by Beth E. Levy
47. Cadman to Eberhart, 1 March 1917; cited in Perison CWC, 134.
48. Cadman, “Some Confessions about Shanewis,” Violinist (July 1918): 354; cited in Gary William Mayhood, “Charles Wakefield Cadman and His Opera Shanewis” (MA thesis, Kansas State University, 1991), 95.
49. Cadman, foreword to The Robin Woman (Shanewis): An American Opera (Boston: White-Smith, 1918).
50. Foreword and “Argument” in The Robin Woman (Shanewis).
51. Musical Courier, 28 March 1918, 8.
52. This passage was cut when Shanewis was produced in Denver on 5 December 1924.
53. Cadman, foreword to the Piano Suite “Thunderbird” (Boston: White-Smith, 1917), 3. This technique resembles and may even have been borrowed from Frederick Burton's music for the Hiawatha pageant, held at Kensington Point on Lake Huron. See Pisani, Imagining Native America, 247.
54. Musical Courier, 28 March 1918, 8; Evening Sun, as reprinted in Musical Courier, 4 April 1918, 13.
55. New York Times review, cited in Musical Courier, 4 April 1918, 13.
56. The Evening World, cited in Musical Courier, 4 April 1918, 13.
57. Tsianina recalled: “[The conductor] had me sing the opening aria, The Spring Song of the Robin Woman, on the stage for him, so that he could get the feel of Indian rhythm. He was wonderful and wanted to take steps to have me sing the part of ‘Shanewis,' but the very thought frightened me terribly.” Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 123.
58. Chicago's American Grand Opera Company announced Shanewis for a spring 1920 tour, but then postponed it. It was finally featured in 1922, as part of the company's “American” season, to generally favorable reviews. See Perison CWC, 228-31. During this time, a petition to have Shanewis heard in Philadelphia was circulated but came to nothing. Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection, Scrapbook I.
59. See Wu, Constance Eberhart, 44-45, for descriptions of some of these events.
60. Upon her return, when Tsianina sang excerpts from Shanewis on a tour of the Pacific Northwest, one reviewer called Shanewis's final monologue “Into the Forest Near to God I Go” a “formidable arraignment of the pale-face civilization,” continuing: “Tsianina lived and suffered in every note…. lived the age-old anguish, felt the fierce indictment, and so made her hearers live and feel the same emotion.” Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 114, 115.
61. Tsianina, Where Trails Have Led Me, 125.
62. One later letter in this vein can be found in AFC, 39/12, in which Cadman announces the recent completion of his Pennsylvania Symphony and apologizes for not phoning Farwell when he was in New York City for his Composers Forum-Laboratory concert. Farwell, too, seems cordial, but he took pains to protest the “misconception” that he was “some sort of follower of my good friend Charley Cadman” when Quaintance Eaton asked him for biographical information in 1935: “I had been composing Indian music, playing it and lecturing on it…before Cadman began sending me his compositions, and those were not Indian music at all. I advised him to tackle the Indian music or other American folk music sometime about 1902 to 1904. This is what started him on it…. What I told you above about Cadman's beginning is of course not to be published. That is, not unless it should come from Cadman himself.” Farwell to Eaton, 12 June 1935, AFC, 35/49.
4. STAGING THE WEST
1. On the forest as wilderness, see, among others, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1982). On the evolution from Cooper's Leatherstocking figure Natty Bumppo into the late nineteenth-century gunslinger, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 106-12.
2. In Imagining Native America, Pisani chronicles over seventy-five “Hiawatha” works. On Longfellow's choice of the name “Hiawatha” and on the later pageant plays that recreate the Iroquois hero's deeds, see Alan Tractenberg, Shades of Hiawatha (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 81-82, 86-97.
3. Before it was imported to Shanewis, Burton's “My Bark Canoe,” was originally included in a suite of music composed for the Lake Huron Hiawatha Pageant. Pisani, Imagining Native America, 248.
4. Cadman assigns actual Indian tunes to only two points in the score; each emphasizes superstition and death: Wokomis's recitation of “The Legend of Niagara” uses an Osage tune in its background music, and Shungela's stoic “Death Song” is based on a Vancouver Indian melody collected by Fletcher.
5. Program preserved in the Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection, 16/16.
6. Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection Scrapbook.
7. Burrill Phillips, “History of Colorado Is Idealized in Brilliant Pageant,” Musical America, May [1927], clipping in the Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection, Scrapbook H. All citations from the libretto come from the program included in this scrapbook. Music from the pageant and related materials are held in the Lillian White Spencer Papers at Denver Public Library.
8. Kaspar Monahan, “Colorado Pageant Proves Grand Epic,” [Denver] E[vening] News, 3 May [1927], clipping in the Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection, Scrapbook H.
9. Ibid.
10. This proclamation reads, in part: “WHEREAS, Our sturdy, fearless PIONEERS…have wrought MIRACLE [sic] in hollowing a mighty mountain, and making therein a great road from vast new realms of plenty; a road whose bonds of steel unite the eastern and the western seas; therefore BE IT RESOLVED, That we, sons and daughters of the PIONEERS, pause a moment in the busy rush of life, to voice our gratitude and to offer praise for blessings that have been, and are, and WILL BE in this dear land of COLORADO.”
11. Guelfo Civinini and Carlos Zangarini, La Fanciulla del West [libretto], English version by R. H. Elkin (Milan, Italy: Ricordi, 1910), 4; cited in Annie Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis, Puccini and the Girl: The History and Reception of “The Girl of the Golden West” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 10.
12. See Allan Atlas, “Belasco and Puccini: ‘Old Dog Tray' and the Zuni Indians,” Musical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1991): 362-98.
13. Randall and Davis, Puccini and the Girl, 32.
14. Kathryn Kalinak interprets the role of Foster's songs in the movie western in How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 57-59, 89-90, 117, 136.
15. Catherine Parsons Smith and Cynthia S. Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 69-72. All three productions of Narcissa took place on the West Coast (Seattle, 1912; San Francisco, 1925; and Los Angeles, 1945). See also Mary Carr Moore, “Writing and Producing an Opera,” Pacific Coast Musician, 7 July 1915, 51.
16. Score excerpt reprinted by permission in Smith and Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, 74-77.
17. Smith and Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, 71-72.
18. Ibid., 79, 72, 74.
19. Sydney Strong, “Whitman in Grand Opera,” Chicago Advance, n.d.; and “Narcissa,” Argonaut, 19 September 1925, 10; cited in Smith and Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, 80, 104.
20. Edward N. Waters, Victor Herbert: A Life in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 385.
21. “Grand Opera Written by Americans to be Given Here,” New York Times, 22 January 1911, SM13. Farwell praised Herbert's score: “His Indian themes, whether borrowed entire or simulated, are authentic in their quality. He has shown remarkable sympathy in devising a scheme of development for these themes which retains their peculiar character and ‘color.’” “American Opera on American Themes,” American Review of Reviews, April 1911, 445.
22. “Grand Opera Written by Americans to be Given Here,” New York Times, 22 January 1911, SM13.
23. Pisani (Imagining Native America, 264-66) offers a detailed discussion of the Dagger Dance, noting its later uses and its characteristic tropes (tom-tom rhythms, tetratonic melody, descending contours, and parallel harmonization).
24. In addition to his brilliant analysis of Natoma's “theme of fate,” Pisani (Imagining Native America) also iden
tifies a “Natoma chord” (the minor-seventh F#, A, C#, E) and documents its prior occurrence in Dvoák “New World” Symphony and Henry Gilbert's music for Curtis's “Vanishing Race.”
25. Waters, Victor Herbert, 374-75.
26. My interpretation here differs slightly from James Parakilas's in his excellent article “The Soldier and the Exotic: Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter, Part II,” Opera Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1994): 43-69, esp. 55-59. Parakilas notes: “The racial difference between Yankee and Native American…is treated as so great that Natoma cannot even play the role of exotic to Paul. A representative of an intermediate race [Barbara] is needed for that role” (p. 55).
27. Waters (Victor Herbert, 562) cites Herbert's 1924 response to an article in Musical America.
28. Lee Shippey, “The Lee Side O' L.A.: Personal Glimpses of World-Famed Southlanders,” Los Angeles Times, 1 September 1929, A4.
29. Cadman to Eberhart, 27 September 1937; cited in Perison CWC, 334.
30. Cadman appears to have written his own textual prefaces for From Hollywood. Two of its movements evoke silent film stars: the second movement scherzo is titled “To a Comedian” and is dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, and the first movement (“June on the Boulevard”) celebrates Mary Pickford.
31. Perley Poore Sheehan, Hollywood as a World Center (Hollywood Citizen Press, 1924), 44. A list of Sheehan's screenplays can be found at the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).
32. Sheehan, Hollywood as a World Center, 43, 58. Sheehan's claim that the Bowl had “never been touched by greed or strife” is definitively countered by Catherine Parsons Smith, Making Music in Los Angeles, chap. 10.
33. Farwell, “The Riddle of the Southwest, I,” Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1926, B4.
34. Sheehan, Hollywood as a World Center, 99-100, 2. See also similar rhetoric on pages 35, 41, 44, and 50, where the Hollywood Bowl is described as the “highest expression” of “the community life of these Aryan migrants.”
35. Smith, Making Music in Los Angeles, 235.
36. Ibid., 231-33.
37. Smith and Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, 180-81.
38. Ives was persuaded to join the Society of Native American Composers by Adolph Weiss, but in March 1943 he wrote that he had received a report “that this Society is against all Jews, and also pro-Fascist. I cannot believe that this is true—but, if it is, accept my resignation immediately.” Charles Ives to Henri Lloyd Clement (Ethel Dofflemeyer). See also Mary Carr Moore to Charles Ives, 22 March 1943; cited in Smith and Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, 184, 259.
39. Jerome Moross, “Hollywood Music without Movies,” Modern Music 18 (May-June 1941), 262.
40. Cadman to Eberhart, 11 February 1936; cited in Perison CWC, 323. See also Cadman's letter to the New York Times, 12 February 1936.
41. Cadman had already written some film music for The Vanishing American (1925), in addition to his incidental music for Earle's Rubaiyat. His best-known work for Fox was the theme song for The Sky Hawk, reportedly finished a mere three hours after he received the text by telegram. He also appeared on screen performing “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water” in the 1930 film Harmony at Home. Perison CWC, 253-63.
42. Cadman, “The Musical Enigma of the Soundies,” The Music World (September 1930): 9, 20; (October 1930): 6, 21. Cadman's most notorious article of this period was “Musicus Quo Vadis?” written for the London Chesterian in 1931 but reprinted in The Music World in March 1932. His linking of “radical” tendencies with communism and fascism required numerous apologies, one of which appeared in the New York Times, 6 March 1932, section VIII, p. 8. See also Cadman, “Evolutionary Versus Revolutionary Music,” Music News, 20 May 1937, 3, 15.
43. Quoted in Shippey, “Personal Glimpses.”
44. Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon, The Gershwins (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 125; Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 46.8.
45. Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 196.
46. Pollack (George Gershwin, 445ff., 478) discusses “I Got Rhythm” as a jazz standard. He also provides a detailed account of the intriguing relationships between several of Girl Crazy's most popular tunes and the unproduced Gershwin-Ziegfeld show East Is West.
47. Pollack, George Gershwin, 466. See also Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 56-66; and Deena Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (New York: Dutton, 1991), 167.
5. WEST OF EDEN
1. Cadman, “The Thresher,” How Constance & Donald Spent the Summer: Eight Studies without Octaves (Boston: Ditson, 1909).
2. Examples include the piano suite Prairie Sketches (1906) and a 1928 song called “Prairie Night.”
3. Cadman to Eberhart, 1 March 1939; cited in Perison CWC, 348-49.
4. Cadman to Eberhart, 21 March 1939; cited in Perison CWC, 350.
5. Program for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 19-20 February 1942, Pennsylvania State University Cadman Collection 16/14. The notes state that “authoritative information…has been provided by Mr. Cadman” describing “a long line of Pennsylvania pre-revolutionary ancestors on his mother's side. His father's father hailed from England. Both the Cadmans and the Wakefields are particularly Anglo-Saxon and have been prominent in British and Colonial affairs throughout the centuries.”
6. Perison CWC (362-63) identifies performances in Harrisburg, Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, and reports of performances in Cleveland and Chile.
7. Cadman to Constance Eberhart, 27 December [1946]; cited in Perison CWC, 364.
8. See, among others, Limerick, Legacy of Conquest; and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
9. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 25.
10. Ibid., 88, 141, 159.
11. Ibid., 99, 111, 122, 127.
12. Ibid., 246. Marx observes that these American hunters are often “impelled to restrict or even renounce their hunting. I am thinking of Natty Bumppo, Melville's Ishmael, Faulkner's Ike McCaslin, and Thoreau himself.”
13. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 173.
14. Ibid., 138.
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; repr. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995), 156.
16. In 1917, the Chicago Symphony devoted an entire concert to Sowerby's works. See B. Wayne Hinds, “Leo Sowerby: A Biography and Descriptive Listing of Anthems,” EdD thesis (George Peabody College for Teachers, 1972), 21-22; and Dena J. Epstein, “Frederick Stock and American Music,” American Music 10 (1992): 20-52.
17. Burnet C. Tuthill, “Leo Sowerby,” Musical Quarterly 24 (1938): 250.
18. Hinds, “Leo Sowerby,” 58.
19. Sowerby, Musical News, responding to the idea that his Eight Little Pieces were imitative of Schoenberg and futurism; W. L. Hubbard, “America Will Lose Its Greatest Composer If Sowerby Goes Abroad,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 March 1920; cited in Hinds, “Leo Sowerby,” 29, 63-64.
20. Hinds, “Leo Sowerby,” 35.
21. Sowerby, From the Northland, piano suite (Boston: Boston Music Company, 1926); and From the Northland, orchestra (New York: G. Schirmer, 1927).
22. Margie A. McLeod, “Apathy Drawing Us Back Under Foreign Domination, Says Sowerby,” Musical America, 12 February 1921.
23. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927).
24. Ibid., x. Sandburg's introduction devotes paragraphs to four arrangers, including Sowerby, elevating them above the pro forma list of contributors that includes Arthur Farwell, Charles Farwell Edson, and “Ruth Porter Crawford,” soon to be Ruth Crawford Seeger.
25. Tuthill, “Leo Sowerby,” 252-53.
26. Daniel Gregory Mason, writing
in an unidentified publication called “The Berkshire Festival of Music,” from the scrapbook of Bertha Wiersma Nolton; as cited in Hinds, “Leo Sowerby,” 62.
27. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 23.
28. For more on the pastoral topic in eighteenth-century music, see, among others, Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980); and Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
29. Sandburg, “The Prairie,” in Poems of the Midwest (contains Chicago Poems [1916] and Cornhuskers [1918]) (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1946). Subsequent quotations and references to line numbers in the poem correspond to this edition.
30. “Champagne & Cornbread,” Time, 29 January 1945.
31. Sandburg, “The Prairie,” 164.
32. Sandburg, “Youth and Pioneers: An Ode,” 14 June 1927; reprinted in Carl Sandburg, Home Front Memo (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 291-94.
33. Sowerby, “The Folk Element—The Vitalizer of Modern Music,” Musical Scrap Book 1 (October 1927): 11; cited in Hinds, “Leo Sowerby,” 132.
34. Cadman, letter printed in the Pacific Coast Musician, 7 August 1943, p. 5.
35. Critic Moses Smith faced a similar confusion two years later, and he approved when the Boston Symphony Orchestra classified Foss as a “native” composer rather than a “foreigner” because he had spent his “formative years amid American influences.” “Boston Goes All Out for Premieres,” Modern Music 21 (January-February 1944): 103-4. Smith heard the “symphonic synthesis” that Koussevitzky performed in Boston in 1943. The choral version of The Prairie, premiered by Robert Shaw, won a New York Music Critics Circle Award for 1944, and the following year Artur Rodzinski performed it with the Westminster Choir and the New York Philharmonic.
36. New Yorker (30 January 1965): 23. See also Raymond Yiu, “Renaissance Man: A Portrait of Lukas Foss,” Tempo 221 (July 2002): 15-23.
