Lesser-Known Composer of the Month: Arthur Farwell

Wait, Who?

Arthur Farwell was a composer, critic, lecturer, and publisher who devoted much of his professional life to advancing the status and nurturing the unique character of American music.  He is particularly remembered as an arranger of folk music, particularly of Native American tunes.  Early in his compositional career he grew frustrated with the lack of opportunities he encountered thanks to the American musical establishment of the time viewing music, in this words, "through German glasses." 

In response he created the Wa-Wan Press, with the announced goal of answering Dvořák's challenge to American composers to step out from under the shadow of European music and explore the richness of American folk music.  He used his lecture tours to help defray the costs of operation and ran the press from 1901–1912, when he sold it to Schirmer.

Farwell recieved musical training as a child, but did not consider a musical career until he encountered the musical scene in Boston while he was attending the Massachussetts Institute of Technology with the intent of becoming an electrician.  He subsequently studied with George Whitefield Chadwick in the US and later with Engelbert Humperdinck and Hans Pfitzner in Europe.  He considered himself a Romantic composer, although in his later works he began to experiment with abstract and polytonal techniques.

In addition to composing, arranging, and lecturing, from 1909–1914 he served as the chief critic of Musical America, for which he contributed numerous articles.

Farwell was primarily a composer for small forces, with much of his orchestral and even chamber music being orchestrations of earlier piano pieces.  His Rudolf Gott Symphony (op. 95) is the largest of his original orchestral works.

The bulk of Farwell's output was for piano or voice and piano.  His vocal compositions include well over a hundred songs, including more than thirty settings of poems by Emily Dickinson.  His piano works include numerous folk music arrangements, particularly of Native American, Southwestern, and Southern folk melodies.  Later experimental works include his set of polytonal studies (op. 109), a set of 23 out of a projected 46; although the remainder were never finished, the exercise informed his last piano work, the op. 113 piano sonata.

As part of his involvement with the community music movement, Farwell also produced incidental music for a number of masques, pageants, and plays.