Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Dvoák was understandably less concerned with American exceptionalism than was Turner, but he still situated the United States at a unique moment in the steady (westward) progress of history. Columbus and colonialism figured in Dvoák's “New World” as well. There was no concealing the historical coincidence that linked the composer's arrival in the United States with the “discovery” of America. On the contrary, at a ceremony welcoming him to New York, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson gave an oration entitled “Two New Worlds: The New World of Columbus and the New World of Music.” Though his English was less than fluent, Dvoák probably got the drift, and Michael Beckerman has suggested that the memory of this speech might have given his symphony its famous subtitle.24 In light of the heightened colonial awareness surrounding his visit, Dvoák might also be understood as an agent of cultural imperialism, spreading German theory and practice to eager American pupils. As Richard Taruskin has argued, the National Conservatory employed its Czech guest “not as a Bohemian or nationalist but as master of the unmarked mother tongue,” German symphonic writing.25

  The controversial pronouncements Dvoák made upon arrival were also secondhand European methods, Old World wisdom about manufacturing national identity in music through reliance on folk roots. In the multicultural United States such teachings were at best difficult to realize, and at worst destined to perpetuate their creators' exile to the awkward periphery of the Teutonic “mainstream.” More often than not, composers' responses to this imported philosophy exhibited an Americanness far more complex than the assertion of blood ties or the celebration of shared historical experiences. Their selection and manipulation of source materials reflect their views on race, class, and the power relations among American population groups. In short, their music encodes the same tensions and resolutions embodied in the nation they represented.

  THE WILD WEST

  While Frederick Jackson Turner spoke from inside the hallowed halls of the Columbian Exposition's numerous congresses, another version of the West took shape outside the fair gates—one that exposed westward expansion's processes of conflict and conquest for all to see: Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Of course I am not the first to point out this conjunction. Richard Slotkin, Louis Warren, Frederick Nolan, and Richard White, among others, have observed that while intellectuals were discussing the West, Buffalo Bill was reliving it for a paying crowd.26 Representing William “Buffalo Bill” Cody's return to the States after years of European touring, the appearance of his Wild West show at the exposition had the character of a homecoming celebration; 3.8 million tickets were sold for its six-month stand near the Midway Plaisance.

  Though never called a show by its creators, the Wild West was nonetheless exiled from the neoclassical structures of the so-called White City because of its commercial associations—its emphasis on animals and acrobatics linked it to the circus. Yet it made visible the same rhetoric of racial and industrial progress that animated the fair as a whole.27 In its depictions of man mastering nature and its impressive deployment of the still noteworthy technologies of electricity and locomotion, the Wild West displayed not just a rustic frontier but a modern marvel whose import went beyond mere entertainment. According to business manager Nate Salsbury, the Wild West “is something of which intelligence, morality, and patriotism approve, because it is history not vaudeville.”28

  The Wild West staged the ethnic and ecological confrontations of the frontier in highly dramatic fashion, and it quickly grew into what cultural historian Richard Slotkin has called “the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier.”29 With origins in modest frontier theatricals, spiced with melodrama and stunts, it was patterned in part on the serialized chapters of the dime novel (the genre that made Cody literally a legend in his own time) and in part on the unfurling of wilderness landscapes and historical events on the traveling panorama shows that were so popular in the mid-nineteenth century.30 By 1887, under the influence of New York dramatist Steele MacKaye, the structure of the show had coalesced into a “drama of civilization,” tracing the development of frontier life through four “epochs”: from the Primeval Forest to the Prairie to the Cattle Ranch and the Mining Camp, the last of which included a terrific cyclone replicated by wind machines and the famous attack on the Deadwood Stagecoach. The Wild West was designated “America's National Entertainment,” and by the late 1880s, it was thrilling the capitals of Europe, in effect replacing the minstrel show as America's most prominent popular culture export.

  As its relegation to the Midway Plaisance suggests, the Wild West would always have to battle those who saw it as cheap or disreputable. Yet in this fight it could mobilize powerful resources that have continued to support western art and literature: a pretension to historical authenticity, an emphasis on real or imaginary audience participation, and a tendency to read the national or even the international into the regional. Historians have long noted that Buffalo Bill's own authenticity was a matter of much debate. His storied biography was intertwined with the dime novels of Ned Buntline and Ingraham Prentiss, spiced with tales of Pony Express riding, gold digging, buffalo hunting, and Indian fighting that were as much fiction as fact. Cody was already being portrayed as a character in frontier-themed plays before he took to the stage himself, and once he did, he joined a host of Buffalo Bill impersonators who continued to play at the boundary of history and myth.31 The Wild West's merging of truth and tall tale might itself be considered “western,” as Warren writes: “In the popular mind the West was an artful deception, a place to be explored with the same methods, and often the same level of enjoyment, as any humbug. In ways long underappreciated by historians, frontier ideology reinforced popular eagerness to play this game. After all, the border between settlement and wilderness was not only the meeting point of civilization and savagery. It was also where the West—whatever that was—met the printing press, the artist's canvas, and the lithograph machine.”32

  Although the spectacle was meant to offer universal lessons about valor and skill, western heroes had particular advantages over regional icons. Like Edward MacDowell's “rude” but “manly” Indians and Turner's intrepid frontiersmen, they could symbolize the nation's most distinctive virtues while eliding the most divisive event in American history. As Warren observes, part of the Wild West's appeal depended on “projected amnesia” about the Civil War.33 For all their educational aspirations, Cody's press agents would have been the first to admit that the Wild West was much more than a history lesson: instead, it allowed audience members to participate in westward expansion. Elite spectators were treated to a stagecoach ride complete with an ambush, and even those watching from the stands were invited to wander through a “real” Indian encampment and to imagine themselves repelling the savage “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” that was the show's typical closing act.

  With its gripping defense of home and family, the Settler's Cabin episode reinforced an ethos of domestic protection as the primary purpose of western heroism. Yet many scholars have noted that Buffalo Bill's frontier imagery was transferred easily and often to other kinds of conflict, both national and international. Historians have often called attention to the cowboy and Indian stereotypes permeating contemporary understanding of the struggles between capital and labor that culminated in Chicago's Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. Richard Slotkin has noted the enormous range of cultural and political contexts that Americans have understood through the figures of “savage war.”34

  Occasionally the Wild West itself made such interpretations all but explicit. Its famous reenactment of “Custer's Last Rally” is a case in point. As Warren has pointed out, Custer episodes rarely figured as the climax of the show. Whenever Custer was evoked, however, the arena atmosphere was especially charged by the presence in the show of Indians who had actually fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, and by the long-established (though largely fictional) intertwining of Cody's and Custer's
biographies. Mere days after learning of the general's defeat, Cody claimed to have taken “The First Scalp for Custer” in a furious battle with the Cheyenne Yellow Hair. (What ever its dramatic background, the violent act was real, and the resulting scalp traveled with Cody for years, forming one of the Wild West's most durable, if controversial, attractions.) Roughly a decade later, Cody was playing Custer to Madison Square Garden, flanked by a posse of cowboys better rehearsed, and more uniformly Anglo, than Custer's regiment had ever been.35

  The Wild West had not toured in the United States since 1888, and upon arriving in Chicago, it sported a new name befitting both its new international reputation and the American West's continuing status as the leading edge of a global westward march. Now dubbed “Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” it featured Cossacks as well as cowboys, Arabs, gauchos, Magyars, and the military horse men of other lands (see figure 1). In Warren's words, “The Congress of Rough Riders of the World reinscribed America's frontier history not just as racial conflict, but as the last of the many conflicts in the east-to-west march of white civilization.”36

  Imperial overtones became stronger still as the United States approached the Spanish-American War. A billboard of 1898-99 asked potential Wild West spectators to contemplate American history “from the primitive days of savagery up to the memorable charge of San Juan hill,” and in fact Cody staged the “Battle of San Juan Hill” instead of “Custer's Last Fight” in 1899.37 Slotkin writes, “This substitution of an imperial triumph carried off in ‘Wild West' style, for a ritual re-enactment of the catastrophe that symbolized the end of the old frontier, completes the Wild West's evolution from a memorialization of the past to a celebration of the imperial future.”38

  The undisputed hero of the San Juan Hill charge was Theodore Roosevelt. Historians have long observed that Roosevelt's vision of the West was deeply connected with his national and international aims.39 Given the latter-day fame of his Rough Riders—a volunteer cavalry that crossed social and racial lines—many have assumed that Buffalo Bill named his famous “Rough Riders” after Roosevelt's. In fact, the reverse seems to have been true, though Roosevelt at times disputed the link. Even if the shared moniker were mere coincidence, there is little doubt that Cody's and Roosevelt's Rough Riders had much in common. As Slotkin puts it, Cody “performed as myth and ritual the doctrines of progressive imperialism that Roosevelt promulgated as ideology.”40 Associating the West with competition, self-reliance, democracy, and the advance of civilization, both Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill shaped popular understandings of the West that were potent enough to seem relevant for more than a century, and flexible enough to meet new cultural needs. This book bears witness to the costume parade of western heroes who, by turn, became imperial conquerors, self-made men, Depression-era outcasts, and emblems of Cold War individualism.

  FIGURE 1. The intermingling of “Savage, Barbarous and Civilized Races” on the international stage in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, circa 1896

  FRONTIER FIGURES

  The metaphorical richness of the frontier myth and the manifold identities of the western hero found expression in every cultural sphere, including classical music. This book thus lies at the intersection of three frontiers: the musical frontier opened by American composers' search for a national identity, the historical frontier pioneered by those seeking the roots of the American character in the American West, and the cultural frontier enacted by those who celebrated the West's potential for colorful and commercial exchange. In the watershed carved out by the confluence of the Dvoák debate, the Turner thesis, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West—the intersection between American music, American history, and the mythology of the American West—there is much fertile ground. And while the line of westward expansion across North America has unique and powerful symbolic content, it was in reality only one frontier among many. In the chapters that follow, we will also see figures negotiating with the frontiers represented by new technology, political and demographic change, and large-scale shifts in aesthetic sensibility. Every frontier is, by definition, a site of hybridity and exchange, and therefore a likely site for transformation.

  During the first half of the twentieth century, as western imagery became ever more prominent in the visual arts and popular culture, American composers also turned to the West for inspiration. On their westward journey they carried a sometimes unwieldy load. They were burdened and encouraged by a changing sense of responsibility toward audiences and toward what they perceived as the “progress” of art. They shouldered among their equipment a small arsenal of European conceptions of nationalism and a catalog of stereotypically western figures already rendered familiar by artists in other media—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper, Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Increasingly as the century progressed, they also had at their disposal the documents of early ethnography and western history and the glossy simulacra of the tourist trade.

  Composers were no more interested in the impossible project of defining “the West” than were their counterparts in literature or painting. But they contributed to the ways the West was imagined, responding to its landscapes and inhabitants as Americans always have, by idolizing, exaggerating, and stereotyping. In short, they made myths. When they incorporated western images, texts, or folk melodies into their scores, composers invited audiences to listen for the frontier and to imagine themselves as participants in its history. The resulting music forms the soundtrack of Manifest Destiny, marked by symbols that are usually easy to recognize but not always easy to interpret. Rather than a comprehensive history of composers' engagement with western Americana, in this book I offer thematically related case studies, while a string of reluctantly omitted chapters stretches to the horizon in my mind's eye. I hope that my choices have allowed me to suggest the complex negotiations that composers made between the intricacies of their individual biographies and such sweeping historical phenomena as world wars, economic fluctuations, and the entertainment revolutions caused by radio and film.

  From the Boston Tea Party to the Boy Scouts, images of Indians have been central to the manufacture of American identity.41 At the turn of the century, composers usually turned to Native American materials if they wished to give their works a western flavor. Parts 1 and 2 treat Arthur Farwell and Charles Wakefield Cadman, showing how these dissimilar composers—one a patriotic ideologue, the other a sentimental songwriter—shared assumptions about Indian music and about Native Americans as “disappearing tribes.”42 As the forced relocation of Native Americans drew to a close, many American composers seized the chance to build a national music based on the readily available European model for national musics: injecting indigenous elements into conventional contexts. Farwell's most important achievement (the founding of the Wa-Wan Press in 1901) was but one branch of a lifelong agenda that included original works based on indigenous sources, grassroots organizations for composers, and elaborate community pageants. Throughout these varied endeavors, he embraced a vision of the West as unique in its potential for musical and cultural revitalization. By contrast, for Cadman, western folklore functioned more like other types of exotica.43 He minimized the importance of anthropological accuracy and disavowed overtly political messages. He made only modest claims to any kind of personal identification with these “foreign” sources—yet he was more engaged than Farwell was in the political struggles of the Indians who collaborated with him. He was also more successful than Farwell in his relationships with the musical institutions of his day, and many of the conventions employed in his dramatic works are reflected or deflected in other works on western themes: Arthur Nevin's Poia, Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa, Victor Herbert's Natoma, and George Gershwin's Girl Crazy.

  Like early ethnographers, these composers walked a fine line between sympathetically portraying Native American life and propagating racial stereotypes. Echoing frontier historians before and after Turner, they had a tendency to treat natives and nature
as a single entity—an unspoiled geography to be admired or a fearsome obstacle to be conquered. Their fascination with Indian tunes was genuine, but their music also encoded a celebration of westward expansion and the supposed disappearance of Native American life in the face of white civilization. No less than Buffalo Bill, they could celebrate Indian heroes without disrupting the tragic trajectory of the “dying race.” While Farwell depended upon American Indian songs and symbols in pieces such as his American Indian Melodies (1901), he relied heavily on musical techniques that emphasize the foreignness of the material he borrowed. And while Cadman's opera Shanewis (1918) explores (doomed) interracial love, his cantata The Sunset Trail (1927) is a blatant eulogy for the living. In instrumental works, these composers overrode the Indians' own creative agency by altering borrowed melodies or disregarding original contexts. In their texted music, emphasis on Indian identification with the land suggests a metaphorical collapsing of the human, Native American presence into the distinctive western landscape.