Natalie Curtis was born in New York City in either 1875, according to Carl Rahkonen, or 1876, according to historian Michelle Patterson. She came from a “...close, well-connected family and relatively wealthy family…” (Patterson, 2010, 438). She initially trained to be a concert pianist at the National Conservatory in New York, while also traveling abroad to study with well known composers, Feruccio Busoni and Alfred-Auguste Giraudet in Berlin. After returning from Europe to the United States, she went on a trip to Arizona which “...roused her interest in Native American cultures” (Rahkonen 1998:511). Once she returned home to New York, from the Southwest, she decided to change her career course, leaving her family and training for what Curtis calls “...the self appointed task of recording native songs” (1913:623) Patterson states Curtis approached her work with the intent of promoting Native American music and by sharing the value of indigenous people and their culture with white audiences. “Native Americans often used public performances of music as means of engaging with white audiences and conveying ‘Indianness’” (Patterson, 2010, 421)
Curtis conducted her own fieldwork where she would live amongst the Indigenous people she was studying. Rahkonen says Curtis first used a phonograph to record songs but later “...relied on her informants singing a song several times so she could make a faithful transcription” (1998: 513). She also engaged in advocacy work, one example being a personal plea she made to Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of her family, where she was able to end government policy which prohibited the use of native languages and songs in schools on the reservations.
Curtis became a widely acknowledged expert on indigenous music and folklore with the 1907 publication of The Indians' Book, a collection of more than 200 songs from 18 tribes (Rahkonen 1998, 511). The majority of The Indian’s Book was printed with no accompaniment, which had been a standard of Curtis’s publications before as Curtis did her best not to add or alter her transcriptions of songs. Maureen Salzer refers to these transcriptions as “Translations of native verbal art…” and makes the claim that the published texts have a problematic relationship with their original verbal sources and are, in most cases, sufficiently removed from accurate translation of representation to be considered Native” (Salzer, 2010, 79).
Natalie Curtis was definitely influenced by the work of Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore, who were more well known and well documented. Due to her unexpected death at age 46, Curtis had a much smaller volume of published materials. Like Curtis, Fletcher and Densmore were white women who shared similar experiences when they were first exposed to Indigenous music and felt that it was in some way their calling (Rahkonen 1998, 511).
In her article "The Female Sound Collector and Her Talking Machine," Roshanak Khesti touches on this “fantasy of sound collecting” (2015, 16) and makes the claim that in all these practices of recording or sound collecting Indigenous music, one thing remains the same: the one collecting the sound is a white woman. Khesti describes this as “The ascension of white, female, comparative musicologists in the public sphere as savior to 'disappearing' Native American sounds, along with the attendant power that yielded for her….” (2015, 28). Khesti identifies the problematic nature of these transcription practices, the first being the presence of white saviorism, the idea that Ingenious people need white people's help or “rescue.” Khesti also touches on how a lot of these women were using Indigenous people, music and culture, a place they knew would accept them, for their own gain or career advancement. She identifies the “archetype of the upper class, white, female comparative musicologists spurned by her male university colleagues and banished to “Indian country” to practice her craftsman, a profile that describes many early comparative musicologists.” (Khesti, 2015, 17)
The work of Natalie Curtis, along with her contemporaries, may have been done with the intention of both aiding and advancing Indigenous people and their music but that does not mean these transcription practices did not engage in any harm. When reading these translations with a critical lens, and an informed perspective on colonialism and indigenous survivance, one can identify the way in which “...the published texts have a problematic relationship with their original verbal sources and are, in most cases, sufficiently removed from accurate translation of representation to be considered Native.” (Salzer, 2010, 79)
Bibliography
- Burlin, Natalie Curtis. 1907. “The Indians' book an offering by the American Indians of Indian lore, musical and narrative, to form a record of the songs and legends of their race.” New York: Harper.
- Curtis, Natalie. “A Plea for Our Native Art.” The Musical Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1920): 175–78.
- Curtis, Natalie. "The Perpetuating of Indian Art." The Outlook, 22 October 1913: 623.
- Rahkonen, Carl. “Special Bibliography: Natalie Curtis (1875-1921).” Ethnomusicology 42, no. 3 (1998): 511–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/852852.
- Khesti, Roshanak. 2015. "The female sound collector and her talking machine” Modernity's ear: listening to race and gender in world music. New York: New York University Press. 15-38.
- Patterson, Michelle Wick. “The ‘Pencil in the Hand of the Indian’: Cross-Cultural Interactions in Natalie Curtis’s ‘The Indians’ Book.’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 419–49.
- Salzer, Maureen. “Native Presence and Survivance in Early Twentieth-Century Translations By Natalie Curtis Burlin And Mary Austin.” Western American Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 79–103.
