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56 A VOICE IN THE DESERT On his western sojourns, Farwell saw himself as an evangelist bringing the gospel of good American music to such remote locations as Kinsley, Kansas. But he also returned to the East in evangelical mode, ready to discourse about Indians and to spread the word about composition in the American hinterlands. Although Farwell functioned as a prophet, for many of his western adventures Charles Lummis was actually the one who prepared the way. Travel writer, ethnographer, architect, librarian, activist, and antiquarian, Lummis was a formidable figure in the culture of Southern California. In January 1904, when Farwell’s Indian Music Talk brought him into Lummis’s orbit of influence, he was apprehensive, as he explained in his Wanderjahre: Now, there is a man in Los Angeles who keeps a sort of fatherly eye on all the Indians of the Southwest, Californian, Arizonian and New Mexican. . . . he also keeps an eye on the artistic and intellectual developments of Los Angeles, and edits a magazine, Out West, containing a “Lion’s Den” department, in which the lion, which is the man in question, eats up all intruders, and has a special relish for easterners. . . . I bore with me from the East an introduction to this dread monster, but had not the opportunity to present it until after my recital. (WJ, 104–5) Lummis proved if not tame at least friendly. More important, he introduced Farwell to a practice of ethnography and transcription that, while idiosyncratic by today’s standards, involved extended sessions with individual informants and the most sophisticated available technologies of recording and reproduction. 2 Western Democracy, Western Landscapes, Western Music Western Democracy, Landscapes, Music 57 Lummis’s interest in Mexican and Hispanic song predated his acquaintance with Farwell by many years. In 1892, he told the readers of Cosmopolitan that he had already collected “several thousands of these quaint ditties” and that the process had been “no small labor”: There was but one way to get an air. A phonograph would have scared off my bashful troubadours, even if it could have caught—as no portable phonograph yet devised could catch with its varying register—the unique movimiento which is the heart of that music. I had to sit by the hour before crackling adobe hearth or by the ruddy campfire, singing each song over time and time in unison with my goodnatured instructors, until I knew the air absolutely by heart—and not only the air, but the exact rendition of it. Lummis eventually acquired his own phonograph, and as prime mover of the Southwest Society, he secured funding in 1903 from its parent association, the Archaeological Institute of America, to purchase a better Edison machine. Over a period of several years, Lummis recorded—in musicologist John Koegel’s estimation—more than five hundred wax cylinders preserving roughly 150 Indian songs (in two dozen languages) and at least twice as many “Spanish Californian ” songs—the only major collection of Hispanic field recordings made in the United States before the 1930s. Lummis had a keen ear but little musical training. Now, in Farwell’s enthusiastic company, he hatched a plan to make his entire collection available in standard musical notation. Soon after Farwell’s first Los Angeles lecture recital, he received an invitation to visit Lummis in his famous “den,” El Alisal, a Spanish-style castle of a home that Lummis designed and built, mostly by hand, using materials salvaged from or modeled after pueblos, missions, and especially the ranchos and haciendas of the Californio population—with additional support from telegraph poles donated by the Santa Fe Railroad in recognition of Lummis’s role as a spokesman for the “See America First” campaign. In this evocative setting (later the headquarters of the Historical Society of Southern California), Farwell “swam in the musical atmosphere” of “the suave or vivacious songs of the Spanish settlers and the weird, somber, and mysterious songs of the dwellers of the desert” (WJ, 111). According to the legendary hospitality of El Alisal, meals were followed by group singing and listening to wax cylinders. Less than two weeks after his arrival, Farwell was dabbling in transcription and observing recording sessions with Ramon Zuñi and Procopio Montoya, the two Indians Lummis had brought to Los Angeles from Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico. As cultural historian Martin Padget points out, Lummis’s “advocacy of the Southwest” involved cultural preservation on many different fronts: “the preservation of threatened manhood, the consolidation of Anglo racial...

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