, 1932)

  This is not the last we will hear of its leisurely unfolding. As musicologist Brooks Toliver has observed, the Grand Canyon Suite is full of reflexive moments—music-about-music. In addition to transforming the burro melody into a violin cadenza, Grofé dresses both donkey and cowboy in new costumes. First, when the traveling companions stop to rest at “a lone cabin,” they encounter, of all things, “a music box” programmed to play the burro theme (a close cousin of the Red Pony picture book on the Tiflins' cinematic front porch). Impersonated by the celesta, its magical timbres suggest a wistful reminiscence related to Thomson's ironic doxology, Harris's cowboy recollections, or the fatal nostalgia of Billy the Kid. Second, as Toliver points out, the cowboy melody is transfigured in Grofé's “Cloudburst,” opening the movement with sentimental pathos but ending in a blaze of glory that puts even the sunset to shame.4

  When Farwell had visited the Grand Canyon in December 1903, he despaired of finding a musical language that could capture this “wonderworld.” Whether out of reflexive optimism or genuine foresight, he nevertheless heard in his mind's ear “the unwritten symphonies of the ages past and the ages to come.” Presumably Farwell and Grofé would have agreed that the “ages past” belonged to the Indian. Although the Grand Canyon Suite is pointedly free of Native American references, Grofé himself recalled how he had “hobnobbed with Indians” during his time as a gold prospector.5 Hearing the music of “ages to come” is a trickier business, and yet all the composers in this book believed that they could do it. They had a claim both on the “music of the future” and on “the music of the people”—whether this meant community pageants, folk song symphonies, or film scores. In this respect they played the role of trailblazing pioneers, the middle term omitted from the child's play of cowboys and Indians.

  This artistic pioneer holds a precarious position, needing to be both ahead of the current time and a voice arising from within the crowd, emblematic not of timeless tribal identity or gunslinging individualism, but of something in between, defined by relationship to community and sense of direction. Walt Whitman called upon such artists to “take up the task eternal” as the “elder races…droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas”:

  Minstrels latent on the prairies!

  (Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)

  Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,

  Pioneers! O pioneers!6

  Whether it came courtesy of Whitman or Whiteman, the invitation to imagine the American West produced music that can barely contain the frontier figures that populate its colorful landscapes. For all their descriptive power, depictions of sunrise or sunset, desert or storm, mountain or prairie cannot situate themselves with any certainty in the West. Perhaps we may someday develop a musical language capable of speaking for rocks and plants—although this seems unlikely given that music can best describe sound and motion. In the meantime, the most specific musical m
ile-markers will refer to people. This musical truth in fact reflects one of the defining ironies of western history and its representations of place. Patricia Limerick observes that, in popular parlance, the West has always represented freedom, openness, and emptiness: “The theory was the same: the West is remote and vast; its isolation and distance will release us from conflict; this is where we can get away from each other. But the workings of history carried an opposite lesson. The West was not where we escaped each other, but where we all met.”7 The varied figures in this book were shaped as they met and moved along frontiers of history, mythology, geography, ethnicity, and style. On these trails all are in transit. All are transformed.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Cited in Charles Hamm, “Dvoák, Nationalism, Myth, and Racism,” in Rethinking Dvoák: Views from Five Countries, ed. David Beveridge (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996), 278.

  2. Joseph Horowitz, “Dvoák and Boston,” American Music 19, no. 1 (2001): 3-17; and Adrienne Fried Block, “Boston Talks Back to Dvoák,” I. S. A.M. Newsletter 18, no. 2 (May 1989): 10, 11, 15.

  3. For a detailed exposition of Dvoák's reliance on Longfellow, see Michael Beckerman, “Dvoák's ‘New World' Largo and The Song of Hiawatha,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 1 (1992): 35-48; and Beckerman, “The Dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis, the Song of Chibiabos, and the Story of Iagoo: Reflections on Dvoák's ‘New World' Scherzo,” in Dvoák in America, 1892-1895, ed. John C. Tibbetts (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 210-27.

  4. Richard Crawford, “Dvoák and the Historiography of American Music,” in Beveridge, Rethinking Dvoák, 257-63.