Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West by Beth E. Levy (review)

Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West. By Beth E. Levy. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 449, notes, 9 black-and-white photo-graphs, selected bibliography, index.)When folklorists use the term American music, it means the wide range of traditional found in America: folk, ethnic, Native American, and African American. But when the term American music is used by scholars, it typically means art written by American composers, which is the way Beth Levy uses the term in her book Frontier Figures. Levy's book is about the influence of the American on the creation of American art music. Although it's not a study of typically studied by folklorists, her elucidation of important themes in this area will be relevant to various studies of traditional music.Levy considers composers from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. In 1893, the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, while living in the United States, said that American composers should find a based on the indigenous of the country. Dvof ak's ideas were controversial. While American composers were interested in creating a national perhaps by injecting indigenous elements into conventional art forms, this would be very difficult in the multi-ethnic United States (p. 5). Around the same time, historian Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that American history, culture, and identity were formed by expansion into the western frontier had a profound effect on a generation of historians. Also, the myth of the West was being created by such popular institutions as Buffalo Bill's Wild show. Levy says: This book ... lies at the intersection of three frontiers: the musical frontier opened by American composers' search for a national identity, the historical frontier pioneered by those seeking the roots of the American character in the American West, and the cultural frontier enacted by those who celebrated the West's potential for colorful and commercial exchange (pp. 13-4).The first part of the book is on Arthur Farwell, who was one of several composers using Native American for composing art music. Farwell is best known for establishing the Wa-Wan Press (1901-1911), named after an Omaha ceremony, as a vehicle for publishing his own compositions as well of those of like-minded composers. Levy paints a vivid picture of Farwell's worldview, using many direct quotations of Farwell's own words and references to pieces published by the Wa-Wan Press. Coming in contact with Charles Lummis, Farwell was introduced to the multi-ethnic West. In addition to Native American-based the Wa-Wan Press began to publish based on the folk songs of cowboys, African Americans, and Spanish Americans. Farwell actually spent part of the summer of 1904 making transcriptions for Lummis, mostly from cylinder recordings at Lummis's home, El Alisal, in Los Angeles (pp. 58-9). Farwell became acquainted with the ethnographic of the and used it as the inspiration for American even later in life when he no longer quoted actual folk in his compositions.The second part of the book deals with Charles Wakefield Cadman, perhaps the most popular Indianist composer, as well as his contemporaries. Like Farwell, Cadman used previously collected and transcribed American Indian as the starting point for a number of his works, some of which were commercially successful. Levy says: If Farwell offered up the visionary West-philosophical and introverted to the point of idiosyncrasy-Cadman represents an extroverted West, pragmatic in its aims and material in its rewards (p. …