by Beth E. Levy
6. “Boston Man to Help the Archaeological Society.” AFC Scrapbook. Lummis, by contrast, described Farwell's “transliteration” work as “most difficult, and wholly beyond the average trained musician who has not had this specific experience.” Lummis, “Catching Our Archaeology Alive,” 45.
7. Curtis was also impresario of an Indianist “picture-opera” called The Vanishing Race, featuring music by Henry Gilbert, who managed the Wa-Wan Press while Farwell traveled. See Valerie Daniels, “Edward Curtis: Selling the North American Indian,” June 2002, accessed August 2006, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA02/daniels/curtis/vanishing.html.
8. When he admired the Indian music of the Southwest, with its “rhythmic irregularities and complexities of the most extraordinary nature,” (WJ, 122), he was gathering ammunition to counter critics who asserted that Native music was uniform and undistinguished. Critic Henry Krehbiel had welcomed the American Indian Melodies (New York Times, 31 August 1902), but more recently he had panned Farwell's “Dawn,” saying that “any cool-headed student of the music of the American aborigine ought to be able to duplicate it fifty times in an hour.” “Music: A Concert of American Compositions,” New York Daily Tribune, 19 April 1909, 7.
9. Farwell, Folk-Songs of the West and South: Negro, Cowboy, and Spanish-Californian (Newton Center, MA: Wa-Wan Press, vol. 4, no. 27, 1905). The “Bird Dance Song” is reprinted with critical commentary in Victoria Lindsay Levine, Writing Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements, vol. 11 of Music in the United States of America (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2002), 38-39.
10. Farwell, “Toward American Music,” Boston Evening Transcript, 1905, p. 6.
11. Little is known about Alice Haskell, whom Farwell credits as the collector of the spirituals he set. According to EDC, 155-56, she was a composer who had submitted music to the Wa-Wan Press in 1904. Together with her sister Mary, she introduced Farwell to Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet.
12. Describing this work in 1909 (WJ, 134-35), Farwell adopted the more familiar text: “Oh, bury me not….” The accompaniment won approval from Phillips Barry, a ballad scholar recently from Harvard. In fact, Barry may have suggested the analogy between the tremolo and the prairie. In a letter of 29 October 1905, he compared Farwell's melody and accompaniment to the wind passing over the plains. AFC, 35/9.
13. Wa-Wan, 2/15 (1903); WWP, 2:67.
14. Lambord in Farwell and Darby, Music in America, 4:311-12.
15. Farwell to J. L. Hubbell, 18 August 1908, AFC, 36/18.
16. Among the cowboy sketches in Farwell's papers are “Wunct [sic] in My Saddle” (or “Cowboy's Lament”); a very simple setting of “Up on the Trail”; and a slightly more elaborate treatment of “It Was a Long and a Tiresome Go,” which appears ready for publication.
17. Farwell, introduction to Farwell and Lummis, Spanish Songs of Old California (Los Angeles: Lummis, 1923).
18. Neither Thomas Stoner nor I have been able to trace the source of Farwell's peculiar identification of Spanish origins for African American song. He may have been referring to an Old World exchange between Spain and North Africa or to the Caribbean contexts of the New World. Farwell, “Toward American Music,” Out West 20 (May 1904): 454-58; reprinted in WJ, 188.
19. Wa-Wan, 2/12 (1903); WWP, 2:20.
20. Farwell, “Toward American Music,” Boston Evening Transcript, 1905, p. 5.
21. AFC Scrapbook; clippings indicate that sometimes the order was switched or only one of the two lecture recitals was given. For more detail, see WJ, 140-42.
22. AFC brochures.
23. Ibid.
24. Farwell, “Community Music and the Music Teacher,” M. T. N. A. Proceedings (1916): 195.
25. Farwell, address to the Canadian Club Meeting, 21 March 1914 (typescript)], AFC, 24/31.
26. John Graziano, “Community Theater, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, and Arthur Farwell,” in Vistas of American Music: Essays and Compositions in Honor of William K. Kearns, ed. John Graziano and Susan Porter (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park, 1999), 306-7.
27. “Kaiser's Defeat by Singing Army Seen,” Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1918, 112.
28. George Boosinger Edwards, undated clipping reporting a lecture Farwell gave on 2 April 1919; also cited in EDC, 199.
29. Berkeley Times, 9 September 1919, front page.
30. Musical America, 24 January 1920, page 13; cited in EDC, 203. Mary Louise Overman to Farwell, 19 October 1919, AFC 36/58. Postcard from Julia M. Platt to Mrs. Linn, dated 2 January 1920, AFC, 31/15.
31. Koegel, “Mexican-American Music,” 39-43. “Report on Folk Song work for Southwest Society A. I. A.,” 1 October 1905, AFC, 31/12.
32. According to “Drama of ‘Ramona' with a Local Star,” Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1905, B1, Farwell's incidental music consisted of arrangements of “Cachuca,” “La Golondrina,” and “La Paloma,” as well as a “Sunrise Hymn” and a “Navajo War Dance.”
33. On the plan to devote a Wa-Wan issue to Spanish California song, see “Music and Musicians,” Los Angeles Times, 24 July 1904, B2.
34. Farwell to Carl Fischer, 26 February 1922, Charles F. Lummis Collection; cited in Koegel, “Mexican-American Music,” 42.
35. “A Note by Arthur Farwell,” prefatory material to Spanish Songs of Old California. Spanish songs are also singled out in his “Outline of the Principles of A NEW MUSICAL EPOCH and Ideas Concerning MUSIC SERVICE as a Vehicle for the Manifestation of These Principles,” 1926 (typescript), page 12, AFC, 24/40.
36. Lummis, “Flowers of Our Lost Romance,” preface to Farwell and Lummis, Spanish Songs of Old California.
37. Farwell, “The Riddle of the Southwest, II,” Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1926, A4. See also “The Riddle of the Southwest, I,” “The Riddle of the Southwest, III,” “The Message of the Southwest, I,” and “The Message of the Southwest, II,” Los Angeles Times, 26 September, 29 September, 24 October, and 25 October 1926.
38. Farwell, “Outline of the Principles.”
39. See Farwell, “America's Gain from a Bayreuth Romance: The Mystery of Anton Seidl,” Musical Quarterly 30 (1944): 448-57.
40. Farwell, “Outline of the Principles.”
41. Farwell's orchestration of his early Indianist piano score “The Domain of Hurakan” was performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1922 under Alfred Hertz. See also Catherine Parsons Smith, “Founding the Hollywood Bowl,” American Music (1997): 206-42; Isabel Morse Jones, Hollywood Bowl (New York: G. Schirmer, 1936); and Grace G. Koopal, Miracle of Music (Los Angeles: Charles E. Toberman, 1972).
42. Isabel Morse Jones, who worked for Artie Mason Carter and chronicled the Hollywood Bowl's early history, stated that “Farwell's community music work…inspired the financing and building of the Hollywood Bowl” (EDC, 218).
43. Bruno David Ussher, [Pacific Coast Musician?], 12 September 1925, p. 10; AFC, 23/35.
44. Wayne Carr Willis interprets The March of Man in light of Farwell's early vision experiences and later writings on intuition in “The ‘Apocalyptic’ Visions of Arthur Far-well: Music for a World Transfigured,” delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in 2002 (Lexington, KY). I am grateful to him for providing me with a longer version of this paper.
45. Ussher, [Pacific Coast Musician?], 10.
46. Charles H. Gabriel Jr., “Music and Colored Lighting Glorify Natural Theater,” Musical America, 21 November 1925, 3; Ussher, [Pacific Coast Musician?], 10.
47. The precise relationship of “Big Country” to In the Tetons is unclear. Farwell planned to write two suites of five movements each. In the end, only seven movements were finished. “Big Country” bears no number, but its texture resembles the etudelike “Wind Play,” which Farwell indicated should be inserted as the fifth movement of an expanded six-movement suite, ending with “The Peaks at Night.”
48. Farwell, “People's Musical Movement” (typescript), AFC, 25/2.
49. Program note, AFC; reprinted in Brice Farwell, ed., A Guid
e to the Music of Arthur Farwell and to the Microfilm Collection of His Work: A Centennial Commemoration Prepared by His Children (Briarcliff Manor, NY: The Estate of Arthur Farwell, 1972), 45.
50. Edwin Schallert, “Music: Revives Modes: Arthur Farwell Believes in Their Future,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1922, p. III-42.
51. Farwell to Roy Harris, 8 or 9 January 1931, AFC, 36/6.
52. As cited in Ron Erickson, “Arthur Farwell (1872-1952) and the Quintet for Piano and Strings,” foreword to Quintet in E minor, Opus 103 (1937) for Two Violins, Viola and Violoncello and Piano (San Francisco: Erickson Editions, 1997). For more detailed analysis of the quintet, see Linda Sue Richer, “Arthur Farwell's Piano Quintet: Aspects of Form and Thematic Development,” MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 1987.
53. Program for the Composers' Forum-Laboratory Concert, 13 December 1939, AFC Scrapbook; Farwell, program note, as cited in Erickson, “Arthur Farwell.”
54. The reminiscences of Farwell's first wife can hardly be considered objective, but she was probably on the mark when she said that her former husband's “quality of creativity was very dictatorial.” She continued: “When the task was done, the project in a community on a fair way to being realized, the same energy that used him to create and build, then would use him to destroy his own usefulness with the group and send him elsewhere.” “Gertrude Farwell's memories, presented by Brice, 12/54,” AFC, 35/55.
55. Farwell, “The Music Teacher and the Times” (typescript), AFC, 24/32.
56. Farwell, “The Artist as a Man of Destiny” (typescript), AFC, 24/5.
57. Farwell to Harris, 8 or 9 January 1931, AFC, 36/6. MacDonald Smith Moore discusses the influence of Spengler's Decline of the West in Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 91-92, 165.
58. Farwell, “The Riddle of the Southwest, I,” Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1926, B4; and “The Riddle of the Southwest, II,” Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1926, A4. For the relevant passage of Whitman's “Facing West,” see the epigraph to the introduction to this volume.
59. Farwell, “Riddle of the Southwest, II,” Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1926, A4.
60. “Music for Americans. Arthur Farwell Believes Indian Themes Offer Material,” AFC Scrapbook.
3. ENCOUNTERING INDIANS
1. Arthur Farwell and Edna Kingsley Wallace, libretto for Cartoon, or Once Upon a Time Recently (typescript), AFC, 10/6, 11/1.
2. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 290, 292.
3. Farwell, “Jazz and the Fourth Dimension” (typescript), AFC, 24/25.
4. Cadman wrote to Fletcher in 1907: “Mr. Farwell is broadly known as an extremist and his methods are not altogether legitimate tho' his object is always noteworthy”; Cad-man to La Flesche, 1908; cited in Harry D. Perison, “Charles Wakefield Cadman: His Life and Works” (PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 1978), 67-68 (hereafter cited as Perison CWC).
5. See Arlouine Goodjohn Wu, Constance Eberhart: A Musical Career in the Age of Cadman ([Oxford, MS]: National Opera Association, 1983), 18; and Grace Overmyer, “Charles Wakefield Cadman,” in Famous American Composers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1944), 164-65.
6. Cadman, “The ‘Idealization' of Indian Music,” Musical Quarterly (1915): 388.
7. Ibid., 391, 390. Cadman reviewed the slow movement of MacDowell's “Indian” Suite when it was performed at the Pittsburgh Sesquicentennial under the title “Music of the Iroquois Echoes in Expo Hall During Sesqui Program: Weird Melodies of MacDowell Applauded by Great Audience at the Exercises,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, Charles Wakefield Cadman Collection, Pennsylvania State University, Scrapbook G.
8. Cadman, “‘Idealization' of Indian Music,” 394, 390.
9. Ibid., 391, 394-95.
10. Ibid., 389-90.
11. Perison CWC, 62-71, 416-17.
12. Cadman to Fletcher, 8 October 1907, 18 March 1908, and 13 March 1908; cited in Perison CWC, 67, 73, 68.
13. For a complete catalog, see the works list provided by the Cadman Collection at Pennsylvania State University, http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/FindingAids/cadman.frame.html.
14. Cadman to Fletcher, 13 March 1908; cited in Perison CWC, 68.
15. Lulu Sanford-Tefft, Little Intimate Stories of Charles Wakefield Cadman (Hollywood: Graham Fischer Corp., 1926), 23.
16. As cited in Wu, Constance Eberhart, 20.
17. Cadman was mortified at the illustrator's inaccurate representation of the flute itself (which is drawn and positioned more like an oboe than an Indian flageolet), but he also objected to the relegation of this handsome artwork to the inside title page instead of the outside cover. See Cadman's letters of 4 December 1908 and 20 January 1909, Perison CWC, 79.
18. Perison CWC, 98.
19. Poia was also presented in illustrated lecture form at the White House at Roosevelt's invitation in 1907. See also “Explains Berlin's Attack upon Poia,” Musical America 12, no. 2 (1910): 25; and Elise K. Kirk, American Opera (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), chap. 8, 139-59.
20. Perison CWC, 99.
21. Eberhart to Cadman, 20 May 1909; cited in Perison CWC, 97.
22. Eberhart to La Flesche, 27 April 1910; as cited in Perison CWC, 104. Perison sums up: “From time to time La Flesche objected to what he considered unrealistic…but in every case he seems to have acceded finally to the judgment of his collaborators.” Harry D. Perison, “The ‘Indian' Operas of Charles Wakefield Cadman,” College Music Symposium 22, no.2 (1982): 23.
23. Cadman to Eberhart, 15 April 1911; cited in Perison CWC, 118.
24. Perison, “‘Indian’ Operas,” 26. Details of the opera's structure are also taken from this source. The Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection holds a typescript titled Daoma, dividing the action into four acts; the score, revised as Ramala, combines the rescue and death of Nemaha into a single Act 3.
25. Cadman to La Flesche, 3 October 1909; cited in Perison CWC, 102.
26. Perison CWC, 102-3.
27. Stokowski led a Hollywood Bowl performance in August 1946, which was broadcast on the Standard Hour—the last major performance of Cadman's work during his lifetime. Perison, “‘Indian’ Operas,” 35.
28. Cadman to Eberhart, 1 March 1917; cited in Perison CWC, 134.
29. Perison, “‘Indian’ Operas,” 24-25; Perison CWC, 174-76. The watercolor drawings survive at the New York Public Library, but it is not known whether Cadman ever used them. The opera was revised throughout Cadman's lifetime and was eventually retitled Ramala.
30. Perison, “‘Indian’ Operas,” 30-31.
31. Cadman to Eberhart, 1 March 1917; cited in Perison CWC, 134.
32. Cadman's lapses in racial sensitivity had strained his relationship with Fletcher and La Flesche from the start. His name kept cropping up in the press next to distinctly unflattering statements about Native America. An account of his first trip to the reservation, published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, described an Omaha pow wow in language that the ethnologists considered insulting. Cadman also had occasion to apologize for one of Leonard Liebling's columns in the Musical Courier, in which he was reported to have said that Indian music “sounds as uncouth to us as the tone poems that come out of Japan, China, and Tibet” and that most Indian melodies “are not even melodies until after the adapter has given them form, symmetry, and rhythmical cohesion.” Perison CWC, 99-100.
33. For details, see Perison CWC, 118-19.
34. G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 82-83; John Koegel, “Mexican-American Music in Nineteenth-Century Southern California: The Lummis Wax Cylinder Collection at the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1994), 30, citing Lummis Correspondence
Files, 12 April 1904, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum. Lummis and Cadman were also acquainted, but their surviving correspondence deals mostly with plans for in-person visits.
35. Cadman to [unidentified, possibly Alice Nielsen], 6 February 1919, Pennsylvania State University Rare Materials.
36. Cadman to the Eberharts, 30 October 1911; cited in Perison CWC, 400.
37. Cadman to Eberhart, 28 January 1935; cited in Perison CWC, 400-401. Cadman's assumption in both letters is that some responsibility for his “tendencies” should rest with his neglectful and alcoholic father. In 1935, he wrote, “I feel sure my childhood wasnt just what it should have been and the queer twists in me physically etc. etc. must have come from away back or NOT so far back.” Perison CWC, 401-2, reports one near-marriage—in early 1915, to a pianist, composer, and teacher; Tsianina [Blackstone] reports another, later love interest, without divulging further details of time or place. Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe: Vergara, 1970), 115-16.
38. Catherine Parsons Smith observes that Cadman's homosexuality “was well known in Southern California and was generally ignored.” Smith, Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 317.
39. Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 13-14, 23.
40. Cadman to Eberhart, 1 May 1913; cited in Perison CWC, 147.
41. Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 26-27.
42. Perison CWC, 145, 406, 206-7.
43. Perison CWC, 93, 74.
44. Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 41-42.
45. At its premiere, it was billed with two other ethnically charged works: a ballet set to Henry Gilbert's symphonic poem “Dance in the Place Congo” and Franco Leoni's L'Oracolo, an opera set in San Francisco's Chinatown. See Irving Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 1883-1966 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 269-74; and Quaintance Eaton, The Miracle of the Met (New York: Meredith Press, 1968), 193-95, 201, 233.
46. While Lulu Sanford-Tefft credits Tsianina with suggesting the opera subject, Perison argues that the suggestion came from several Denverites, including Wilcox. It is noteworthy that “Shanewis” was also the name of the Indian maiden in Cadman's first song on a text by Eberhart, “The Tryst.”
