Music for Bicycles

I am perhaps slightly re-inventing the wheel (groan) by considering music for bicycle wheels: a quick internet search uncovered "Eine Brise", by Mauricio Kagel, and "Travelon Gamelon" by Richard Lerman. Here's a review of a performance of the Kagel last year in Los Angeles. Both of these pieces involved multiple bicyclists actually riding the streets, a lovely idea, no?! This stationary bicycle wheel roulette/altar is quite different, of course, more about the connection of wheels and spindles, necessary and otherwise....

Poe, Sir Thomas Browne, Suetonius, Tiberius

Despina, an inveterate mystery reader, mentioned that the epigraph to Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is this line from Chapter 5 of Sir Thomas Browne's HYDRIOTAPHIA, Urne-Buriall OR, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.

Sir Thomas appends a note that says "The puzling questions of Tiberius unto Grammarians. Marcel. Donatus in Suet."

So I went to Suetonius and found the following entertaining bits about Tiberius and exile, along with the question about the sirens:

10 At the flood-tide of success, though in the prime of life and health, he suddenly decided to go into retirement and to withdraw as far as possible from the centre of the stage; perhaps from disgust at his wife, whom he dared neither accuse nor put away, though he could no longer endure her; or perhaps, avoiding the contempt born of familiarity, to keep up his prestige by absence, or even add to it, in case his country should ever need him.... At the time he asked for leave of absence on the ground of weariness of office and a desire to rest; and he would not give way either to his mother's urgent entreaties or to the complaint which his step-father openly made in the senate, that he was being forsaken. On the contrary, when they made more strenuous efforts to detain him, he refused to take food for four days. Being at last allowed to depart, he left his wife and son in Rome and went down to Ostia in haste, without saying a single word to any of those who saw him off, and kissing only a very few when he left.

11 From Ostia he coasted along the shore of Campania, and learning of an indisposition of Augustus, he stopped for a while. But since gossip was rife that he was lingering on the chance of realising his highest hopes, although the wind was all but dead ahead, he sailed directly to Rhodes, for he had been attracted by the charm and healthfulness of that island ever since the time when he put in there on his return from Armenia. Content there with a modest house and a villa in the suburbs not much more spacious, he adopted a most unassuming manner of life, at times walking in the gymnasium without a lictor or a messenger, and exchanging courtesies with the good people of Greece with almost the air of an equal.

****

13 He also gave up his usual exercises with horses and arms, and laying aside the garb of his country, took to the cloak and slippers; and in this state he continued for upwards of two years, becoming daily an object of greater contempt and aversion. This went so far that the citizens of Nemausus threw down his statues and busts, and when mention was once made of him at a private dinner party, a man got up and assured Gaius that if he would say the word, he would at once take ship for Rhodes and bring back the head of "the exile," as he was commonly called. It was this act especially, which made his position no longer one of mere fear but of actual peril, that drove Tiberius to sue for his recall with most urgent prayers, in which his mother joined; and he obtained it, although partly owing to a fortunate chance. Augustus had resolved to come to no decision of the question which was not agreeable to his elder son, who, as it happened, was at the time somewhat at odds with Marcus Lollius, and accordingly ready to lend an ear to his stepfather's prayers. With his consent therefore Tiberius was recalled, but on the understanding that he should take no part or active interest in public affairs.

****

70 He was greatly devoted to liberal studies in both languages. In his Latin oratory he followed Messala Corvinus, to whom he had given attention in his youth, when Messala was an old man. But he so obscured his style by excessive mannerisms and pedantry, that he was thought to speak much better offhand than in a prepared address. He also composed a lyric poem, entitled "A Lament for the Death of Lucius Caesar," and made Greek verses in imitation of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, poets of whom he was very fond, placing their busts in the public libraries among those of the eminent writers of old; and on that account many learned men vied with one another in issuing commentaries on their works and dedicating them to the emperor. 3 Yet his special aim was a knowledge of mythology, which he carried to a silly and laughable extreme; for he used to test even the grammarians, a class of men in whom, as I have said, he was especially interested, by questions something like this: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" "What was the name of Achilles among the maidens?" "What were the Sirens in the habit of singing?"

[I should mention that Sir Thomas Browne is one of my favorite guys, I wrote a piece many years ago based on The Garden of Cyrus, which oddly enough happens to be being performed tonight in NYC(!)]

lyric meters

This is just the contents of the last email I sent you but it struck me that it might turn out to be important at more than a practical level, so I thought I'd post it on the blog in order to make sure that it was included.

-o0o-

OK, I've done a bit of digging on the subject of metrical analysis and it turns out that there is a commentary on the Helen by Bill Allan, who teaches Classics at the University of Oxford. This was published in 2008 and reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Review in 2009. What's really interesting is that the review identifies metrical analysis as a particularly strong feature of Allan's commentary and uses his account of the very passage you are working on as an example of how perceptive he is:

Elucidation of lyric meters, and the connection of these meters to their literary context, is also a noteworthy and positive feature of Allan's commentary. Comprehensive metrical analysis is given at the start of each choral ode or exchange with a dramatis persona, along with a discussion of the content of the passage and its relationship to the play as a whole. For example, about the choral parodos at vv. 164-252, Allan identifies the iambo-trochaic exchange between Helen and the chorus as a "form of antiphonal lament which the fifth-century audience can relate to the antiphonal dirges...of their own mourning rituals" (166). Consistently and sensitively tying meter to context proves to be a valuable contribution both for scholars of the tragedy, and for newcomers to Euripidean lyric who may be yet unaware of the power and importance of these often difficult passages.

I've just ordered a second-hand copy of this through Amazon. I did think about having it sent direct to you but I'd quite like a copy myself for when i come to write about this stuff, so I thought I'd get a copy for myself and then I can tell you want he says about the relevant sections of the text.

Orpheus and the Sirens

As a change from botanical names, I spent some time last night looking at the two volumes of Robert Graves' work, The Greek Myths, to see what he says about the Sirens. Something that I'd completely forgotten is that Jason and the Argonauts also encountered the Sirens when they were returning from Colchis, having seized the Golden Fleece from King Aeëtes. They too survived the danger but by different means:

Jason now needed only to double Cape Malea, and return with the fleece to Iolcus. He cruised in safety past the Islands of the Sirens, where the ravishing strains of these bird-women were countered by the even lovelier strains of Orpheus's lyre. Butes along sprang overboard in an attempt to swim ashore, but Aphrodite rescued him; she took him to Mount Eryx by way of Lilybaeum, and there made him her lover. Some say that the Sirens, who had already lost their wings as a result of an unsuccesful contest with the Muses, sponsored by Hera, committed suicide because of their failure to outcharm Orpheus; yet they were still on their island when Odyseus came by a generation later. (Graves, volume 2, page 245)

I think there's something really interesting about this alternative way of resisting the song of the Sirens and, given the focus on music and the voice, it might be worth thinking about, perhaps.

ojibwe music #7

Just another chunk of the article on Ojibwe music that I found in Gilfillan's scrap book. This section has the heading 'Specimen Lyrics':

"My Bark Canoe," to which reference has been made in the foregoing, is a lyric which is exquisite from any point of view, and the musical theme such as might have been composed by any of the precursors of Schubert in the last of the eighteenth century. It is cast in the usual mode, beginning upon the higher and ending on low notes, and the melody is at once so graceful and appealing that it is heard here as commonly among the visitors as among the Indians; both sing, whistle, and hum it incessantly, the Ojibway in his tepee or his canoe and the visitor on the piazza of the hotel. It possesses its native touch of barbarism, yet is as fluent as the tenderest thought of Schubert, and, for the paleface musician, its charm is unconsciously enhanced by the appropriate words which Mr Burton has adapted to it. The original Ojibway is:

"Kee-chi ga de beck, ondeydeyan,
Ah gu-ze be, ondeydeyan."

and this is the translation supplied by one of the native singers:

"I am out all night to seek my love;
I paddle all night long and seek for her."

I quote the English arrangement to show how delicately Mr Burton has transcribed the simplicity of the Indian idea:

In the still night the long hours through,
I guide my bark canoe,
My bark canoe, my love, to you.

While the stars shine and falls the dew,
I seek my love in bark canoe,
In bark canoe I seek for you.

It is I, love, your lover true,
Who glides the stream in bark canoe,
It glides to you, my love, to you.

As the reader no doubt has imagined, the same melody again is repeated with each stanza, but the theme is of a haunting quality whose repetition serves only to emphasize the plaint of the Indian swain.

I quite liked the comparisons with Schubert here and also the comparison of the literal translation supplied by 'one of the native singers' and the more 'delicately' translated version by Mr Burton.

Kurt Weill

This is just an off-the-cuff comment really but, while I was in London over the weekend, I went to one of my favourite CD shops (on the South Bank, near the National Theatre) and bought a recording of Kurt Weill's Die sieben Totsünden. I wasn't really thinking about this when I bought it, but afterwards it struck me that Weill was another exile from Nazi Germany who made his way to the US. I always think that there is a very interesting - not to say strange - sense of place in Weill's songs, partly because of the words but also because of the musical styles that accompany them. (I'm thinking of something like ' Benares Song', which seems almost willfully defiant of 'real' geography.)

ojibwe music #6

Another (shorter) quotation from the article on Ojibwe music that I found in Gilfillan's scrapbook. It follows on from the material on rhythm and harmony that I posted earlier. The title of this section is 'Rules of Indian Music':

One of the rules of Indian music is that a song begins on a high note and ends on a low one. We usually reach our climaxes in art music by just the opposite process. To its own rules Ojibway music generally conforms, but among the comparatively few examples studied there are striking exceptions, one song in particular ending in the most spirited manner on a high note. Another rule is in regard to the scale which, with most tribes, is limited to five notes. The omitted intervals are usually the fourth and seventh; some of the Ojibway songs have the seventh as a passing note, and some include the fourth on the accented part of the measure. It will occasion no surprise to discover native songs in which every note of the scale is employed. How much missionary influence, exerted over a series of generations, has had to do with the making of Indian songs cannot be asserted, but various circumstances suggest that the music is practically undefiled. The melodies unquestionably are very ancient. No one appears to know where or when they originated, but it is certain that they have been handed down by oral tradition for many generations. It is not a wild dream that many of the identical songs of Longfellow's Chibiabos are reproduced annually on the shore of Lake Huron.

So here we have more of that speculation about how 'pure' the present state of Native American music is and how much is owed to contact with missionaries. Actually, it made me think of something you said last summer about the term 'authenticity'. A practice is authentic if its practitioners see it as such...

ojibwe music #5

Another quotation from the 1902 Evening Post article on Ojibwe music. Once again, there's a reference to someone, no doubt Burton, investigating the Ojibwes' sense of music through an experimental process:

Such Ojibway music as the white visitor has heard divides easily into two general classes, lyric and ceremonial. The latter class subdivides into accompanied and unaccompanied songs. Inasmuch as the accompaniment consists always and only of drum beats, it might seem as if the subdivision were superfluous, but this is by no means the case. The unaccompanied songs are rhythmically free; that is, they may be in double or triple or indeterminate rhythm. The accompanied songs never fail to be in double rhythm. This may have all the gradations of tempo from andante to presto, but it is always double. The accompanied song, moreover, is always enhanced by dancing, and the plain double rhythm is the only one to which the Ojibway can direct his feet. It has been learned by patient experiment that any form of triple rhythm, or even 6-8, is hopeless confusion to the Ojibway mind, and a tangle to his limbs. This is rather perplexing in presence of the complicated rhythm of "My Bark Canoe" (described further on), in which 3-4 and 4-4 alternate, and the still more complex rhythm of some of their songs, one of which analyzes into the very unusual rhythmical structure of seven beats to the measure.

I wonder what the 'patient experiment' involved - playing tunes in 6-8 and shouting 'dance! dance!', perhaps?

Mr Burton and the Ojibwe songs

I've been thinking a little about the story I posted earlier today and there's something about it that intrigues me. Perhaps I'm over-interpreting but, to me, there's a suggestion that Burton wanted the Ojibwe singers to like his harmonised version of the song. I suppose he might have viewed what he was doing as an experiment and nothing more - a piece of research on the attitudes of a 'primitive' people. But I sense just a hint of anxiety in the air as the second version of the song begins: it seems to matter to Burton at more than just an intellectual level how the 'owners' of the tune will react to what he has done.

ojibwe music #4

Back in August, I posted a number of times (here, here, and here) on the subject of Ojibwe music. The posts focused on material that Gilfillan either published himself or collected, and the third post included an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the the New York paper, The Evening Post. Gilfillan pasted it into his scrapbook, which is how I came to read it. I thought I'd post a bit more material from it. This is a section called 'appreciation of harmony'.

There is [...], in all their songs, a distinct tonality. It is not often one that will lend itself readily to harmony, for most of their songs are in a five-note scale, and the omission of the seventh, or leading note, of the European scale makes the employment of the dominant chord hazardous if not impossible.

Although Harmony does not enter into Ojibway music, the Indians are appreciative of it, and at times seek to utilize it in their own way. About midnight recently a party of them came from the village of Desbarats down the river to the camp in their canoes, and when opposite the hotel burst forth sonorously in one of their love songs; and the powerful voice of Kaboosa, the scholar of the band, was given forth in a series of thirds below the melody. I called his attention to it afterward, and asked if it were accidental. He replied that he gave the "undertones," as he called them, purposely, but he did not often venture to do so in the regular performance, because it disturbed the other singers and caused them to wander from the correct "tone." I asked if it was common for the Indians thus to attempt harmony, and he replied with smiling pride that he was the only Indian on the shores of Lake Huron or Lake Superior that could do so. Kaboosa, however, attended school in Marquette, Mich., and there got an idea of singing, and his accomplishment may not be wholly unrelated to his experiences in school. Kaboosa believes the Indians could readily be taught harmony, and says his own children pick up the melodies of the whites very readily. Lewis Tetebahbundung, another of the "Hiawatha band," gives forth a beautifully sweet tenor, and obviously could easily be trained in a more highly developed music than that of his tribe. Indeed, I am surprised to find that the Indians as a class have ordinarily good singing voices.

Mr Burton used to wonder whether the Indians would welcome or resent the employment of harmony with their melodies, and he put the question to test one evening when they had assembled for social relaxation, after a performance of "Hiawatha." First he asked them to sing one of their own lyrics in their own way. They did so, in unison, repeating the melody three times. Then a quartet of whites sang the piece in English as Mr. Burton had previously arranged it. The Ojibways were greatly excited. They clapped their hands and split the air with their falsetto shrieks of pleasure, and when the quartet had sung the harmonized version again the Indians surrounded him, asking eagerly if he thought they "could learn to sing it that way." He told them they could, and they were delighted when he offered to teach them to sing by note, using their own songs as a basis for exercises.

I find the phrase 'using their own songs as a basis for exercises' particularly poignant, somehow.

Chavéz Ravine

This is a bit tangential but do you know Ry Cooder's 2005 album, Chavéz Ravine, Eve? I've been listening to it recently and enjoying it. I thought of it in this context because it's very much about place and more specifically about displacement (since it deals with the forcible removal of the Mexican-American community from Chavéz Ravine, Los Angeles, in the '50s). It has quite a political flavour but I think it's equally concerned with providing a kind of snapshot of a particular culture in a specific time and place. Here's the album cover:

Josephine the Singer

Here's a link to a translation of Kafka's last short story, 'Josephine the Singer', which Rebecca Comay mentions in her article, 'Adorno's Siren Song':

http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/vermeer/287/josephine.htm

Kafka and the Sirens

Over the weekend, I looked up some of the literature on Kafka's story and I've particularly enjoyed reading an article by Rebecca Comay called 'Adorno's Siren Song', which appeared in New German Critique in autumn 2000. I'm writing in haste, so I'll just quote a couple of passages from it - ones that focus on Kafka rather than Adorno. Here's the first:

Kafka wonders whether the Sirens were not, indeed, quite silent; whether it was not Odysseus who seduced himself with his own drive to mastery; whether it was not indeed the cure itself which was in the end the real disease. Who could withstand the vertical exaltation [Überhebung] induced by the exerience of the upright stance?

"Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one's own strength, and the subsequent exaltation [Überhebung] that bears down on everything before it, no earthly powers could have remained intact [widerstehen]."

And what would be the effect of such a binding? What if the binding which was homeopathically to counter the enchanting song - for in Greek, as in other languages, "binding" and "spellbinding" share a common semantic thread - was only to redouble its constricting power? If the Sirens themselves were stringing Odysseus along with promises as binding as they were untethered. According to at least one etymology, the word "Siren" relates to seira, the word for "cord" or "line" or "bandage": the enchanters would be, then, the enchainers. Suggesting, finally, that the binding power is from the outset split and doubled. A double bind.

The second passage that I'm going to quote is about Walter Benjamin's comments on Kafka's story. (I think this is interesting not least because Jess and Pam are focusing quite closely on Benjamin in their thread of work). Here it is:

Benjamin suggests that by Kafka's day, the Sirens have fallen silent because music as such - the last "token of hope" - has been permanently gagged. [Reference: Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka," Gesammelte Schriften 2.2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) 416; In English, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969) 118.] This will not prevent them, perversely, from exerting a certain hypnotic spell. In "Josephine the Singer" (Kafka's final testament, written on his deathbead while his own voice, was, under the impact of tubercular laryngitis, disappearing) the mass mouse audience fails to appreciate the pathetic squeaking which nonetheless, they insist, "enchants" them. [Reference: Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971) 362.] Having missed out on proper childhood, these rodent exiles - "nearly always on the run" - are at once too "childish" and "too old for music," and hardly notice when the enchanting Josephine, on strike for better working conditions, stops singing.

In a footnote to this passage, Comay cites an essay by Laurence Rickel with the title 'MUSICPHANTOMS: "Uncanned" conceptions of Music from Josephine the Singer to Mickey Mouse'. It appeared in Sub-stance in 1989 and sounds as if it might be interesting! Comay goes on to talk about Adorno's views on the 'gagging' of music but perhaps this is enough for today...

Simple Person

I've just been listening to your piece, I am really a very simple person, and I have to say that it moved me a lot, particularly in the choral version. I don't know whether you see it as having any connection with the exile project but it seemed to me to resonate with a number of the ideas - and, I think, the moods - that we've touched upon before.

I love the elliptical relationship between the title and the piece itself. I also love the way that the syllables 'spoken' by the voice are entirely conventional - not, on the face of it, 'meaningful' at all. And yet, despite this, the voice uses those conventional syllables to reveal something of itself. While we've been working on this project, I've written quite often about transcription as a way of archiving the voice. What startled me about this piece is the fact that you've made transcription - the use of sol-fa syllables and, indeed, shape notes - almost the subject of the work. The voice simply sings the syllables that are used to transcribe pitch to paper. And, as I listened, I kept thinking in terms of a kind of relay between voice and document, document and voice. (I guess you associate shape notes with religious traditions in the South? Actually, I have no idea if there are shape note choirs in Britain, but sol-fa has certainly been used by the choirs that have been such a significant part of the cultural history of working-class communities, not least in the area of South Wales that my parents come from. In that way, by singing the syllables, the voice seems to speak about its tradition and the way in which this mode of capturing the voice makes the tradition possible.)

I hope you don't mind my writing this way about a piece that you are still working on - I was just so taken with the fact that transcription was such a feature of the work!

ojibwe music #3

With all that in mind, here is the first part of the article in Gilfillan's scrap book:

It is no longer to be doubted that there is real beauty in Indian music - in that of the Ojibway tribe, at least; and on of the most capable of our American composers, Frederick R. Burton of Yonkers, N.Y., is engaged in his summer home in Desbarats, Ont., studying the musical system of the Ojibways, reeducing it to notes and, to please the civilized ear, making harmonized arrangements of it which bid fair to become classic. The word "system" in the foregoing is used advisedly, for, notwithstanding that the Ojibway musical scheme does not recognize harmony, the Ojibways have unconsciously attained an artistic end. The singing of the Zuñis, the Omakas, and other tribes of Western Indians leads very nearly to the conclusion that, while rudimentary melodic ideas of a pleasing nature might be found in aboriginal music, no such thing as a well-defined, coherent Indian tune exists. Indian music, like Indian poetry, consists in the indefinite repetition of a single brief idea. Art music, on the other hand, is distinguished by repetition or imitation of a single melodic idea with various other melodic phrases as links to bind the essential fragments into a complete whole. This feature of art music is palpably manifest in the structure of Ojibway songs. They attain unity by the repetition of a definite melodic phrase, or motif, and they attain variety by the alternation of other phrases or by the familiar device of imitation of the main phrase on another interval of the scale.

Desbarats, since prehistoric times, has been the summer playground of the Ojibways, and it is there that the scene of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" is laid. It is there, too, that the Ojibways give from July 10 to September 1, their annual performance of their own play of "Hiawatha". Mr. Burton's successful dramatic cantata "Hiawatha" has been selected for combination with the Indian "Hiawatha" for the later delectation of audiences in the great cities, and the composer and conductor has been adopted into the tribe and given the appropriate name of "Neganne-Kah-boh" - "the man in front." Himself an Indian by adoption, it is peculiarly fit that it should fall to his lot to uncover to the civilized world the remarkable inherent beauties of the music of his tribe.

ojibwe music #2

This is a bit complicated and I hope I get it right! In the second volume of Gilfillan's scrap book, there is an article that he clipped from a 1902 edition of the New York paper, The Evening Post. The title of the article is 'The Music of the Ojibway Indians: Aboriginal Tunes on the Scene of Longfellow's "Hiawatha"' and it discusses a composer called Frederick R. Burton ('of Yonkers, N.Y.'), who had had been studying Ojibwe music and had made arrangements of some of the songs he had heard.

In the opening years of the twentieth century, at the instigation of one Louis Olivier Armstrong, a company of Native American performers had begun to enact scenes from "Hiawatha" with dialogue in Ojibwe. The performances took place at Desbarats, Ontario, and subsequently also at Little Traverse Bay, Michigan. Armstrong worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the performances seem to have been, at least in part, intended to draw tourists. Burton became involved with these productions when a tour of urban centres was planned for 1903 and he agreed to arrange the music. So, I guess the article in The Evening Post must have been part of the publicity for the tour.

I'll post something about the article in The Evening Post later. What's pretty cool is that our man, Michael McNally, who wrote the book about Ojibwe hymn-singing, did an article on these Native language performances of "Hiawatha" in a 2006 edition of the journal, American Quarterly. I can probably get hold of that through the university library but, at any rate, the abstract is freely available and this is it:

Each summer from 1901 to 1918, and intermittently thereafter through 1965, Odawa and Ojibwe actors in Northern Ontario and Michigan took part in operatic Native language performances of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha financed by area railroads and captured on silent film. While audiences and reviewers understood the pageants to validate the reality of Longfellow's representations of vanished noble savages and while Native actors peformed this script for pay in lean times, a closer look at their offstage lives, their onstage improvisations, and especially their humor reveals that these were also Indians playing Indian for Indian reasons. In an era of assimilation policies that outlawed drumming, dancing, and ceremony in public, and on stages designed to render them absent as twentieth century Native people, the actors insinuated their presence in heavily ramified, if subtle, ways. Crucially, performances enabled them to embody and thereby maintain a musical and dance repertoire associated with peoplehood and power, that could be rekindled with greater sovereignty by subsequent generations.

Interesting, no? And worth bearing in mind while reading the account of Ojibwe music developed in the 1902 newspaper.

the songs

With a bit of luck, you should be able to view the songs by clicking on these links:

Song of the Medicine Lodge
Dance Song
Love Song
Peace Meeting of Ojibways and Dakotas
Gambling Song

ojibwe music #1

Right - in 1904, Gilfillan published a novel called The Ojibway: A Novel of Indian Life of the Period of the Early Advance of Civilization in the Great Northwest. I first looked at it last week and thought it was a bit boring. But then I looked at it again today and it suddenly seemed much more interesting, which shows how much is in the eye of the beholder!

The interest lies in the fact that it constitutes a huge act of ventriloquism by which the missionary gives readers a sense that they are hearing the voices of Native Americans when, of course, all the voices of the book are mediated through the author himself. And the text presents us not only with *speaking* voices but with *singing* voices too in that, scattered throughout the narrative, are five songs:

Song of the Medicine Lodge (p.40)
Dance Song (p.57)
Love Song (p.168)
Peace Meeting of Ojibways and Dakotas (p.361)
Gambling Song (p.451)

They are all described as 'transcribed and harmonized by Edwin S. Tracey'. I'm a little curious about who Tracey was and whether he worked on Native American music regularly or just did this as a favour for Gilfillan. Will try to post copies of the songs now!

Inkslinger's Song

The other moment when the 'myth of the frontier' is called into question comes in a song sung by Johnny Inkslinger, Bunyan's book-keeper:

It was out in the sticks that the fire
Of my existence began
Where no one had heard the Messiah
And no one had seen a Cézanne.
I learned a prose style from the preacher
And the facts of life from the hens
And fell in love with the teacher
Whose love for John Keats was intense
And I dreamed of writing a novel
With which Tolstoi couldn't compete
And of how all the critics would grovel
But I guess that a guy gotta eat.

I can think of much nicer professions
Than keeping a ledger correct
Such as writing my private confessions
Or procuring a frog to dissect
Learning Sanskrit would be more amusing
Or studying the history of Spain.
And, had I the power of choosing
I would live on the banks of the Seine
I would paint St. Sebastian the Martyr
Or dig up the Temples of Crete
Or compose a D major sonata
But I guess that a guy gotta eat.

The company I have to speak to
Are wonderful to me in their way
But the things that delight me are Greek to
The Jacks who haul lumber all day.
It isn't because I don't love them
That this camp is a prison to me
Nor do I think I'm above them
In loathing the site of a tree.
O but where are those beautiful places
Where what you begin you complete
Where the joy shines out of men's faces
And all get sufficient to eat?

Auden's Blues

There are two moments in Paul Bunyan when a less triumphalist version of history comes to the fore. One is the song named 'The Blues: Quartet of the Defeated', which goes like this:

Gold in the North came the blizzard to say
I left my sweetheart at the break of day,
The gold ran out and my love grew grey.
You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

The West, said the sun, for enterprise,
A bullet in Frisco put me wise,
My last words were, 'God damn your eyes'.
You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

In Alabama my heart was full,
Down to the river bank I stole,
The waters of grief went over my soul.
You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

In the streets of New York I was young and well,
I rode the market, the market fell,
One morning I found myself in hell.
I didn't know all, sir, I didn't know all.
We didn't know all, sir, we didn't know all.

In the saloons I heaved a sigh
Lost in deserts of alkali I lay down to die
There's always a sorrow can get you down
All the world's whiskey can never drown,
You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

Some think they're strong, some think they're smart,
Like butterflies they're pulled apart,
America can break your heart.
You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

Brogan quotes the third stanza - the alto solo by the woman from Alabama - and says:

For a moment the true sorrows of the frontier and the cotton-fields as they affected women come to life, but the hint is never followed up. The "Blues" is only a warning - one which the operetta's characters ignore.