Farwell Piano Music – An American Rediscovery

Few American composers have been so thoroughly buried by the history they helped to make. Arthur Farwell spent the better part of two decades arguing, publishing, lecturing, and organizing on behalf of music that might actually sound like it came from this continent — and then watched as the mainstream moved on without him, leaving him stranded somewhere between the Indianist enthusiasm of his youth and the quietly radical experiments of his final decades. This recording, built around three works that span nearly the full arc of his career, makes a case that the burial was premature.

Start with what Farwell is still remembered for, on the rare occasions he is remembered at all. The Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony of the Omahas belongs to that early Indianist period when he was running the Wa-Wan Press — “wa-wan” meaning, literally, to sing to somebody, which is as good a description of Farwell’s missionary zeal as any — and publishing scores by composers who shared his conviction that American music had to grow from American soil. The ceremony itself, a multi-day Omaha ritual through which separate tribes affirm bonds of peace, gave Farwell an eight-movement structure built on actual tribal themes. Not all of it sustains interest equally. Some sections feel like well-intentioned ethnographic transcription dressed up in late-Romantic harmonics. But the stronger movements — and there are strong ones — achieve something genuinely strange and ceremonial, a quality of ritual repetition that anticipates, however dimly, what Messiaen would later do with plainchant.

Then there is The Vale of Enitharmon, from 1930.

This is the surprise of the disc. Enitharmon is the Blake figure who personifies spiritual beauty — she appears in Europe: A Prophecy, in The Book of Urizen, in Jerusalem — and Farwell’s response to her is an Impressionist tone poem of real intensity, closer in spirit to Charles Tomlinson Griffes than to anything in the Indianist catalog. Griffes is the obvious comparison, and it’s a fair one: there’s the same hovering harmonic ambiguity, the same sense of a world glimpsed through gauze. But in the central section, where Farwell pulls the harmony loose from its moorings and lets the texture expand into something almost Scriabinesque, you hear a composer operating well beyond the conventions he inherited. This is a work that deserves a place in the recital repertoire, and the fact that it has apparently waited until now for its first album is the kind of thing that should embarrass us all.

The Polytonal Studies are another matter — and here the disc becomes genuinely complicated.

Farwell began these in the early 1940s, projecting a set of forty-six; he finished twenty-three, many undated, the numbering non-consecutive. Of the twelve recorded here, some are essentially pedagogical demonstrations, short pieces in which bitonality is the lesson rather than the expression. (Farwell called them polytonal, but the harmonic practice is really bitonal — two keys superimposed, not many.) A few, though, push into territory that sounds less like a harmony textbook and more like a composer genuinely disturbed by what he’s hearing in his own imagination. Those pieces are worth having. The weaker ones you can admire for their intellectual discipline without needing to revisit them often.

Lisa Cheryl Thomas plays all of this with clean artistry and evident commitment. Her touch in the Enitharmon is particularly well-judged — she understands that the piece needs room to breathe, and she gives it that, without letting the tempo sag into indulgence. The Old Granary Studio recording is clean and present, maybe slightly close for the more atmospheric passages of the Wa-Wan suite, where a touch more air in the acoustic would have served the music better.

Competing versions? For most of this material, there are none. That’s precisely the point.

This is essential listening for anyone who takes American music seriously — not because every note justifies the attention, but because Farwell was a genuinely interesting mind working in genuine isolation, and recordings like this are how we find out what we’ve been missing. The Enitharmon alone earns the disc a place on the shelf. Strongly recommended.