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Frontier Figures

American Music and the Mythology of the American West
by Beth E. Levy (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $36.95 / £31.00
Publication Date: Apr 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 470
ISBN: 9780520952027
Series:

Read an Excerpt

1

The Wa-Wan and the West

The Ragged Edge of History

If on the afternoon of 27 April 1919, you found yourself seated at the Greek Theatre on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, you would have witnessed and most likely been asked to participate in California: A Masque of Music. With musical numbers and libretto crafted by Arthur Farwell and personnel recruited from the ranks of the Berkeley Music Department, the masque places a toga-clad personification of California in the company of the muses: "California! {apos}tis a name Worthy of Apollo's nine; {apos}tis music's self/Soft syllabled upon the silent air." Only six of the nine muses grace the stage, but California seems destined to join their number if she can pass the musical "tests" set forth by Apollo and the Spirit of Ancient Greece. Having produced the requisite instrumentalists from isolated corners of the outdoor amphitheater, California musters her forces for the final test: choral song. "From hill, from canyon, shore and fragrant grove,/From city, vineyard, white Sierras' snows,/With summons far I call you to this shrine/... O noble children of our Western world."

Springing as it does from the mouth of California, "our Western world" is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, and this ambiguity lies at the heart of Farwell's West. If early twentieth-century California represented the endpoint of westward expansion in the United States, the golden reward of America's Manifest Destiny, it also occupied a special spot on the continuum of "Western civilization." Though mythological, the masque is set explicitly in "the present," and it privileges symbolic meanings over strict adherence to chronology. In the first scene, for example, three groups are conjured up in turn to sing Farwell's own arrangements. Each chorus features a tune transcribed by an ethnologist, and each setting reflects the tension that would forever mark Farwell's approach to the West: on the one hand, a scientific emphasis on anthropological fact; on the other, a subjective identification bordering on rapture:

"First let the red race speak, whose plaintive strain/Charms the divinities of wood and plain." (The division of the chorus on one side, accompanied by the orchestra, sings the "Bird Dance of the Cahuillas")

"The black race now, redeemed from slavery's smart,/Pathetic-humorous in its artless art." (The division of the chorus on the other side sings the "Moanin' Dove")

"Last the bold race who bore across the main/To California's shores, romantic Spain."

(Both divisions of the chorus together sing "Chata cara de bule.")

This gradual introduction of ethnic groups reflects something other than actual demographic data. While it might make historical sense to give Indians pride of place, the Spanish settled California long before there was a substantial black population-let alone an English-speaking, spiritual-singing black population. Instead, it is tempting to see in this ethnic procession Farwell's implicit judgment about the relative usefulness of each group's music to the task at hand: ensuring that the western United States could take up the artistic mantle of ancient Greece.

For Farwell, Indian song represented a uniquely valuable resource and a necessary starting point in the creation of "a new art-life" for America-a project in which black music occupied an explicit but historically uncomfortable middle ground. While Farwell recognized the spiritual as a resource for the community singing movement, he preferred to speak of "Spanish folksongs" whose value was in his eyes "beyond all power to estimate or predict." Therefore, in the masque, it is "romantic Spain" who eventually ascends to stand beside California and the muses.

But this is not where Farwell's California masque ends. After the choral groups unite and ascend the stage, they perform music that emphasizes the union of diverse populations and draws the largely Anglo audience into Farwell's vision: a medley of university fight songs, followed by "Hail California." The Spirit of Ancient Greece reminds California that song holds the key to national cohesion. The chorus responds with Farwell's wartime anthem "Our Country's Prayer," sparking an on-stage discussion of religion. The Spirit of Ancient Greece invokes Almighty Zeus, but her plea goes unanswered. Instead, the aud

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About the Book

Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.

About the Author

Beth E. Levy is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: The Course of Empire

Chapter 1. The Wa-Wan and the West
Chapter 2. Western Democracy, Western Landscapes, Western Music

Part Two. Western Encounters: Charles Wakefield Cadman and Others
Chapter 3. Encountering Indians
Chapter 4. Staging the West

Part Three. American Pastorals
Chapter 5. West of Eden
Chapter 6. Power in the Land
Chapter 7. Harvest Home

Part Four. Roy Harris: Provincial Cowboy, White Hope
Chapter 8. How Roy Harris Became Western
Chapter 9. Manifest Destiny
Chapter 10. The Composer as Folk Singer

Part Five. Aaron Copland: From Orient to Occident
Chapter 11. The Saga of the Prairies
Chapter 12. Communal Song, Cosmopolitan Song
Chapter 13. Copland and the Cinematic West

Conclusion: On the Trail

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Music professor Levy looks at how Western Americana has been woven into American culture via music.”
— Sacramento Bee
“In this work, Levy offers an amazing amount of scholarship. She has researched nearly every person and event of this period, many now long forgotten. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Choice
“Think about the open prairie, or the Western mountain ranges, and music comes to mind. Expansive music, evoking broad vistas. . . . But what makes that music sound “American?” And how did the composers use a symphony orchestra — an ensemble with European roots, rarely heard in the American West during the 1800s — to conjure up images of peaks and plains, cowboys and horses? This is the topic that Beth Levy, an associate professor in the music department at UC Davis, examines in her new book.”
— Davis Enterprise
"A fine resource for extending the scholarly dialogue."
— Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 507
"A welcome and reliable contribution to the scholarship on Tahiti."
— The Burlington Magazine
"Frontier Figures tempts us with a great deal of fascinating information and interpretation, and triggers even more questions about the development of American music."
— Journal of the Society for American Music
"Beth Levy has written an elegant work of depth and breadth that gives generous space to the idea of the American West. Her discussions of more than a dozen composers and their works—some usual suspects, others rather unexpected—reveal the 'varied musical ecosystems of the west.' Levy takes us with her on the trail in prose that is by turns pithy and poetic, but always spot on."—Denise Von Glahn, author of The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape

“Big and bold as the terrain it covers, Beth Levy’s Frontier Figures takes us on a gratifying road trip, traversing American ‘classical’ compositions that conjure up landscapes from the Middle West to the shores of the Pacific. En route, we encounter many now-famous composers, such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, along with others who have faded from view. Throughout, Levy treats the ‘West’ as both geographic location and mythologized ideal, demonstrating its power on the American musical imagination.”—Carol Oja, author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s.

Awards

  • Music in American Culture Award 2013, American Musicological Society