by Beth E. Levy
THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
Farwell was generally adamant in his insistence on national unity over sectionalism. At the end of the press's third year, he clarified: “Ordinarily, there are easterners, westerners, northerners, southerners, Bostonians and what not…. How, then, can any of these reasonably be expected to grasp, even with faint animation, the central vivifying principle of the Wa-Wan, which is forgetfulness of section in the unifying spirit of the whole?”39 Yet Farwell also felt that the western United States held a special potential because of its open-minded citizens and its distance from cosmopolitan Europe. During his first visit to Los Angeles, Farwell conveyed his enthusiasm to Wa-Wan readers: “We must reckon with the west. The Great Word of the west has not yet been spoken in art,—when it arises, many traditions must fall. Here the mind is overwhelmed by the vastness of nature's plan…. Already there are many…Botticellis in the rough, scattered about these deserts and Edens of the west.”40 Comparing contemporary America to an ancient Greece in which overcivilized Athens required renewal from its own West (Sicily and Corinth), he wrote: “History is repeating itself…. Again we have the vast, vague, significant west, and the self-centered and consciously cultured east. And the culture of the east is in part borrowed from Europe, as the eastern culture of Greece was in part borrowed from the Orient.” Thankfully, the distinguishing features of the western landscape ensured that America's renaissance would be unique. “The Rockies, the plains and the Pacific,” Farwell continued, “will afford another stimulus to the creative mind than the Isles of Greece.”41
Farwell himself found this stimulus first in Indian music and then in western peoples and places. The narrative of his artistic awakening, including the four “western tours” he undertook between October 1903 and March 1907, survives in slightly eccentric form under the title Wanderjahre of a Revolutionist, published in weekly installments by Musical America during May and June 1909.42 By the spring of 1903, he recalled, he was already nurturing “an ardent desire” to see the Far West for three reasons: to observe “the musical conditions of the whole country at first hand”; to give “a broad trial” to his newest compositions based on Native American themes; and “to get out into the Indian country, and hear the Indians sing” (WJ, 95).
Though Farwell sometimes cited Indians' presence in every American state as a reason for their universal appeal, especially when he wished to distinguish Indian music from black or Hispanic music, he more often associated Indians with the West—the Plains, the pueblos, or the reservations to which many tribes had already been removed. Indians may have had a ghostly presence in Farwell's native Minnesota, but he knew that his chances of hearing Indian music depended on his getting out west. The prospect of closer contact with Native American people was certainly an enticement, but Farwell already considered himself something of an Indian aficionado. In fact, the expertise he had manufactured in this area was precisely what made his westward travel possible—an irony that was not lost on the composer himself. He noted that the means of financing his trips was, “curiously enough, the very thing disparaged by such critics as had noticed it…namely—the Indian music…. I realized that in the making of this Indian music I had forged the wings by which I could fly out of my Eastern prison” (WJ, 95-96).
Farwell called each of his four ventures a “western tour”—perhaps because each circuit extended as far as California, or perhaps simply because each involved travel beyond the cultural spheres of Boston and New York. The first trip took him from coast to coast with stops in upstate New York, his native Minnesota, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver; he spent Christmas week at the Grand Canyon before continuing on to the West Coast for the month of January. Farwell made sure to hit cities where he had relatives or friendly contacts, and numerous music clubs and civic groups responded favorably to his advance publicity.
Ever effusive, Farwell devoted special energy to capturing the thunderous impact of the landscape during his first trip. Having reached his native state, he took a stand on the banks of the Mississippi to exclaim: “How vastly these great scenes exceed in space and grandeur anything which may be witnessed upon the Rhine!…What great unwritten music lingers about these dreaming lands!” (WJ, 98). By the time he reached New Mexico, he was clearly, exultantly, on unfamiliar ground:
Going over the Great Divide, and into New Mexico for the first time, it is hard to believe that these strange infinite stretches of opaline desert, mesa-grit and mysterious, are part of the same old United States that we have always known. A dweller of the East, the Mississippi Valley, or the Northwest suddenly dropped down into this extraordinary region would certainly think himself nowhere except in Egypt, or possibly on Mars. And the strange beings that came crowding up to the train at stopping places—no one familiar with the Sioux or any of the Middle Western tribes would take this unfamiliar race at the first glance for Indians…. At the pueblo of Isleta, near Albuquerque, I first had the opportunity of seeing these strange and picturesque desert dwellers in the midst of their native surroundings, and of casually hearing a few of their songs. (WJ, 101-2)
On the rim of the Grand Canyon, Farwell finally found himself at a loss for words when he “arrived at the edge of the world”:
I had often wondered what it would be like to die and wake up on the other side, or to be Beethoven, or Wagner, or Dante. But such slight experiences are engulfed in the great one of that first glimpse into the incredible other-world of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. One cannot write about this place. There is no word, no phrase, no description that does not belittle it, unless we go to the Apocalypse…. I sat there watching the lights and shadows play and change over the strange distances and depths of this wonderworld, and heard the unwritten symphonies of the ages past and the ages to come. (WJ, 102)
Farwell's tours were motivated by curiosity and the anticipation of modest financial gain; it quickly became apparent, however, that the chief advantage of his sojourns would be the personal contacts he made along the way. Everywhere he went, he found supportive women and like-minded men, and he expressed his appreciation of the region's receptiveness in a variety of newspaper pieces, perhaps most explicitly in Portland, Oregon, where an unnamed interviewer quoted the composer's opinion that “American ideals are purer in this section of the country, too, for one does not find so much European alloy in them, and individuals are not afraid to think for themselves and express what they think in plain terms.”43 Farwell's regional emphasis was not lost on his western (or midwestern) audiences. Under the headline “Western Genius to the Fore,” one Minnesotan reported: “It is satisfying to our Western pride to note that out of a dozen names mentioned by Mr. Farwell as among the best of the American composers, at least a half are Western men.”44 Farwell was likewise proud to have sparked East Coast interest in “western musical expressions” (WJ, 128). Here and elsewhere, Farwell's “West” encompassed anything that was distant—literally or metaphorically—from the European past.
The lecture component of Farwell's first trip was devoted to a tripartite presentation usually titled “Music and Myth of the American Indians and Its Relation to American Composition.” Most of what Farwell said on the topic can be pieced together from tour publicity and the copious review articles Farwell collected at almost every stop on his western journey and pasted into an extensive but deeply redundant scrapbook held in the Arthur Farwell Collection. Many of these clippings seem to paraphrase his lectures quite closely, and the substance of the lecture-recital changed very little from city to city. On the 1903-4 circuit, Farwell usually led with a report on the state of composition in America, paying particular attention not only to “Indian racial expression,” but also to popular music, ragtime, and cowboy song. The talk's next section was illustrated with excerpts drawn mostly from the American Indian Melodies and grouped into three categories: “elemental or cosmic songs,” “songs of human expression,” and “songs of the superhuman.” It explained “the Indian's place in American life and thought,” th
e “indestructibility of race spirit,” the worship of “the Great Mystery,” and the “inseparableness of story and song.”45 Almost every documented lecture ended with a selection of “original compositions developed from Indian themes” that expanded in tandem with the Wa-Wan's catalog of Indianist scores.
As Michael Pisani has ably demonstrated, “Indian Music Talks” were more than a passing fancy during the early twentieth century. Farwell seems to have pioneered the genre, but he was soon joined by many others, often frank imitators of his lecture-recital format.46 Several singers adopted portions of his program, but apparently they felt free to do the talking themselves if Farwell was not in town.47 Among composers, Loomis, Cadman, Troyer, and Thurlow Lieurance took lecture-recitals on the road. Yet Farwell's presentation seems to have carried especially strong anthropological authority because of his association first with Alice Fletcher and later with Charles Lummis. The earliest versions of his “Western Tour” brochures declared this kinship using the words of New York critic Henry Krehbiel, who wrote in 1902: “Miss Alice C. Fletcher has found a sympathetic companion in Mr. Arthur Farwell…who has made the first sustained attempt to infuse [Indian melody] with poetical significance and emotion by means of harmony.” Fletcher's own, private endorsement would soon follow. Shortly before Farwell set out on his lecture circuit, she declared to Farwell's mother, Sara, “how impressed I am with the progress your son is making…. His trip this Autumn will surely do him and the country good.”48 Contemporary newspapers frequently exaggerated Farwell's ethnological expertise and especially his work with Lummis, often blurring the line between transcription and fieldwork, claiming that he lived for years “among the Indians.”
Just as Farwell did, Charles Wakefield Cadman made sure that his “American Indian Music Talk” sported a veneer of anthropology. He mentioned Fletcher in the first paragraph of his descriptive brochure and took care to point out that the performance of the “Omaha Tribal Prayer” by Cadman's singer-collaborator Paul Kennedy Harper had earned “the unqualified approval of Francis La Flesche, a son of Chief Joseph of the Omaha Tribe.”49 Yet other passages in Cadman's brochure and the structure of the talk itself emphasize musical appeal more than cultural awareness. “Musical history, psychology, and ethnology are touched upon lightly,” the brochure states. Given the popularity of his Four American Indian Songs, Cadman's credentials rested more with the list of venerable singers who had already performed his music than on the scholarly sources for his tunes. Like Farwell, Cadman offered simple transcriptions before moving on to more elaborate scores—generally works by MacDowell, Troyer, and Farwell, all outnumbered by pieces by Cadman himself. But unlike Farwell, who grouped his numbers on the basis of their content, Cadman took a decidedly “musical” approach. He opened with the same “Old Man's Love Song,” but immediately after it, he played an excerpt from the first movement Beethoven's “Appassionata” Sonata, op. 57 (to illustrate some shared facet of melodic construction). He juxtaposed his own idealization of “The Mother's Vow” with portions of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite and Tchaikovsky's Symphonie “Pathétique.” In perhaps the most credible of his three comparisons, one that he actually learned from Fletcher and La Flesche, he followed the “Omaha Tribal Prayer” with a “Gregorian Chant of the 7th Century” and a “Mohammedan Call to Prayer,” each harmonized by Cadman himself. He wrote to La Flesche: “We sang the three religious songs first unaccompanied and as they would be heard in their native environment with afterward a simple harmonized accompaniment. This convinced the audience that all music really had its genesis in the same emotional root—springing from the same soil—and when they caught this fact—the bond of sympathy was established and the enjoyment and appreciation keen. It was most gratifying.”50 From start to finish, Cadman aimed to explain Indian music and make it more accessible through productive comparisons with more familiar music.
By contrast, Farwell's emphasis on the particularity of Indian music is striking. In his eyes, its value lay not in its similarity to established classics, but in the departures from European tradition that it could enable. He proclaimed that Indian music “springs from, and interprets in new colors, the ‘great mystery,'…to which refreshing source American life is leading us back from the artificialities and technicalities which have latterly beset European culture.”51 While Cadman might have adapted his format to deliver a “Negro Music Talk” or even a “Persian Music Talk” with equal ease, for Farwell, only Native America carried the “cosmic,” “human,” and “superhuman” powers to revitalize American music. He wanted audiences to recognize Indian ideals (not Indian sounds) as familiar: “love of nature, reverence for its great invisible powers, freedom of spirit, self-reliance and stoical courage, dignity, elemental breadth of nature, intrinsic spiritual worth.” Without an understanding of the common humanity of the Indian (whose myths Farwell believed to be entirely transparent to any sympathetic mind), the progress of American art would falter: “We shall not know what Indian mythology has for us, and for the aggregate expression of the west, until we know all that the Indian has dreamed.”52
WAR AND PEACE
Implicit in Farwell's fervent, if imaginary, identification with the Indian is an effort to counteract some of the more egregious stereotypes that had long colored white views of Native life. Pisani counts among these “bloodthirsty warriors or traitorous scouts…occasionally a noble chieftain or a dark, mysterious maiden…the murderous thief, the idler and drunkard, or the embittered ‘half-breed.’ ”53 Farwell considered it a source of satisfaction that his American Indian Melodies had already brought to life alternative images of Indians, “to supplant the tales of scalps and tortures which have constituted heretofore nearly the whole stock in trade of his European reputation.”54 As Pisani has demonstrated, these stereotypes circulated in the United States as well as in Europe; but Farwell nonetheless offered a valuable corrective. His selection of “Wa-Wan” as a motto reflects this, for it memorializes a ceremony of “peace, fellowship, and song” that Farwell attempted to explicate in a new lecture-recital for his second western tour (see figure 2). In contrast to the piecemeal presentation of the original Indian Music Talk, Farwell here attempted to recreate an entire ritual, and thus to present Indian music in its most meaningful form: “These ceremonials mark the culmination of Indian racial expression; they focus and crystallize for us the inmost meanings of Indian racial life, exactly as the Greek drama preserves for us the great central truths of Greek civilization.”55 Compressing a multiday event into a single evening, Farwell nonetheless sought to retain its ritual structure and, by extension, an aura of communal experience that foreshadows his later work in pageantry and civic singing.
More than anything he could play or say, Farwell felt that with his own Wa-Wan ceremony, he could draw audiences into an experience that would yield insight into “the Indian character.” He observed: “The ritual is not someone's idea or explanation of the Indian's view of the world and of life, but is that view revealing itself…speaking for itself in the very music which the Indian himself conceived and employed in the enacting of those scenes.”56 This lecture-recital featured roughly a dozen tunes transcribed by Fletcher and Fillmore in their Study of Omaha Indian Music, and eight of these tunes found their way into a new piano suite that Farwell titled Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony of the Omahas (1906): “Receiving the Messenger” (no. 33 in Fletcher/Fillmore), Nearing the Village” (no. 34), “Song of Approach” (no. 35), “Laying Down the Pipes” (no. 38), “Raising the Pipes” (no. 39), “Invocation” (no. 42a), Song of Peace (no. 42), “Choral” (no. 41).57 Apart from switching the placement of no. 42 and no. 42a, and moving the “Choral” to a valedictory position at the end of the cycle, Farwell replicates the music as it occurs during the ritual action: the formal delivery and acceptance of sacred pipes representing peace and prosperity.
As he did in the American Indian Melodies, Farwell preserves most of the essential aspects of the tunes as he found them in print, keeping
Fillmore's key signatures in five of the eight pieces. Apart from the occasional elision of measures that reiterate the final note of a phrase, Farwell relies on repetition of whole tunes or multiple phrases rather than developing motives or inventing related melodic material. The overall effect, however, is rather more elaborate here than in the earlier piano miniatures. Several of the pieces involve introductory or closing gestures that expand on the borrowed melody, usually in the form of a partial reprise or an echo—an effect that Pisani finds crucial to the popular history of Indianism.58 The third vignette, “Song of Approach,” bears this type of rhetorical frame. Like most of the melodies Farwell favored, the tune is pentatonic, linking it in early twentieth-century parlance to “primitive” musics from around the world and allowing for a variety of harmonic realizations. Fillmore's setting clearly assumed a key signature of A; Farwell instead assumes the minor mode, and although he raises the melody by a half step, its notes occupy the same lines and spaces on the musical staff that they did in Fillmore's harmonization, yielding the peculiar result that Farwell's borrowing looks more faithful to Fillmore than it actually is.