This Hamms Beer commercial, which I vividly remember from childhood and our brand-new black-and-white TV, signals “Indian music” with a steady tom-tom beat. The tune (and its tom-tom) adapts the Dagger Dance in Victor Herbert’s opera Natoma. The words – “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” – reference a once popular concert song by Charles Wakefield Cadman. Both Herbert’s opera and Cadman’s song belong to the “Indianist” movement in American music – the topic of my latest NPR “More than Music” installment: “Native American Inspirations.”
“This tale in its totality,” as I remark at the top of the show, “is a battleground. It actually holds up a mirror to the discontinuity and mistrust that plague the American experience today. But it also incorporates some pretty remarkable music – some of which, you might say, is more or less ‘cancelled’ by present-day sensitivities.”
Unpacking it all, I confer with Timothy Long, who heads the opera program at the Eastman School of Music. Both his father, who was Muskogee Creek, and his mother, who was Choctaw, spoke English as a second language. His mother had been raised in an Indian orphanage in Oklahoma, after which she was moved to an Indian sanatorium. She was so bored there that she began to listen to Beethoven sonata recordings played by Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Brendel – the music with which Long grew up. So Tim Long lives two musical lives. He also prefers not to listen to the Indianist composers. His reasoning, which he eloquently expounds, has nothing to do with “appropriation” or “permission.” Rather, he says: “We still don’t get recognition – we’re not in the history books, people know nothing about us. This really makes it very difficult to me to listen to the Indianists. We were being occupied, and the occupiers were celebrating us with our music.”
And yet I have long made the music of Arthur Farwell – the most sophisticated of the Indianists — a cause. He seems to me the closest thing to an American Bela Bartok. And he spearheaded a thirty-year chapter in American music that – make of it what you will — is a significant component of our nation’s cultural history.
As it happens, the pianist who has most recorded the Indianist compositions of Farwell is herself Native: Lisa Cheryl Thomas, whose ancestry is Cherokee. She uses word like “authentic” and “informed” when she discusses Farwell. She also says: “I feel we owe a great gratitude to the [non-Native] ethnographers and to the Indianists, especially Farwell. . . . And it’s my goal to keep promoting this with my concerts so that Native American music has a lasting legacy in the fine arts.”
Starting with Louis Ballard (1931-2007) ,whose music I also sample, a growing number of Native American composers have taken up the challenge of marrying Native American sources with the Western concert tradition. On my NPR show, we hear a tribute to Crazy Horse by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. It’s performed by Delta David Gier and the South Dakota Symphony, whose “Lakota Music Project”, now more than a decade old, has fostered musical collaborations with Lakota musicians.
I conclude: “Would that a coming to terms with Native America – with the cultural vigor and desolate ordeal of this country’s first inhabitants – could enrich a more harmonious America to come. In truth, that day still seems far distant. But we have at least put far behind us the tom-tom beat of that Hamms Beer commercial with which I grew up.”
LISTENING GUIDE:
2:06: Victor Herbert’s “Dagger Dance” (1911)
5:30: The Scherzo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony (1893), inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha
7:00: Arthur Farwell’s Pawnee Horses (1904), performed by pianist Benjamin Pasternack
8:25: Farwell’s choral Pawnee Horses (1937), performed by the University of Texas Chamber Singers led by James Morrow
12:00: An Omaha song recorded in 1895
16:05: Art historian Adam Harris on George Catlin’s controversial paintings of Indian life
19:25: Lisa Cheryl Thomas on Arthur Farwell
20:45: Farwell’s Navajo War Dance No. 2 (1905), performed by Benjamin Pasternack
25:30: Timothy Long on the Indianists movement
29:05: Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “From the Land of the Sky Blue Waters” (1909)
30:30: Louis Ballard’s Devil’s Promenade (1973), performed by the Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter
32:15: Jerod Tate on Louis Ballard
33:40: Tate’s Crazy Horse tribute from his Victory Songs (2013), performed by Stephen Bryant and the South Dakota Symphony led by Delta David Gier
37:45: Raven Chacon’s Nilchi’ Shada’ji Nalaghali (Winds that turn on the side from Sun) (2008), performed by Emanuele Arciuli
41:00: Jeffrey Paul’s Wind on Clear Lake, performed by Lakota flutist Bryan Akipa and the South Dakota Symphony led by Gier
With the Hamm’s beer commercial having left the scene maybe fifty years ago and all of your other examples of appropriation dating from over a hundred years ago and probably unlikely to be heard in any concert hall anywhere (Good luck with Arthur Farwell), is this really an issue anymore.
Yes, giving an audience to new composers, Native American and others is always an important task. And it’s wonderful to see good new music coming from Native Americans as well as Black composers of many nationalities. And female composers of every ethnicity. Personally, I wish this music was given equal or greater play and interest than the interest in long dead figures like Florence Price and William Grant Still, who are interesting good to make their acquaintance, but definitely of their time.
(I wonder if “American Indians” take any offense to that label since through their history predating Columbus, they’re not “American”, nor are they anything similar to people of India, where the label “Indian” originated from. What’s a better term? Maybe someone should ask them rather than the rest of us inventing and imposing labels like this. I think I’ve heard ‘indigenous peoples’ used in various places. Works for me, but what do the people affected want to be called?)
The innovation created by the interplay of cultures has been the single greatest source of human progress. What would the ancient Greeks have been without the knowledge they gained from Egypt and Assyria? What would the Romans have been without the Greeks? How could Christianity have evolved without the synthesis created by Greco-Hebraic theologies and philosophy? What would Buddhism be without its foundations in Vedic thought? How would the Renaissance have happened without European access to the great Moorish Arabic libraries that were opened to it through the reconquest of Spain? How could Western classical music started without the Arabic musical concepts picked up through the crusades? How would Germanic classical music culture have evolved without the major influences from Italy? What would 19th century Russian culture have been without the influences of France? What would the American Southwest be without its synthesis of Spanish, American, and Native cultures?
The rise of identity politics here in the Southwest where I live led to positive results. Almost forgotten and lost cultural traditions were revived, preserved, and strengthened through new found cultural pride. I think, however, misguided concepts of cultural appropriation were a less fortunate development. People somehow got the idea that cultures should silo themselves into walled-in cultural communities which has led to new forms of segregation with its attendant hatreds and resentments.
Sure, we do not want to allow cultural thievery and forms of appropriation that lead to commercialized superficiality that degrades cultures. But to say we should forbid intelligent cultural interaction, exchange, and influence is just foolishness that shows little understanding of how cultures evolve and grow. It’s one more reminder of how much easier it is to promote hatred, resentment, and isolation rather than sensitive, respectful, intelligent cooperation and exchange that benefits everyone.