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  CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

  Richard Taruskin, General Editor

  1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard

  2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison

  3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch

  4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal

  5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider

  6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis

  7. Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

  8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz

  9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico

  10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long

  11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut

  12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott

  13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller

  14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

  Frontier Figures

  American Music and the Mythology of the American West

  Beth E. Levy

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  Berkeley Los Angeles London

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levy, Beth E. (Beth Ellen), 1972–

  Frontier figures : American music and the mythology of the American West / Beth E. Levy. —1st ed.

  p. cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 14)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-26776-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-26778-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Music—United States—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Legends—West (U.S.)—History and criticism. 3. West (U.S.)—Social life and customs—20th century. 4. West (U.S.)—History—1890-1945. I. Title.

  ML200.5.L49 2012

  781.5'9—dc23

  2011038214

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (Z 39.48) requirements.

  To my parents,

  David and Lynne Levy

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Introduction: The Course of Empire

  PART ONE. ARTHUR FARWELL'S WEST

  1. The Wa-Wan and the West

  2. Western Democracy, Western Landscapes, Western Music

  PART TWO. WESTERN ENCOUNTERS:

  CHARLES WAKEFIELD CADMAN AND OTHERS

  3. Encountering Indians

  4. Staging the West

  PART THREE. AMERICAN PASTORALS

  5. West of Eden

  6. Power in the Land

  7. Harvest Home

  PART FOUR. ROY HARRIS: PROVINCIAL COWBOY, WHITE HOPE

  8. How Roy Harris Became Western

  9. Manifest Destiny

  10. The Composer as Folk Singer

  PART FIVE. AARON COPLAND: FROM ORIENT TO OCCIDENT

  11. The Saga of the Prairies

  12. Communal Song, Cosmopolitan Song

  13. Copland and the Cinematic West

  Conclusion: On the Trail

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. The intermingling of “Savage, Barbarous and Civilized Races” on the international stage in Buffalo Bill's Wild West

  2. Publicity for Arthur Farwell's “western tours”

  3. The March of Man, cast photo

  4. The cover of the sheet music for Cadman's Four American Indian Songs, op. 45

  5. Shanewis at the Hollywood Bowl

  6. The Grasslands, film still from The Plow That Broke the Plains

  7. Roy Harris during his time in Colorado in the 1940s, posing with his favorite car, “Golden Boy”

  8. Square-dancing couples in Rodeo

  9. Copland with Peter Miles on the set of The Red Pony

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For decades, artists and thinkers have approached the American West with a mixture of nostalgia and excitement-as if simultaneously returning home and embarking on an adventure. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that I have found both comfort and challenge in writing this book. I have had many companions along the way, and it is my heartfelt pleasure to thank them for their wise guidance, their practical assistance, and above all their camaraderie.

  As this book took shape first in the form of a dissertation, I owe significant thanks to those who guided its first stages. First, my committee of readers. I feel the warmest and most profound gratitude to my adviser, Richard Taruskin, whose enthusiastic support and careful reading have informed and enlivened this project from the start. His influence continues to inspire me toward a scholarship that has both musical and moral force. I am also grateful to Katherine Bergeron for her generous advice and for knowing the right questions to ask; to the late Michael Rogin, whose insights into American cultural history have left their mark on each of my chapters; and to Kerwin Lee Klein for his insights into the American West and the writing of history. Research support at the dissertation stage was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship Foundation, the American Musicological Society, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Phi Beta Kappa (UC Berkeley Chapter), and the Music Department and Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley. More recently, the University of California Office of the President and the University of California, Davis, College of Letters and Sciences have provided fellowship and grant support during crucial phases of research and writing.
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  To my faculty colleagues at the University of California, Davis, I want to express my sincere thanks for their unflagging interest in my work and their commitment to creating an exceptional environment for research. I have also appreciated the contributions of graduate students in my recent seminars (on nationalism, music in the 1930s, and music in the West). I have benefited immensely from financial support and the intellectual companionship of colleagues at the UC Davis Humanities Institute in a faculty research symposium on California Cultures, and at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. For expert editorial feedback, I owe serious debts to Richard Crawford, Denise von Glahn, and many other readers—anonymous and otherwise. My thinking about Copland has evolved in productive conversation with Elizabeth Bergman, Jessica Burr, Jennifer de Lapp, Carol J. Oja, and Howard Pollack, and on matters Californian with Leta Miller, and the late Catherine Parsons Smith. And for a delightful variety of writing advice, moral support, and good company, it is my great pleasure to thank Ardith Allen, Laura Basini, Mark Clague, Robert Fallon, Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Sandra Graham, Alyson Knop, Tanya Lee, Nathaniel G. Lew, Klára Móricz, Joel Phillips and Peter Schmelz.

  The West is a big place and its archival materials are scattered widely. In addition to the army of mostly anonymous librarians (past and present) who collected and catalogued old concert programs, letters, the residue of “community pageants” and the like, I am especially grateful to the Interlibrary Loan staffs at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University; to the Oral History of American Music project at Yale University (especially Vivian Perlis and Libby van Cleve) and the University of California's Regional Oral History Program; to the Denver Public Library and the New York Public Library for access to isolated collections; to Patricia Harris for permission to use materials related to her father Roy; and to Ellen Bacon and Jon Elkus for assistance with the Ernst Bacon papers.

  For more extensive assistance with archival research, I am grateful to David Coppen and the Special Collections staff at the Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music for their help with the Arthur Farwell Collections; to Jim Quigel and the Cadman Collection at the Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University; to Suzanne Lovejoy and Richard Boursy for access to the Virgil Thomson Papers at Yale University's Irving Gilmore Music Library; to David Sigler and Renee James at the Roy Harris Archive (California State University, Los Angeles); to Stephen M. Fry at the University of California, Los Angeles, Music Library and to Timothy A. Edwards and the staff at the UCLA Music Library, Special Collections; and to Wayne Shirley and Wilda Hess for their help with the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress.

  I should also like to thank many members of the University of California Press for their support, expertise, and encouragement, chief among them Mary Francis, whose editorial eye and gentle understanding of authorial psychology were crucial to this project's completion. I am grateful to Eric Schmidt for technical assistance, to Jacqueline Volin for her responsiveness to many queries, and to Mary Ray Worley for her exceptionally careful copyediting. A special word of thanks goes to Sam Nichols for his painstaking and good-humored typesetting of music examples.

  Four sections of this book present revised versions of material published else-where. A précis of the material that grew into chapters 1 and 3 appeared as “‘In the Glory of the Sunset': Arthur Farwell, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Indianism in American Music,” repercussions 5, nos. 1–2 (1996): 124–83. Portions of chapter 8 were previously published in “‘The White Hope of American Music'; or, How Roy Harris Became Western,” American Music 19, no. 2 (2001): 131–67. Material on Aaron Copland covered primarily in chapter 10 was included in “From Orient to Occident: Aaron Copland and the Sagas of the Prairies,” in Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Judith Tick and Carol J. Oja (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 307–49. Finally, an expanded treatment of chapter 13 has been published as “The Great Crossing: Nostalgia and Manifest Destiny in Aaron Copland's The Red Pony,” Journal of Film Music 2, nos. 2–4 (2009): 201–23.

  Finally, my oldest, deepest, and most cherished debt: to my family—my parents, my brother, Benjamin, and many others. I know they will recognize in this book the souvenirs of many shared road trips and the imprint of many lively conversations. I thank them for their unfailing support and their love beyond words.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AFC Arthur Farwell Collection, Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music

  CC Nicolas Slonimsky, “Roy Harris: Cimarron Composer,” unpublished manuscript (1951), Roy Harris Collection, California State University, Los Angeles

  CCLC Copland Collection, Library of Congress

  EDC Evelyn Davis Culbertson, He Heard America Singing: Arthur Farwell, Composer and Crusading Music Educator (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992)

  HP Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999)

  OH UCLA Music Library Special Collections; Oral History Interviews, UC Regents; typescript (1983) in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  Perison CWC Harry D. Perison, “Charles Wakefield Cadman: His Life and Works.” (PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 1978)

  PR Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1929)

  RHC Roy Harris Collection, California State University, Los Angeles

  VPAC1 Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland, 1900–1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984)

  WJ Arthur Farwell, “Wanderjahre of a Revolutionist” and Other Essays on American Music, ed. Thomas Stoner (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995)

  Introduction

  The Course of Empire

  Facing west, from California's shores,

  Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

  I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the

  land of migrations, look afar,

  Look off the shores of my Western Sea—the circle almost circled;

  For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,

  From Asia—from the north—from the God, the sage, and the hero,

  From the south—from the flowery peninsulas, and the spice islands;

  Long having wander'd since—round the earth having wander'd,

  Now I face home again—very pleas'd and joyous;

  (But where is what I started for, so long ago?

  And why is it yet unfound?)

  —WALT WHITMAN, LEAVES OF GRASS

  The turn of the twentieth century came early to America. Still a young country by international standards, the United States seemed determined to celebrate its coming of age in 1892-93 with a cluster of events marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's fabled transatlantic voyage and so-called discovery of the New World. They culminated in the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair. Drawing on a pointedly diverse range of natural and human resources, the exposition was meant to reinforce the idea of American exceptionalism and to display America's growing centrality on the world stage. For the Columbian moment was not just a convenient anniversary. By backdating the birth of the nation from the revolution to the age of exploration, these commemorations aligned the United States not only with the civic republicanism of the founding fathers, but also with the increasingly relevant issue of empire and its relationship to America's own westward expansion.

  The Gay Nineties at home coincided with unprecedented aggression abroad. Following the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee and the effective end of the Indian wars, the Spanish-American War, with America's interventions in Cuba and invasion of the Philippines, placed the United States at the heart of a new colonial network. When Americans directed their attention east, they saw the Old World crumbling under the weight of its own history. When they looked south, they saw a tropical paradise virtually
untouched by history. When they looked west, they saw history in action. This book attempts to hear the traces of this last, “western” history in the lives and works of classically trained musicians during the first half of the twentieth century.

  Between the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific coast, where the American frontier seemed to fall off the edge of the world, lay a continent in flux. The rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny” furnished Americans with images and metaphors through which to understand their status as a twentieth-century imperial power: natives, savages, and Indians; scouts, pioneers, and settlers; mavericks, cowboys, and gunfighters. This mythology is so fundamental to the telling of American histories and the construction of American identities that its presence even in the rarefied realms of music should not be surprising. Far more remarkable is the variety of projects that these frontier figures could be made to serve. Western imagery was at once a natural and strategic choice for projects both romantic and modern, individualistic and communal, nostalgic and progressive.

  Taking as its point of departure the geographical imagination of the nineteenth century's Columbian year, this book embarks on its own voyage of discovery, navigating waters that are sometimes familiar and sometimes uncharted. Like any ship's captain, I have selected one route among many, tracing a current that may seem relatively narrow: American art or “classical” music as practiced by a handful of influential composers between 1900 and 1950. En route, this current commingles with and gains momentum from many others—the dime novel, the community pageant, the popular song, and the Hollywood film score, to name a few. At the outset, I choose to dock for a while in 1893, to take on board some of the themes that will sustain our westward journey, and to ponder their relationship to the world-historical vision captured in the most famous line of Bishop George Berkeley's poem “America or the Muse's Refuge: A Prophesy”: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.”