Frontier figures: American music and the mythology of the American West, 1895--1945

This dissertation examines the intersection between two cultural spheres: American music and the mythology of the American West. During the twentieth century, as western imagery became ever more prominent in literature and film, American composers also looked westward for inspiration. Through musical analysis and archival research, I show how images and folk songs associated with the West were absorbed into American music and how they influenced the ideals of composers and musical institutions during the first half of the twentieth century. In each chapter, my aim is twofold: to deepen our understanding of influential western stereotypes and the individuals who deployed them, and to explore some of the common ground between music scholarship and American Studies.; In Chapter 1, I discuss two early twentieth-century composers' appropriations of Native American materials. Arthur Farwell claimed Indian songs as part of an ideological platform for a renewal of American musical life that involved grass-roots musical groups and a printing press devoted to music built on American folklore. During the same years, Charles Wakefield Cadman's stereotyped portrayals of the Native American as a “vanishing race” propelled him to fame as his popular parlor songs found their way into American homes and his large-scale dramatic works (Shanewis and The Sunset Trail) reached such stages as the Metropolitan Opera and the Hollywood Bowl.; Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, composers began mining cowboy songs as a compositional resource. Relying on the folk-song collections of Carl Sandburg and the Lomax family, they brought cowboy melodies into classical music just as the “singing cowboy” rode onto the Hollywood scene. In Chapters 2 and 3, I investigate this new mythology as revealed in the music of Roy Harris and Aaron Copland.; The structure of my dissertation reflects an unnoticed but intriguing development in the character types that composers chose to associate with the West. Portrayals of Native Americans dominated at the turn of the century after the forced removal of Indian tribes had ended. Postwar pride and Depression-era politics fostered an agrarian mythos, and cowboy figures offered an aggressive hero appropriate for the years leading up to WWII and into the Cold War. The diverse composers in this study—ideologue and songwriter, western native and “cosmopolitan cowboy”—were engaged in constant negotiation between sweeping socio-political trends and the intricacies of their own biographies. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...