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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n— I — <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cArthur Farwell is probably the most neglected composer in our history. . . . At the turn of the century no one wrote music with greater seriousness of purpose or fought harder for American music. . . . He was an intellectual and spiritual giant.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This assessment, by the late\ncomposer\/critic A. Walter Kramer in 1973, rings ever louder today; Farwell has\nbeen deemed untouchable. Hounded by the watchdogs\nof \u201ccultural appropriation,\u201d he has fallen prey to dictates of political\nrectitude, a victim of our escalating culture wars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was (among many other\nthings) the leader of the \u201cIndianists\u201d movement in American music \u2013 a huge and yet\nforgotten swath of cultural history, amassing many hundreds of operas,\nsymphonies, chamber works, and songs until petering out in the 1930s. I first\ndiscovered Arthur Farwell via a New World Records \u201cIndianists\u201d LP about twenty\nyears ago. The Farwell pieces on that recording weren\u2019t very good, but they\nwere original. I was curious to know more about a composer who, inspired by\nDvorak, thought Americans would one day become sufficiently enlightened to\nembrace Native America as an essential component of our national identity. I\nsoon discovered, in score, Farwell compositions far more challenging both for\nperformer and listener \u2013 forgotten music, once esteemed, and yet never\nrecorded. Ever since, I\u2019ve seized every opportunity to present it in concert. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not long after my Farwell\ndiscovery, I encountered a prominent Native-American ethnomusicologist who told\nme that she did not listen to Arthur Farwell\u2019s music as a matter of principle.\nThis is the kind of challenge Farwell poses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PostClassical Ensemble <\/a><\/strong>\u2013 the \u201cexperimental\u201d DC chamber orchestra I co-founded in 2003 with the remarkable Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez \u2013 is dedicated to curating the musical past. As readers of this blog know, we champion composers whose time will come. Silvestre Revueltas, Bernard Herrmann, Lou Harrison are the top of our list. Whether Farwell\u2019s time will come is another question \u2013 it will, alas, depend on political, not musical winds of change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2014 PCE Naxos CD \u201cDvorak and America\u201d was a start. It includes three top-drawer Farwell cameos in terrific performances: the piano pieces Pawnee Horses<\/em> and Navajo War Dance<\/em> No. 2 played by Benjamin Pasternack, and a 16-part a cappella version of Pawnee Horses<\/em> sung (in Navajo) by the University of Texas Chamber Singers under James Morrow \u2013 one of half a dozen distinguished choral conductors who I\u2019ve observed discovering Farwell with incredulity. You can hear the UT performance by clicking here <\/a><\/strong>and scrolling down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A week ago, PCE produced a\nweek-long festival, \u201cNative American Inspirations,\u201d surveying 125 years of\nmusic inspired by Native America. That is \u2013 we linked Dvorak, Farwell, and the\nIndianists to contemporary composers, Native and non-Native, who mine Native\nAmerican songs and ceremony. In a few weeks\u2019 time, that festival will generate\na four-hour \u201cPostClassical\u201d podcast. After that will come a PCE-produced\nFarwell release, on Naxos, with world premiere recordings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The DC festival, headquartered at the Washington National Cathedral, provoked divergent reviews from Anne Midgette in the Washington Post<\/em> and Sudip Bose in The American Scholar<\/em>. Midgette gave short shrift to Farwell; she wanted to hear more music composed by Native Americans. Her review<\/a><\/strong> was buttressed by a flood of supportive tweets condemning Farwell as an appropriator. Bose mounted a considered rebutta<\/a>l<\/strong> (see below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The festival itself included\na Saturday night public conversation, at the Center for Contemporary Political\nArt, that attempted to unpack the controversy clouding Farwell and his\nmovement. I will return to that event below. But first: the music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n –II–<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charles Martin Loeffler called Arthur Farwell\u2019s Pawnee Horses<\/em> for solo piano (1905) \u201cthe best composition yet written by an American.\u201d As Loeffler was for a time the most highly regarded American composer, a schooled aristocratic musical personality, a man who also grasped the importance of George Gershwin when others dismissed Gershwin as a gifted dilettante, his opinion means something. The piece itself, setting an Omaha song, is not even two minutes long. A downward cascading chant is framed by galloping figurations. The pianistic lay-out, with multiple hand-crossings, is idiomatic and ingenious. Most memorably, Farwell deploys harmony and texture to create a fragrant aura of mystery; at the close, the gallop dissipates in the treble. Considered as a musical composition, without reference to source or inspiration, Pawnee Horses<\/em> is indisputably top-notch. In 1937, Farwell created a second version for a cappella chorus; the closing ascent touches a pianissimo high C. Musically considered, Pawnee Horses<\/em> is a choral tour de force. Again: you can access this piece here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another early Farwell piano solo \u2013 Navajo War Dance<\/em> No. 2 \u2013 was championed by John Kirkpatrick. He is the pianist who premiered Charles Ives\u2019s Concord<\/em> Sonata. This 1904 Farwell miniature is notably astringent, rhythmically and harmonically complex. It is also hard to play. It more resembles Bartok than any other American composition I know. But Farwell could not possibly have known pertinent Bartok keyboard music in 1904. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the hidden world of Arthur\nFarwell, the two piano pieces I have just mentioned are relatively known. But\nhis biggest Indianist composition, the Hako<\/em>\nString Quartet of 1923, is certainly not. I had occasion to present it with\nstudent performers at the New England Conservatory in 1999. The late David MacAllester,\nan eminent authority on Native American music, was at hand to react. McAllister\nwas greatly impressed by the Hako<\/em>\nQuartet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the challenges of presenting Farwell in concert is enlisting Native American participants. For our DC festival, I unsuccessfully attempted to engage Native American scholars and musicians from as far away as Texas, New Mexico, and California. My greatest disappointment was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which declined to partner the festival even though it presented in concert the South Dakota Symphony\u2019s Lakota Music Project, brought to DC at the invitation of PostClassical Ensemble. A staff member explained that Farwell lacked \u201cauthenticity.\u201d But the Hako<\/em> claims no authenticity. Though its inspiration is a Great Plains ritual celebrating a symbolic union of Father and Son, though it incorporates passages evoking a processional, or an owl, or a lighting storm, it does not chart a programmatic narrative. Rather, it is a 20-minute sonata-form that documents the composer\u2019s enthralled subjective response to a gripping Native American ritual. At our festival, a sensational performance of the Hako<\/em> by the Dakota String Quartet (comprising the principal strings of the South Dakota Symphony) ignited a thunderous ovation. This is a work that skillfully builds to an enraptured close, marked \u201cwith breadth and exaltation.\u201d It is Arthur Farwell\u2019s rapture that is here \u201cauthentic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sudip Bose did not attend our Monday night concert, with the Hako<\/em>. In Anne Midgette’s view, the Hako<\/em> “did little with its musical ideas.” A third critic, Emily Wright for <\/a><\/strong>Strings<\/a><\/strong><\/em> Magazine<\/a><\/strong>, was more sympathetic but could not resist terming Farwell “perhaps naive” — meaning what? Unlike Bose’s, in The American Scholar<\/em>, her summary of the Farwell story was vague and inaccurate. Her mild approbation was unconsciously patronizing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Other Farwell compositions\nare differently conceived. They more resemble transcriptions or adaptations of\nNative American song. Pawnee Horses<\/em>\nattempts to evoke the complexity of Indian rhythms and tunes. But it would be\nglib to infer that he here aspires to \u201cauthenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what was Farwell trying to\ndo? He believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent\nto try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed \u2013 to\npreserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation.\nHis Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual\nand the Western concert tradition. Like Bartok in Transylvania, like Stravinsky\nin rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically\nproject the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to\ncapture specific musical characteristics \u2013 but also something additional,\nsomething ineffable and elemental, \u201creligious and legendary.\u201d He called it \u2013 a\nphrase belonging to another time and place \u2013 \u201crace spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a young man, Farwell visited\nwith Indians on Lake Superior. He hunted with Indian guides. He had out-of-body\nexperiences. Later, in the Southwest, he collaborated with the charismatic\nCharles Lummis, a pioneer ethnographer. For Lummis, Farwell transcribed hundreds\nof Indian and Hispanic melodies, using either a phonograph or local Indian\nsingers. Even so, our present-day\ncriterion of \u201cauthenticity\u201d is a later construct, unknown in Farwell\u2019s day. If\nhe was subject to criticism during his lifetime, it was for being na\u00efve and\nirrelevant, not disrespectful or false. The music historian Beth Levy \u2013 a rare\ncontemporary student of the Indianists movement in music \u2013 pithily summarizes\nthat Farwell embodies a state of tension intermingling \u201ca scientific emphasis\non anthropological fact\u201d with \u201ca subjective identification bordering on\nrapture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other writings perpetuate misleading assumptions. John Troutman\u2019s Indian Blues<\/em> (2009), a valuable treatment of \u201cAmerican Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934,\u201d groups Farwell with other Indianists \u201cdedicated to the production of Indian themes palatable to non-Indian ears . . . they seemed in the end to share much more in common with the imagery found in Tin Pan Alley numbers than with the performances as originally observed and recorded by the ethnologists.\u201d This verdict may fit Charles Wakefield Cadman, also mentioned by Troutman. But Farwell cannot credibly be dismissed in the same breath; Troutman has not done the homework. Neither does the distinguished Native-American ethnomusicologist Tara Browner, in a 1997 American Music<\/em> article, undertake any concerted effort to assess the varied style and caliber of Farwell\u2019s Indianist output. Though she prefers him to Edward MacDowell (who lacked Farwell\u2019s passion for ethnology), Brower expresses regret that Farwell failed to \u201cseek permission\u201d to \u201cincorporate\u201d Native American music in his own. But in 1905, when Pawnee Horses<\/em> was conceived, no composer, writer, or painter adapting Native American music and ritual would have thought to do that. The only present-day Native-American Farwell authority of whom I am aware is the pianist Lisa Cheryl Thomas, who admires and performs him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is Sudip Bose, in his American Scholar<\/em> review:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo be sure, we can look back at Farwell\u2019s interactions with Native American cultures, and find him lacking in certain areas. . . . Beth Levy writes that the composer\u2019s attitudes toward Native Americans \u2018never completely slough[ed] off their skin of exoticism.\u2019 . . . Yet it cannot be denied that Farwell\u2019s reverence for Native American music was genuine. . . . It\u2019s a tricky thing\u2014trying to come to terms with Farwell in our time. His perceived flaws provide detractors with enough justification to reject him out of hand. To them, it doesn\u2019t matter what his music sounds like, or what part it played in the evolution of classical music in the United States. To them, Farwell is simply a white man who made a living at the expense of marginalized peoples. This, I believe, not only misrepresents the composer and his intentions, but it also uses the politics of our current moment to form loose judgments about a very distant time. . . . I would also like to assert that Farwell, despite his keenest ethnographic instincts, was not <\/em>an ethnographer. His principal aim was not to document Native music, and certainly not to compose it. Rather, he was writing classical music\u2014an anti-modernist classical music, rooted in diatonic harmony and sonata form, that he felt best represented America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n –III–<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classical music lives in the\nconcert hall and the opera house. But classical composers \u2013 many of them \u2013\ncrave the primal. It impels them to compose, no questions asked. Bartok in\nrural Transylvania, Falla in the gypsy caves of Granada were galvanized by\nelemental songs and dances they proceeded to diligently research. Harry\nBurleigh \u2013 a frequent topic of this blog \u2013 was impelled to turn the sorrow\nsongs once sung by his grandfather into tuxedoed concert songs. These\ntransformations will always be genuinely controversial. Flamenco purists find El amor brujo<\/em> denatured. Zora Neale\nHurston found concert spirituals sanitized. But these are aesthetic, not moral\njudgments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n