Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  FIGURE 2. Publicity for Arthur Farwell's “western tours.” Courtesy of the Arthur Farwell Collection, Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music

  Farwell's opening gesture (now E-F#-E instead of Fillmore's E-F-E) is stretched for dramatic effect and made to accommodate a flamboyant arpeggiation of chromatic harmonies before being echoed at a lower register and in a simpler guise (see example 3). His initial harmonic progression might be understood as a move from a seriously altered supertonic seventh chord (G#-B-D-F#, but with B# replacing B to the tonic F# minor, which itself has been transformed into a seventh chord by the E dictated by the pitches of the borrowed melody. The impact, however, is purely coloristic. The sense of a tonal center arrives first with the bass tremolo in measure 3 marked “in imitation of Indian drum,” and from this point on F# functions as a pedal, sounding in some register on almost every quarter-note beat until the rhapsodic figuration of the opening returns to close the piece. For this entire time (mm. 6-33), the accompaniment throbs a double-drumbeat figure comprising an eighth note followed by a sixteenth note—substituting length for strength in an approximation of the typical STRONG-weak articulation of the Plains tribes.

  It is easy to imagine Farwell's Impressions evolving over the course of his western tour as he would have had ample chance to tinker with each setting until he was pleased with the result. In one of the earliest analytical studies of the composer, Edgar Lee Kirk in fact gave Farwell's lecture recitals credit for his fluency at the keyboard.59 Not surprisingly, the composer favored a more psychological explanation for the relative elaborateness of his Wa-Wan miniatures:

  The pianoforte sketches based upon this ceremony have been called “Impressions” since they depend, in feeling, largely upon early memories of the Indian of the west…. They aim to reflect in some measure the peaceful nature of the ceremony, the quiet and the breadth of the prairie, and to serve as an introductory insight into certain lesser known phases of Indian life. Peace, fellowship, song,—these gifts of the Great Spirit shall not pass with the Indian, and may long remind us of the efforts and deeds through which he sought to attain them.60

  Though the sad fate of the Indian might already have been sealed, Indian gifts could still be handed down to future generations. Farwell considered himself in a position to transmit this legacy because he had grown up on native soil: “It is not without powerful influence upon after life [sic] to spend the impressionable years of childhood and youth there upon the very ground where so lately, and so remote from the thought of the outer world, were enacted the scenes and performed the deeds of a romantic and heroic epoch.”61

  EXAMPLE 3. “Song of Approach,” mm. 1-18 (Wa-Wan Press, 1906)

  “Peace, fellowship, song”—though Farwell was forceful in articulating these themes, they were not necessarily what audiences wanted to hear. Among the dozens of newspaper reviews that Farwell collected while on tour, few convey anything about audience reaction. A bevy of headlines show the variety of ways in which audiences understood and misunderstood Farwell's message: “The Mental and Emotional Life of the Indian,” “Myth and Song Inseperable [sic],” “Much Music in Indian Songs,” and “Weird Singing Enraptures Women.” One observer considered the Omaha setting “The Song of the Deathless Voice” to be “very much like ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ without the ‘weep no more my lady.’” 62The question of reception was particularly thorny where Farwell's ideas bumped up against long-standing traditions of western-themed entertainment. In an anecdotal passage from Farwell's travelogue, he relished having been mistaken for a Wild West show of the Buffalo Bill variety while visiting Kinsley, Kansas:

  A stray cowpuncher, in search of a lively time, read the legend “American Indians” on a placard in the village street announcing my lecture-recital, and determined to take it in. He paid his quarter without asking any questions, like a good sport, and went into the little church where the event was about to begin. Leaning over the back of a pew, he timidly touched a man in the audience on the shoulder and said, “Say, is dis a show?” Being assured that it was, he took a seat and attended carefully; but after waiting vainly for half an hour for the scalping, or at least a little shooting to begin, he slid quietly out into the night in search of more thrilling adventures. (WJ, 100)

  Farwell frequently had to contend with widely held prejudices about the West, and it should not be surprising that he also found ways to turn these stereotypes to advantage. For example, he added a “Navajo War Dance” to his catalog in what he claimed was a calculated response to public opinion that his works celebrating the “quaint, poetic, and picturesque aspects” of Indian life were insufficiently “savage”: “Evidently I must reform and do something really Indian,” he wrote in 1909 (WJ, 123). For melodic material, Farwell chose “something to make your blood curdle and your hair to stand on end” (EDC, 384). In fact, Farwell wrote two Navajo War Dances and, as Thomas Stoner has pointed out, the two are often confused. Both are tripartite, featuring two borrowed melodies deployed in vigorous outer sections and contrasting midsections. The more famous of the two (in common time with a key signature of E major) is usually referred to as “Navajo War Dance No. 2.” It was written sometime in 1904, revised and labeled op. 29 circa 1908, and revived in the 1940s by John Kirkpatrick, who published his own edition and programmed it frequently.63 Together with “Pawnee Horses,” it remains one of Farwell's most compelling works, and yet its origins are somewhat mysterious.64 Given the work's popularity, it is surprising that Farwell never divulged his source tunes. Perhaps this is because both war dances seem more at home in the solo recital than the lecture-recital.

  More than any of his earlier works, the “Navajo War Dance No. 2” makes liberal use of small-scale repetition not just as a background feature but as an engine that can be manipulated to create momentum—as if Farwell's belated acknowledgment of the “savage” Indian freed him to explore rhythmic and textural considerations, not just melodic or harmonic ones. In the outer sections of the piece, the ostinato overwhelms the melody in its claim on the listener's attention. The serpentine bass line unsettles the texture, at least at first, when its not-quite-chromatic sequences of pitches is still surprising. During the first section, the figuration from bar 1 (D#-C-D-C-C#-C-C-B) or bar 2 (D#-C-D-C-C#-C-B-F#) appears in every measure that is not interrupted by a full stop in the melodic phrasing (see example 4). By bar 24, when the repetition becomes less literal, the ostinato has been so well established that a few pitch alterations have little effect on the impression of constancy.

  The “Navajo War Dance No. 2” is emphatic, but circularity on many levels renders its violence curiously impotent. The motoric ostinato goes nowhere: the focal note, E, can be heard on almost every beat except at points like measure 6, where both melody and accompaniment come to rest on B in a type of primitivist half cadence. The gradual thickening of texture that gives momentum to each section is undermined by the melody's modular phrasing, which dictates abrupt halts that remain startling even after repeated hearings. The third section rises to a climax no higher than the first, and although a sequential extension (m. 50) helps prepare the listener for an ending, the possibility remains that the piece will double back on itself yet again.

  Until the original tune comes to light, it is difficult to say whether the “exotic” features of the “Navajo War Dance No. 2” came from Farwell's pen or from the borrowed melody. Alas, no reviews seem to have survived from his 1907 performance in Logan, Utah, where Farwell “held forth for American music in the Mormon Tabernacle, and tried a Navajo War Dance on the elect” (WJ, 144), but composer Benjamin Lambord recognized in 1915 that the piece represented an extreme for Farwell in its “barbaric crudity,” noting that the composer had “renounced almost all defined harmony, preserving only the vigorous rhythm of the dance in the bold intervals of the Indian melody.”65 If the “barbaric crudity” was unusual for Farwell, the particular manner of his harmonic renunciation was not. Chromatic harmonies seem to have been the norm for Farwel
l, but both of his war dances exploit melodic chromaticism to excess. The other Navajo War Dance begins with an off-kilter chromatic scale that rumbles through the piano's lowest register.

  EXAMPLE 4. “Navajo War Dance No. 2,” mm. 1-6 (ed. John Kirkpatrick, New York: Music Press, 1947)

  As initially published in the folk collection From Mesa and Plain of 1905, this less famous war dance is immediately followed by Farwell's other lasting contribution to the repertoire of Indianist piano miniatures: “Pawnee Horses,” which the Bostonian composer and violinist Charles Martin Loeffler called in 1949 “the best composition yet written by an American.”66 Here we find chromatic activity of a different persuasion. The beginning, middle, and end of the piece feature a three-bar passage saturated with half steps that are designed to confuse harmonic perceptions, not to intensify the motion toward or away from a tonal center (see example 5). Although the pillar pitches for the key of C major (the tonic C and the dominant G) sound together in the opening chord, they are immediately dispersed into mutually exclusive groups as all twelve chromatic pitches are aligned and divided to present both of the available whole-tone scales, spelled G F E D B A and A F# E D C B.

  For several years Farwell had advocated French and Russian models as a counterweight to America's overwhelmingly German musical life, and in “Pawnee Horses” we have evidence that he took his own advice, employing one of Debussy's favorite scales to make a pointed departure from common practice harmony. While the downward trajectory of these framing bars may be linked to the typically descending phrases of Native American melody, the accompanying sense of harmonic free fall has its roots in a resistance to the patterns of tension and release dictated by Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian harmony. Like each of the tritones in the French augmented sixth chords that Farwell so enjoyed, the whole tone scale divides the octave into equal parts, eschewing a single center in favor of a cosmic democracy of pitches. The power of C and G to solidify a tonal center is dissolved in a downward spiral of intervals that achieves a not-quite-equal division of the octave; extracting the notes played by the right thumb yields a near cycle of minor thirds starting with a fall from B to G# to F but slipping down a half step before the last minor third can sound (E-D replaces the expected F-D).

  EXAMPLE 5. “Pawnee Horses,” mm. 1-9 (Wa-Wan Press, 1905)

  In overall form, “Pawnee Horses” is simpler than either war dance. Once the tune gets under way, in the middle register at the pickup to bar 4, much of the mysterious atmosphere evaporates. A takes its rightful place as an upper neighbor to the dominant G and ostinato figuration hammers home G and C almost exclusively. The two statements of the melody are separated and brought to a close by reprises of the whole-tone opening (mm. 15-17, 25-28). Farwell may have intended the regular structure and accompaniment of “Pawnee Horses” as foils for a melody that he considered “so complex and difficult in its rhythm as to render it virtually impossible as a song to be sung by any known singer except an Indian” (WJ, 124). In effect, however, the ostinato figures transfer the striking directionlessness of the whole-tone opening to rhythmic and harmonic realms.

  Like the war dances, “Pawnee Horses” is built on drones and the reiteration of small rhythmic cells. In this case, however, the constant motion suggests an environment free from human intervention: “There go the Pawnee horses,” the epigraph reads, “I do not want them,—I have taken enough.” Two discrete layers of accompanying material surround the melody, but they take no notice of its stops and starts. The implied fade-in (soft accompaniment followed by “well pronounced” melody) and literal fade-out suggest that the listener has been privileged to catch a glimpse of nature in transit—not a dance of “savages,” but the running of animals only barely tame, as Farwell states: “The melody carries the rhythm of the gallop and the spirit of the scene as only an Indian would have conceived it” (WJ, 124).

  This last assertion points to the central paradox of Farwell's Indianism: the impossible claim of complete spiritual identification with borrowed material. The war dances show that he was not immune to contemporary stereotypes about native savagery, and some of his piano miniatures engage with the conventional icons of Indian removal—the “defeated warrior” and the “vanishing race.” But Farwell's desire to serve as a conduit for “Indian spirit” was so fused with his self-image as a pioneer for American music that such sunset themes are outnumbered in his oeuvre by works that emphasize peace, dawn, and rebirth.

  INDIANS AGAIN

  After 1901, Indian music was never absent from Farwell's professional life, and in fact it haunted his reputation in ways that he came to resent. By the end of his life, he could state flatly: “It is in fact a matter of regret to me that my Indian works are being brought to performance more widely than my very greatly numerous other works, not based on folk themes of any kind.”67 Yet Farwell surely knew that he was partly responsible for his lingering Indianist associations, as he continued to adapt his earlier piano works to new formats. One of the earliest such arrangements was Three Indian Songs (1908), in which Farwell adapted three excerpts from his American Indian Melodies68 Farwell described these songs as his response to the false but potentially profitable impression that he was a popular songwriter: “As I had never written an Indian song in my life except to transcribe literally and publish a little one-page ‘Bird Dance Song' of the Cahuillas, I felt that if I was to make this shadowy reputation secure, the quicker I could write some Indian songs the better” (WJ, 170). As if to stamp the set with his superior ethnological expertise, particularly since he was now operating on Cadman's home turf, he selected one melody from each category in his Indian Music Talk: the cosmic “Inketunga's Thunder Song,” the human “The Old Man's Love Song,” and the superhuman “Song of the Deathless Voice.” Unlike Cadman's sentimental fare, these were meant to be “striking modern vocal developments, boldly Indian,” replete with Indian names and vocables. For each song, Farwell included English lyrics (some paraphrased from Fletcher) translating the original into the more conventional language of unrequited love and stoic death.

  Farwell also made choral arrangements of four of the pieces included in American Indian Melodies, and they became favorites at Westminster Choir College in the late 1930s and 1940s.69 Despite his grumbling, these and a second installment of four choruses gave particular satisfaction to Farwell in his later years. He wrote to his daughter Sara in 1946: “Toscanini heard [the Westminster Choir] do my Navajo War Dance and said something to the effect that it was the best American composition he had heard. He wanted to orchestrate it, but found that as written for the voices it won't transcribe rightly for orchestra! I guess I'll make an independent orchestration…and show it to him.”70

  There are only two exceptions to this pattern of recycling and rearrangement, and each one shows Farwell returning to the familiar ground of Indian material when trying out a new form or genre. First, in 1914, he sketched “Indian Fugue-Fantasia” for string quartet (arranged for piano in 1938 but never published). In Evelyn Davis Culbertson's words, it is “more Fantasia than Fugue,” but it does come complete with augmentation, inversion, and a contrapuntal strictness unusual for the composer (EDC, 513). More important is Farwell's single-movement string quartet of 1923, The Hako, which represents his last and by far his longest original essay on Indian themes.

  Farwell had once believed that with his 1906 Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony he had taken Indian melody “about as far as it will go in modern music” (WJ, 138-39). The Hako tests this hypothesis by taking a very similar ritual as the basis for a much more intricate work. Like the Wa-Wan of the Omaha, the Pawnee tribe's Hako ceremony is a protracted ritual of unification between two different tribes or clans within a tribe—one led by a man designated as the “Father” and the other led by the “Son”—whose symbolic actions are meant to ensure peace, prosperity, and the procreation of children. Both ceremonies were recorded in great detail by Fletcher, and both invest power in sacred objects created during months of pre
paration.71

  The crucial difference between Farwell's Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony and The Hako is a matter of form. In the earlier work, the outlines of the Indian ritual itself provided a loosely unifying framework for a series of otherwise self-sufficient miniatures. In The Hako, the work unfolds along the lines of sonata form as understood in the nineteenth century, complete with introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Commissioned by the Los Angeles-based Zoellner Quartet, The Hako represents Farwell's first claim to unify western melos with the elite genres of “western” classical music.

  Inserting Indian melodies into a canon so hallowed by European masterworks was no easy task, as the composer seems to have recognized. Although the work won an honorable mention at the 1926 Ojai Valley Chamber Music Festival and was performed on both coasts, Farwell was still uncertain of its success. As he wrote to Arthur Cohn (of the Dorian and Stringart Quartets) in 1935, it remained to be seen whether The Hako could be “pulled through by a vigorous and convincing performance, whether with time and understanding of its Indian implications, it will at last carry the day—or simply, whether I have set out to do too much with a string quartet.”72 Farwell was anxious that the players should instill the performance with the proper “Indian spirit.” To this end, he offered some instructions: