Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Certain things must be brought to [the quartet's] interpretation before it has even a chance of proving itself, e.g. the immensely reverential spirit of the Indian in general, and his immense dignity, and the unction with which each syllable is taken in his singing. Specifically, I might speak of the reverential attitude of the chanted prayer of the priests which forms the greater part of the introduction…[and] the dignity of the processional…where the held note of 1st vl. indicated the flatness of the plains, the 2nd vl. the swaying of the feathered stems, viola the inevitable drum, cello the priests' chant…. In short the work has to be dramatized, and dramatized with an intelligent and sympathetic understanding. The hearer should feel “here is something real, purposeful, expressive, going on, even if I do not yet understand the full meaning behind it.”73

  In Farwell's view, the composer alone could go only so far. Responsibility was shared with performers, who must adopt the proper mindset, and especially with listeners, who must cultivate the proper respect for the work's spiritual import.

  Farwell did not shy away from programmatic links between his score and the ritual that inspired it. The swaying of feathers, the drum, lightning, thunder, the woodpecker and the owl—all these are meant to be audible in the quartet. More complex are the moments when ritual meanings and formal functions intersect. At the opening, for example, the priests' invocation coincides nicely with the evocative material and harmonic freedom of a sonata form introduction. Above and below a drone on E, first violin and cello intone a pentatonic melody “like a pulsating chant”; Farwell holds fast to the original tune for five measures before the drone is transferred to the bass lines and the other voices rise upward exactly as the ceremony would suggest: “like a prayer” (see example 6).74

  EXAMPLE 6A. “The Hako,” Seventh Ritual, Part 3 (from Fletcher, “The Hako,” 1904)

  The exposition and development sections instead suggest two kinds of tension between the melody of the American West and the norms of “western” classical music. While the episodic introduction presented an “exotic” surface meant to signal “Indianness,” those themes that are most crucial to the working out of the conventional sonata form exposition are couched in late-romantic harmonies that threaten to overwhelm any impression of the indigenous. In the development section, by contrast, Farwell's reverential attitude toward his borrowed melodies seems to overwhelm his ability to create momentum. The section begins with the dignified “processional” Farwell described in his letter: a complete statement of the introductory priests' chant (in its original key) is played out against the lovely “swaying” countermelody in second violin before undergoing the expected fragmentation (see example 7). At points, Farwell works with segments small enough to be called motives, but more often entire measures or pairs of measures are preserved, resulting in an overly regular pacing. This was, after all, one of Farwell's first large-scale compositions, and while it bears traces of inexperience with the genre—particularly in its unrelentingly four-voice texture—it also reveals much stronger traces of what he had already absorbed from his work with Indian music: namely an impulse to preserve as he encountered it (i.e., in western notation) melodic material that he recognized as sacred.

  EXAMPLE 6B. Farwell, “The Hako,” mm. 1-17 (ed. Ron Erickson, San Francisco: Erickson Editions, 1997)

  Farwell's attempt to reconcile the music of the West with the genres of western music proved more difficult than he might have imagined. Like the participants in the Hako ceremony, he was concerned with cycles of renewal, inaugurating a “new art-life for America,” or sparking a spiritual awakening through Indian song. Most of all, it was the moment of frontiering that captured his imagination. Understanding this aspect of Farwell's westward gaze sheds some light on the enthusiasm he mustered for the grassroots projects (community choruses and historical pageantry) that occupied him after the demise of the Wa-Wan Press.

  EXAMPLE 7. “The Hako,” mm. 243-55

  It also helps explain his tendency to see even his best efforts as works-in-progress. In 1906, he prefaced his Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony of the Omahas:

  When all is said, when all is done that can be done today to crush or to obliterate the race that dwelt in this land before us, there still remains a dignity, a vastness, a freedom, in our memory of the Indian of the plains, an investiture of heroic circumstance, which seems destined to haunt us until it be accorded at last a full and adequate measure of artistic expression. Such an art, stripped of every detail of modern civilization, surcharged with the elemental forces of earth and sky, and the passions and deeds of heroic and primal men, may not be for the cities of the east. But it is not impossible that such a development may arise in the west.75

  While the historians who followed Turner grappled with the uncertain consequences of the final chapters of westward expansion, Farwell, whose frontiers were largely figurative, could instead paint an ever-receding horizon—one whose natural and human resources were inexhaustible.

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  Western Democracy, Western Landscapes, Western Music

  A VOICE IN THE DESERT

  On his western sojourns, Farwell saw himself as an evangelist bringing the gospel of good American music to such remote locations as Kinsley, Kansas. But he also returned to the East in evangelical mode, ready to discourse about Indians and to spread the word about composition in the American hinterlands. Although Farwell functioned as a prophet, for many of his western adventures Charles Lummis was actually the one who prepared the way. Travel writer, ethnographer, architect, librarian, activist, and antiquarian, Lummis was a formidable figure in the culture of Southern California. In January 1904, when Farwell's Indian Music Talk brought him into Lummis's orbit of influence, he was apprehensive, as he explained in his Wanderjahre:

  Now, there is a man in Los Angeles who keeps a sort of fatherly eye on all the Indians of the Southwest, Californian, Arizonian and New Mexican…. he also keeps an eye on the artistic and intellectual developments of Los Angeles, and edits a magazine, Out West, containing a “Lion's Den” department, in which the lion, which is the man in question, eats up all intruders, and has a special relish for easterners…. I bore with me from the East an introduction to this dread monster, but had not the opportunity to present it until after my recital. (WJ, 104–5)

  Lummis proved if not tame at least friendly. More important, he introduced Far-well to a practice of ethnography and transcription that, while idiosyncratic by today's standards, involved extended sessions with individual informants and the most sophisticated available technologies of recording and reproduction.

  Lummis's interest in Mexican and Hispanic song predated his acquaintance with Farwell by many years. In 1892, he told the readers of Cosmopolitan that he had already collected “several thousands of these quaint ditties” and that the process had been “no small labor”:

  There was but one way to get an air. A phonograph would have scared off my bashful troubadours, even if it could have caught—as no portable phonograph yet devised could catch with its varying register—the unique movimiento which is the heart of that music. I had to sit by the hour before crackling adobe hearth or by the ruddy campfire, singing each song over time and time in unison with my good-natured instructors, until I knew the air absolutely by heart—and not only the air, but the exact rendition of it.1

  Lummis eventually acquired his own phonograph, and as prime mover of the Southwest Society, he secured funding in 1903 from its parent association, the Archaeological Institute of America, to purchase a better Edison machine. Over a period of several years, Lummis recorded—in musicologist John Koegel's estimation—more than five hundred wax cylinders preserving roughly 150 Indian songs (in two dozen languages) and at least twice as many “Spanish Californian” songs—the only major collection of Hispanic field recordings made in the United States before the 1930s. Lummis had a keen ear but little musical training. Now, in Farwell's enthusiastic company, he hatched a plan to make his
entire collection available in standard musical notation.

  Soon after Farwell's first Los Angeles lecture recital, he received an invitation to visit Lummis in his famous “den,” El Alisal, a Spanish-style castle of a home that Lummis designed and built, mostly by hand, using materials salvaged from or modeled after pueblos, missions, and especially the ranchos and haciendas of the Californio population—with additional support from telegraph poles donated by the Santa Fe Railroad in recognition of Lummis's role as a spokesman for the “See America First” campaign. In this evocative setting (later the headquarters of the Historical Society of Southern California), Farwell “swam in the musical atmosphere” of “the suave or vivacious songs of the Spanish settlers and the weird, somber, and mysterious songs of the dwellers of the desert” (WJ, 111). According to the legendary hospitality of El Alisal, meals were followed by group singing and listening to wax cylinders. Less than two weeks after his arrival, Farwell was dabbling in transcription and observing recording sessions with Ramon Zuñi and Procopio Montoya, the two Indians Lummis had brought to Los Angeles from Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico.2

  As cultural historian Martin Padget points out, Lummis's “advocacy of the Southwest” involved cultural preservation on many different fronts: “the preservation of threatened manhood, the consolidation of Anglo racial identity, and the conservation of both natural and cultural resources.”3 While at Isleta, Lummis came to love the tribes of the Southwest as uniquely civilized, gentle, and hospitable. He compiled a still-unpublished dictionary of the Tiwa (Tee-wahn) language and founded the Sequoia League in 1902 to fight for Indian rights. Although he had worked with the noted archaeologist Adolph Bandelier for more than five years, journeying as far as Peru in the early 1890s, Lummis preferred what he called “Catching Our Archaeology Alive,” a form of activist scholarship for which the body of wax cylinders was both tool and artifact.4 When Lummis undertook his own lecture tour, he found that his recordings won friends for the Southwest Society, and he was eager to make the music more widely available.

  After Farwell left Los Angeles, only six weeks elapsed before he received a letter from Lummis proposing that he spend the summer of 1904 “out West” doing transcriptions. “Deep in my consciousness,” Farwell recalled, “where I heard the strange chants of Ramon and Procopio echoing and echoing, and voices and guitars in the patio ringing, I saw again those vast and alluring strips of Arizonian desert, fraught with uplifting inspiration and bigness” (WJ, 116). After much effort, Farwell secured a two-hundred-dollar stipend from the American Archaeological Institute and arranged for his second lecture tour to arrive in Los Angeles by mid-July to begin his months of transcription work.5

  Several things made this experience unusual. First, while the atmosphere at El Alisal rang with living voices, the bulk of Farwell's work was isolated, involving little contact with singers. Whether he liked it or not, Farwell's transcribing took shape as a process of repetition and internal assimilation for the purposes of reproduction—in other words, a process resembling his work with the printed songs in Fletcher's books. Second, when he did make “live” transcriptions, Farwell's informants usually visited him in familiar domestic settings. Most of Lummis's cylinders were made at his own home or at a handful of Hispanic estates—his singers included Manuela Garcia, Rosa and Luisa Villa, the del Valle family, Rosendo Uruchurtu, and Adelaida Kamp—and the actions of each side were dictated more by the rules of courtesy and hospitality than by scientific pretensions. Among Lummis's Spanish-speaking friends, these rules were mutually understood. But for the Indians, the situation was much more problematic.

  Ramon Zuñi and Procopio Montoya were Lummis's key Indian informants and also his household help, performing tasks that ranged from doing construction work to serving breakfast. They were probably the first Indians with whom Farwell spent any substantial amount of time, and it was the memory of their voices that inspired him to dedicate his summer months to the Lummis collection. Farwell recalled that Lummis had to exert all his persuasive power to induce the shy “Indian boys” to sing their religious songs. Ramon, who had been in the Lummis household longer, finally acquiesced and, “taking up an Indian drum, began in low tones a very insistent rhythm.” The phonograph was quickly pressed into action, but it “required coaxing and a prolonged council of war between Ramon and Procopio.” Once Lummis played back the recording, “Procopio's face darkened…and he hastily retreated to a far corner of the room.” (WJ, 109).

  Given these difficulties, Farwell remained optimistic, but not blindly so, about the possibility of faithful transcription. Under the heading “Not Difficult Work,” he told a reporter that his work was “mere recording, not harmonizing.” For this project, he continued, “they want the irregularities recorded; the correct rendering—supposedly correct—may be put in the foot notes; an accurate record as sung is the first consideration.” He continued: “Even when the tune, as sung by some absent-minded old brave, perhaps, is irregular and therefore puzzling, the rhythm swings one into comprehension, and enables the transcriber to read the tune aright.”6 Farwell could see that the process of cross-cultural extraction was in some ways a painful one. Still he attempted to grasp the resulting raw materials, making them his own just as thoroughly, and through the same process that had infused his rereading of Fletcher's texts—a spiritual identification no less potent for its use of the phonograph as medium.

  THE MULTIETHNIC WEST

  Perhaps the most striking thing about Farwell's transcription work was that it brought him into contact with the music of diverse groups in quick succession. Rather than immersing him in one new cultural context, it presented him with a smorgasbord of ethnic options. Already, his western tours had introduced him the music of the Zuñi (courtesy of Carlos Troyer); to western painter Maynard Dixon (friend and protégé of Lummis, who helped spark Farwell's interest in cowboy song); and to ethnographic photographer Edward S. Curtis (famous for his compendium of Indian portraits).7 Now in the living room of El Alisal, at a work station he called “the museum,” Farwell immersed himself in the songs of Spanish California, heard stories of Lummis's Peruvian adventures, and came to appreciate regional differences among Indian tribes.

  The productive jostling of ethnic groups left its mark on Farwell's oeuvre as early as 1905, when the Wa-Wan Press published in quick succession his vocal collection Folk-Songs of the West and South: Negro, Cowboy, and Spanish-Californian and his piano miniatures From Mesa and Plain: Indian, Cowboy, and Negro Sketches for Pianoforte. Together with his 1909 Wanderjahre, these sets represent Farwell's Années de Pélérinage, and they illustrate his comparative geography (example 8). Farwell found the “The Bird Dance” of the California Cahuilla tribe (later used in his California masque) among Lummis's wax cylinders, and he experienced it as distinctly different from the Omaha melodies Fletcher had published.8 Unlike his earlier arrangements, this one preserves more of the original performance practice, rendering it more anthropologically accurate yet more “foreign” sounding to Anglo audiences. Marked “low and tremulous, flute like and in obvious imitation of low weird bird-tones,” the score identifies its “Indian” singers with primeval nature.9 The tune itself is marked by circular flutterings and unexpected transposition of melodic fragments, as if the singer (or singers) had accidentally slipped upward in register—an impression reinforced by the evocation of sliding pitches, marked “a mere quaver of the voice, not a distinct triplet.” Though pedal tones on G and D would appear to ground the melody in the tonic and dominant of western tonality, signs of foreignness reinforce the song's power as incantation, outside the realm of intelligible speech.

  EXAMPLE 8. Excerpts from Folk-Songs of the West and South (Wa-Wan Press, 1905)

  By going West, Farwell did get to “hear the Indians sing,” but he did not need to travel to hear black music. Farwell understood and embraced (with some ambivalence) the ubiquity of ragtime, calling it “our indisputable native folk-song” and ratifying its popularity (if not its musi
cal substance) by deferring to the wisdom of the people. “We must not blame the honest American for preferring ragtime to the German masterwork,” he wrote; “it is more his own.”10 Despite ragtime's winning syncopation, which he happily linked to Indian song, Farwell gravitated instead toward the spiritual, producing two arrangements for FolkSongs of the West and South and one for From Mesa and Plain.11 All seem tame by comparison to the “Bird Dance Song,” “Pawnee Horses,” and the “Navajo War Dances.” In “De Rocks a-Renderin',” vocal ornaments are confined to a pair of grace notes and a passing tone; for “Moanin' Dove” (better known by its third verse “Sometimes I feel like a mudderless chile”), Farwell included the instructions “ingenuously, crooning,” and provided a static, rocking accompaniment. In both cases, the tone is elegiac rather than vigorous, and unlike the “Bird Song,” no footnotes are required to understand or perform the dialect texts.

  Farwell's Indian arrangements purchased local color at the price of intelligibility; his spiritual settings proved more familiar yet (for him) less compelling. But in cowboy song and especially in “Spanish-Californian” themes, he saw a chance to combine western character and broad appeal. Farwell would appear to be the first composer to make a classical setting of a cowboy song. Like all western claims, this one is contested, but it gains credence from the difficulty Farwell had both in finding the relevant tunes and in crafting convincing accompaniments. Having acquired the melody from his Wa-Wan colleague Henry Gilbert, Farwell included a setting of “The Lone Prairee” in his Folk-Songs of the West and South. Today the text and tune are well known under many titles (“The Dying Cowboy,” “The Dying Ranger,” etc.), but in 1905 some now-standard features had yet to crystallize. Farwell cites as the opening line, “Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee,” noting in a footnote that some sources give “not” for “out.” In addition, the metrical disposition of the tune in Farwell's setting differs from most subsequent ones in making the downbeat of his triple meter coincide, rather sensibly, with “bury” and “lone” (instead of “not” and “-ree,” as Roy Harris and Aaron Copland would do three decades later).