Frederick R. Burton's American Primitive Music, with Especial Attention to the Songs of the Ojibways
In the preface Levine writes that Burton
It is important to the story that the individuals involved in this story about colonialist engagements with Indigenous practices often have degrees from or affiliations with elite institutions, such as Harvard or the Field Museum. The legitimacy gained from such affiliations and positions carried significant weight.was employed as a musical expert in the ethnological departments of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago. He produced both scholarly transcriptions of Native American music and harmonized arrangements for voice accompanied by piano. Burton wrote that although artistic enthusiasm had inspired his research, he tried to remain objective and accurate in his transcriptions (2002: xxv).
We are interested in Burton's arrangements for voice accompanied by piano, as these became the source material for Zeisberg's re-arrangements in his series Primitive Indian Tunes. Like his predecessor, John Comfort Fillmore, Burton was interested in the harmonizing the indigenous melodies, though he was more explicitly interested in arranging them for concert performance.
It is worth quoting Levine's summary of his approach to arranging.
In a chapter entitled "Indian Songs in Their Relation to Art," Burton defends his harmonized arrangements of American Indian music and discusses the importance of indigenous melodies in establishing an American nationalist musical style. He writes:
I would rather, myself, hear an Ojibway sing ''My Bark Canoe," in his simple way than hear it with pianoforte accompaniment; but that is because I would rather walk in the sombre forests, or guide a canoe along the wilderness waterways, than dwell in a city flat; and the circumstances of civilization having compelled me to dwell in a flat far removed from primeval forest and flashing lake, I find in the harmony added to the melody a factor for spiritual comfort that vies in sweetness with uncontaminated Nature herself. Not that the harmonies recall the forest and the lakes; not that they suggest the atmosphere of the song's origin, for music does nothing of that kind; it is that the melody, when sung under the conditions of civilization, demands the rounding out of its nature which is effected by harmony (Burton, American Primitive Music, 178; quoted in Levine 2002: 62)
Levine goes on to include a quote that explain's Burton's defense of English-language text, where he claims a "desire to make the attractive melody available for paleface singers. To this end it was essential that there should be singable verses" (Burton, American Primitive Music, 151-52 quoted in Levine 2002:62).