by Beth E. Levy
Out of necessity, Farwell wrote his own texts, alternating between elaborate choralorchestral movements and movements for choir with simple accompaniment:
Introduction and chorale of the mountains
1. From the Heights
2. Depth of Pines; Chorale of the Forest
3. Azure Lake; Chorale of the Lake
4. Crags; Chorale of the Crags Interlude: Mystery, for Strings
5. Dawn and Day; Chorale of the Mountains
The rhetoric resembles that of The March of Man in its invocations to the “Lord God of the Mountain,” in whom “we shall rest and be whole,” and to “the Soul” that it may rise to “far horizons [that] in orient splendor gleam.” Yet in Mountain Song, the peaks also speak, attempting to bar the seeker's path and to shield “the dread height's mysteries” from human corruption. In the end the chorus asks the God of the Mountains to “Smite us with vision, / Gird us with power!” for the coming hour of transfiguration.
Farwell spent considerable effort trying to work out a sufficiently transcendent musical language, and his sketches bear witness to this labored genesis with pages of notes on voice leading and discarded harmonic progressions. The most revealing of these sketch pages outlines one aspect of Farwell's basic plan: “Begin with chromatic and carry out by systems of equal intervals, all half steps first bar, all whole steps second, all minor thirds, etc.” While I have not found this pattern literally in the pages of the score, the residue of Farwell's intervallic experimentation is everywhere apparent. Take, for example, the opening of “Crags,” which Farwell tidied into a piano-vocal score presumably for some never-realized performance (example 9). Farwell's harmonic choices had always been highly chromatic, and his favorite chord was the French augmented sixth (which itself combines two tritones, each of which bisects an octave). Here, however, Farwell seems in search of a chromaticism that could be as much structural as coloristic. He juxtaposes chords whose roots are separated by tritones: C and F# at the opening of line 1; G and D at the opening of line 2. Still basically functional, the F# triad in effect resolves to G-minor in bar 2, but by bar 4, Farwell's penchant for chromatic motion has pushed the G down to G (related by tritone to the opening C).
Equal divisions of the octave are rare but not unprecedented in Farwell's work. Recall the dispersed whole-tone scale in the framing material of the piano miniature “Pawnee Horses.” By contrast, in “Crags,” tritones organize entire passages of score and chromaticism is pervasive. In transferring chromaticism from the background to the foreground of his landscape painting, Farwell found sonorities that were distant enough from conventional harmony to sound otherworldly. During the 1920s, Farwell had also experimented with modal scales outside the major-minor system, not in evocation of any folk music, but in homage to Ancient Greece and in the related belief that the modes had an otherwise unspecified “application to the requirements of community music.”50
EXAMPLE 9. Farwell's piano arrangement of “Crags,” from Mountain Song, mm. 1–7 (courtesy of the Farwell Collection, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music)
Farwell believed that Mountain Song and works of similar scope might be a vehicle for the wholesale “naturalization” of musical experience. In his correspondence with Harris in 1931, Farwell argued that new genres like the “symphonic song ceremony” offered salvation from the damning compromises of the concert world. As he envisioned it, “This work doesn't belong to any department of our present set scheme of things, and may have to wait a good while for a presentation. Attendance…might become one day almost like a Nature Ceremony—something quite apart from the life of the symphony hall.” While works like the Wa-Wan Ceremony of the Omahas and The Hako attempted to envelop white audiences in Indian ritual, Mountain Song aimed at something more transformative. Farwell explained the stages of this process: “I believe we were true and right to absorb our primitives—Indian and negro—as part of the immense blend of the future race here. Then, in the midst of this chaos and confusion, I have felt strongly that the next thing to do is to go to our own greatest American aspects of Nature.”51 With the shift from “primitive” folklore to future-oriented nature-painting, Americans of color, overtaken by modernity, would vanish into colorful and timeless landscapes.
Indeed, folklore all but disappears from Farwell's oeuvre in the 1930s, with the not inconsiderable exception of his arrangements of earlier scores. Having moved in 1927 to take up a new teaching position at Michigan State University, Farwell busied himself with large-scale forms, teaching obligations, and the typesetting of his music using a handcrafted lithograph printing press. But even when he returned to the American West for inspiration, as in his Piano Quintet of 1937, he renounced melodic borrowing. The Quintet is based on materials Farwell jotted in his sketchbook during his early western tours. Farwell admitted that the quintet might display “something of the loneliness of the plains and the ruggedness of the mountains.” Yet he was careful to emphasize that he had used “no American folksongs whatsoever” in the score.52 The opening pits a pentatonic melody suggesting F-major against B-major harmony, showing that the composer's fascination with tritones remained. Ron Erickson (violinist, publisher, and a student of Harris) rightly compares this gesture to the Scherzo of Dvoák's “American” Quartet.
In the midst of this harmonic and motivic richness, two moments stand out as vestiges of Indianist practice—yet each brings some alternate interpretation to the fore. In the opening movement, the bridge between the first and second themes of the sonata form includes a sudden change in texture, heralded by a return to the quintet's opening motif at bar 122. After this declarative phrase, percussive fifths in the piano reverberate with such steady familiarity that it is easy to hear a double-drumbeat instead of the written triple meter (example 10a). But these are diminished fifths, not perfect ones; they carry the symmetrical perfection of the tritone, not the pulsing of an Indian drum. Another kind of harmonic stasis characterizes the quintet's second movement—as if all the drones of Farwell's early scores had come to rest in a single extended gesture (example 10b). Although the composer would later allow that this movement projects the “desert moods” of the quintet as a whole, his program note states that he conceived this movement “by listening to a large Chinese gong struck softly but continuously, and noting the musical effects arising from the overtones.”53 On the one hand, this reference to Asian percussion suggests that Farwell's western wandering finally took him to a place where East met West. On the other hand, the gong's reverberations reveal Nature in a way that is not folkloric but material. The space he evokes is not the emptiness of the Great Plains but the unfolding fullness of a single pitch. Here Nature is not merely symbolized in the metaphorical perfection of the interval cycle but embodied, audible in the fundamental sounding of a naked tone.
EXAMPLE 1OA. Piano Quintet, first movement, mm. 128–36 (ed. Ron Erickson, San Francisco: Erickson Editions, 1997)
EXAMPLE 1OB. Piano Quintet, second movement, mm. 7–18
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST?
Farwell's Piano Quintet was a logical choice for programming at the Depression-era Composers' Forum-Laboratory concerts in 1939. Not only was it his most recent chamber work, but it also reflected his Americanist leanings in an evocative rather than a literal way. And it had none of the overblown prose that critics from the 1930s forward have chosen to overlook. The monumental Mountain Song, in which Farwell invested so much labor, has never been heard in anything close to its seventy-two-minute totality. Two of its chorales were sung during the 1940s at a celebratory concert in the composer's natal state of Minnesota, and the string movement “Mystery” was excerpted for performance by none other than Roy Harris. Yet Harris's planned performance never happened, and he took the time to tell Farwell why:
I rehearsed your work meticulously with my string quartet and had planned to put it on a nationwide broadcast, but your letter gave me such a worry that I would not do you justice according to your spiritual ideals tha
t I decided I had better not do it…. I found your work a very sensuous piece, which indicates to me that I really missed the whole spirit of it. I found it very Wagnerian and very sensuous in texture—beautiful, delicate and extremely pantheistic, exactly the opposite of what your letter said, so I fear I am too much of a barbarian. I will have to do some more rugged work of yours I guess. (EDC, 679–80)
The letter from Farwell that caused Harris's chagrin does not seem to have survived, but we can surmise that—despite their many affinities—the two men (born more than a quarter century apart) heard Mountain Song with distinctly different ears.
It is clear from Farwell's copious writings and lectures that he felt himself out of sync with his contemporaries—a critic both of long-established institutions and of what he heard from avant-garde or “ultramodern” circles. In most cases, Farwell was able to frame his loneliness as a virtue, casting himself as a pioneer or prophet. The force of repetition necessary to maintain this stance over three decades can be felt in his many forecasts of musical progress, his rhetoric about new audiences and “new epochs,” and his reversion to the metaphor of new days dawning—from his piano fantasy “Dawn” to The Hako string quartet to Mountain Song and beyond. Fittingly, Farwell chose to sign Charles Lummis's guest book at El Alisal once with an incipit of the “Old Man's Love Song,” and again with the text “up with the break of day.”
It does not take an especially astute observer to note that Farwell was better at beginning projects than at continuing them: the Wa-Wan Press, the community music movement, the Theater of the Stars…each was hailed as the birth of a new era, and all were relatively short-lived. Financial and family considerations kept Farwell on the move, and he could at times be autocratic—shutting out the opinions of the fellow workers needed to sustain his projects.54 Yet there is also a sense of impatience and perhaps even desperation in Farwell's grasping at a string of idealistic ventures, none of which could be achieved in a single lifetime. It was, after all, an “Old Man's Love Song” that Farwell so often chose to cite.
What, then, gave Farwell such confidence in the future? For a man who had suffered so many disappointments, so many grand plans unfulfilled, Farwell's optimism is little short of astonishing. Its roots seem to lie in the intensely visionary experiences he had as a young man and in his understanding of history. He was deeply influenced by German historian Oswald Spengler, whose eccentric and magisterial Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) posited a cyclical view of human history, marked by a succession of eight epochs (Egyptian, Chinese, Classical, etc.), each of which followed an organic life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death. Writing amid the chaos of World War I in Europe, Spengler saw only the crumbling of contemporary, or “Faustian,” civilization. Farwell, however, had long seen the decay and stagnation of European institutions as a portent of America's coming of age. His most extensive treatment of Spengler, in a talk called “The Music Teacher and the Times,” includes corrective subsections titled “Exceptional Position of America” and “American Musical Supremacy,” which grafted Spenglerian wisdom onto existing ideas about westward expansion.55 In a related talk titled “The Artist as a Man of Destiny,” he made the distinction between Old and New Worlds explicit: “For those of us who entertain a large measure of respect for Spengler's methods and conclusions, but who [are] inhabitants of a new continent and members of the new and irrepressible Yankee race, and hence [are] the possible [crossed out: probable] forerunners of a new culture, there remains still another attitude…which looks to the artist as priest in a new order of life.”56
The priests of the new order were few but not necessarily far between. As we shall see, Farwell did not hesitate to appoint Harris the “protagonist of the time-spirit” and hero of the “western race-soul.” Though such public statements were perhaps cryptic, privately Farwell made sure that Harris knew what he had in mind: “You and I, and a good many others in this country are born out of the soul of America,” he wrote.
The proto-soul of a new race—a race worthy of a new continent…. We are the forerunners of another breed, a breed that bears within it a spiritual germ worthy of generating one day a new “Great Culture” of the world. The discovery of America, the pouring in of the races of the world, a new and broader nature world, a new absorption of the primitive (negro and Indian)—in short, a new continent…. It is unthinkable that such a new continent and new race as this can remain and be a mere tail to an old-world world-view that has had its day.
“Your letter makes me feel that you haven't really read your Spengler,” Farwell chided, after receiving Harris's despondent missive about the cultural bankruptcy of the concert hall: “Western civilization…is defeating itself at a terrific pace. A new spirit in the world will have to defeat it. And that spirit will not arise on the now depleted soil of the senescent Occidental culture in its original European home. It will appear somewhere else.”57
Though Farwell briefly entertained the notion that the next great world culture would appear in Russia—“which is not Europe,” he explained to Harris—there was really little doubt that the fertile soil he had in mind could be found in the American West. Farwell's series of articles for the Los Angeles Times “The Riddle of the Southwest” (1926) was devoted to showing that the region was uniquely equipped for this mission. “A new race, a new culture and civilization, a new glory of human achievement—a veritable new spirit of life—is coming to birth in Southern California!” Following Whitman's “Facing West from California's Shores,” Farwell argued that this birth was enabled by geography: “Eternal Walt, himself humanity, has started in the dimness of time westward from Asia, the cradle of races, has circled the world, has come at last around to the Pacific, and now faces home again looking over the waves.”58
Yet even so powerful an influence as geography was dwarfed in Farwell's mind by the human factor, the determining influence in the destiny of the West: “It comes before us with the force of a conviction, almost from racial considerations alone, that the proper conditions for such an achievement exist here in Southern California and the Southwest generally as nowhere else in the United States.” Just as the “greatness of Greece arose in considerable part from the fact of a new race being created by the various and divergent hordes,” he wrote, so the citizens of California represented an “admixture…not such a one as the ‘melting pot' ordinarily implies but the one which is caused by the intermingling of the different aspects of the original sturdy stock, the direct descendants of the Atlantic colonists, north and south…and their indirect descendants coming from localities farther to the westward.”59 These were, of course, the men and women whom Far-well aimed to reach through the recreation of music as ritual, whether Indian rituals like the Wa-Wan and the Hako, or the new ceremonial forms of the community pageant. More than passive recipients of an evening's entertainment, the western audience represented for Farwell a force of living history. “What people these Westerners are,” Farwell told a newspaper reporter from Portland back in 1904; “how wide awake! They seem to catch ideas so much quicker than Eastern people do—or at least they grasp and absorb them in a different manner than I have been accustomed to seeing…. There is not such a thing as a comparison between a Pacific Coast audience and a Boston audience. One might say of Boston that it is hermetically sealed. That expresses the whole situation there, I think. With New York—well, New York is a whirlpool; but the West is open and free-minded, ready to absorb and learn—but at the same time it is critical.”60 More than distinctive geography or climate, more than Indians or cowboys, it was the intrepid western audience that Farwell believed would generate the greatest potential energy: in imitation of ancient wisdom, the gathering of this artistically engaged community would ensure that western music remained ever the music of the future.
PART TWO
Western Encounters
Charles Wakefield Cadman and Others
The sunset beams played around her hair like a halo; th
e whole place was aglow with red light, and her face was kindled into transcendent beauty. A sound arrested her attention. She looked up. Forms, dusky black against the fiery western sky, were coming down the valley. It was the band of Indian shearers. They turned to the left, and went towards the sheep sheds and booths. But there was one of them that Ramona did not see…. It was Alessandro, son of Pablo Assis, captain of the shearing band. Walking slowly along in advance of his men, he had felt a light, as from a mirror held in the sun, smite his eyes. It was the red sunbeam on the glittering water where Ramona knelt. In the same second, he saw Ramona. He halted, as wild creatures of the forest halt at a sound…. As he gazed, his senses seemed leaving him, and unconsciously he spoke aloud: “Christ! What shall I do!”
—HELEN HUNT JACKSON, RAMONA
3
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Encountering Indians