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Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852-1933)

Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852-1933) was an American psychologist whose nascent work in studying “primitive music”, as the West called it, developed into the modern field of musicology. The historical moment in which he worked allowed for him to contribute to and exist within a particular intellectual ferment in a number of developing or fast-approaching fields, including psychology and, eventually, ethnomusicology and museum theory. While his work is no longer at the forefront of any field of study, Gilman’s legacy of colonial and racial subjugation is one that remains imbued in present-day practice, and understanding the overlap across these disciplines provides a clear perception of how profusely harmful Gilman’s work truly was.

The tight quarters that these fields occupied during their development in the late 19th century certainly influenced Gilman’s career trajectory. Prior to working with music, Gilman had pursued studies in philosophy, logic, and aesthetics, learning with such notable intellectuals as C.S. Peirce and William James, the latter of whom is considered the father of American psychology. Following his education, Gilman offered a course at Clark University on the psychology of pleasure and pain, in which he only consulted music briefly but felt comfortable asserting that European music was the only kind of “developed [musical] art” due to being based on Western scales (Gilman 1893, 50). His later work with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, somewhat separate from his musicological and psychological studies altogether, involves his background in aesthetics. His 1904 report to the museum’s trustees about what he felt was necessary for a museum to center their audience’s experiences is so formative that many historians consider it “the birth certificate of the modern American art museum” (Lubar 2017). Gilman’s skiascope exemplifies his ideas behind this developing museum theory, as the tool’s rigid and limiting frame isolates a museum object or exhibition from outside influence, for better or for worse.

As his treatment of music in the psychology course implies, though, Gilman held an expertise in what he called “developed” musics from his ethnological study, and the significance of that research supersedes his other academic pursuits. In 1890, prior to teaching, Gilman and ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes were commissioned by philanthropist Mary Hemenway to research the music of Indigenous Puebloans in the southwestern United States. This project, known as the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, focused predominantly on recording the music of the Hopi and Zuñi tribes and drawing analyses and transcriptions from wax cylinder recordings. The novelty of both new recording technology and the beginnings of the field of music ethnology (to become musicology) itself means that Gilman’s work in the expedition set a precedent for the developing discipline. This precedent cemented the glaring ethical and moral flaws involved in his research methods as acceptable practice. For example, Gilman’s research of Hopi music correctly asserts that it functions separately from Western temperament and form, but he comes away feeling that because the Hopi music he heard will never “submit to a trammels of a system”, such music is “unhistoric rather than … prehistoric” +. Gilman’s experimental research in psychology, aesthetics, and the study of music beyond the American Southwest reflects similarly bigoted and racist justification: an 1892 article on the psychology behind “specimens of Chinese music” reduces a wealth of Chinese scalar function to a monolith, one supposedly belonging to a “time immemorial” despite making comparisons to prior knowledge of Greek and Western structures (Gilman 1892a, 55;59).

In summary, the disconnect between the nature of Gilman’s research and his academic distillations is obvious and astounding. How can so-called “primitive” musics, “inexplicable by interpolation and transcription”, be dissected with analysis that forcibly compresses musics outside of Western art music into the Euro-American mold (Gilman 1909a, 11)? Gilman’s lack of respect for Indigenous communities, as well as his desires to divulge their musical cultures by and for the academy, dehumanized groups like the Hopi and Zuñi through scientific abstraction rather than by social Darwinism alone. As a result, the foundation of the music ethnology discipline was tempered by its self-fulfilling desire to hold court with already established disciplines, reducing vibrant musical cultures to wax cylinders and transcriptions that hold no value to the communities whose sonic and ceremonial practices were poached for intellectual commodification.

Below are some additional publications by and about Gilman for further reading:

Gilman, Alexander William. 1895. “Search Into the History of the Gillman or Gilman Family” (London: E. Stock) 257-9. https://archive.org/details/searchesintohist00gill/page/724/mode/2up.

Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1892b. “Report on an Experimental Test of Musical Expressiveness” The American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 4, no. 4: 558-576. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1410803?seq=2.

GIlman, Benjamin Ives. 1909b. “The Science of Exotic Music” Science. Vol. 30, no. 772: 532-5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1635211.pdf .

Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1891. “Zuñi Melodies” A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology. Vol. 1, sec. II: 63-91. https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP665127-PMLP1067374-A_Journal_of_American_Ethnology_and_Arch.pdf.

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Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850 - 1930) 28 This is a short biography of Jesse Fewkes's work in the field of ethnography specifically with the Passamaquoddy Tribe in present day Maine. plain 2022-06-07T20:11:42+00:00
Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850 - 1930) spearheaded the use of the phonograph in the “research” of Native American cultures. Fewkes focused his work on capturing Native American sounds through audio recording devices, such as the phonograph. He is credited with being the first person to record with a phonograph in the field during a trip to Maine where he worked among the Passamaquoddy and recorded one of his largest collections of wax cylinders (Hough 1932). The trip was a test of the technology before embarking on more extensive “expeditions” in the southwest. His work amongst the Pueblo Indians, including the Zuni, became his focus (1890).
His “research” focused on collecting songs, celebrations and other events that could be recorded on a phonograph. Fewkes's work would inspire other significant figures in the movement of preserving indigenous cultures such as Benjamin Ives Gilman,who analyzed the use of intervals outside Euro-American tunings in Fewkes's recordings. However, Fewkes conducted “research” in a colonizing manner that wrought epistemic violence upon the musics he encountered. This epistemic violence can be found in the erasure of Indigenous musical contexts and epistemologies.
Prior to engaging in the field of ethnology, Fewkes's main area of study was zoology; he spent four years in Leipzig, Germany studying zoology from 1871-1875. Fewkes’s previous areas of study influenced heavily his work in Ethnography. In his writings about the Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine, he often refers to the “dying out” of their “language, manners and customs” (Fewkes 1890a: 688). His writings and articles describing the Passamaquoddy tribe’s culture deny coeval existence of settlers and indigenous people. This practice of ethnologists publishing writings documenting Native American life as if it were in the past was very common in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. As Sterne points out, this effect feeds the practice of “othering” Indigenous Peoples (Sterne 2003). The denial of coeval existence is defined by the colonialist attitude of refusing to acknowledge Indigenous groups as existing at the same time as a “modern,” settler society. This is done through setting Indigenous groups as “others” who belong to the past within a linear idea of evolution.
Fewkes's background in zoology undoubtedly had a significant effect on his research of the Passamaquoddy tribe. Although he recorded a prolific number of Passamaquoddy voices, he chose to accompany each recording with a transcription and his own observations and interpretations as if they are fact. Take the Passamaquoddy “Snake Song,” for example. In the description of the “Snake Song” recording, Fewkes says, “While there is nothing to prove that it is a remnant of an ancient snake worship, still it is natural to presume that such is the case” (Fewkes 1890b: 270). Much of Fewkes’s work is similar to the game “telephone,” passing through other ethnographers such as W. Wallace Brown, an agent for the Passamaquoddy tribe based in Calais, Maine. Information became distorted and thus likely to be inaccurate to the original person.
To attempt to understand Native American cultures, Fewkes utilized western rhetoric to find analogues between EuroAmerican culture and Native American culture. In other words, Fewkes analyzed indigenous practices through his EuroAmerican lens. Another assumption Fewkes publishes noted that “it may be presumed that it (the Snake Dance of the Passamaquoddy) originally had a religious importance similar to that of the Snake Dances of the Southwest, since the extent of the worship of the snake among North American Indians is known” (Fewkes 1890b: 278). In his writings, Fewkes conflates cultures, denying the individuality of different tribes. In addition, he used analogues to western faith structures in his analysis, but also compared traditions from tribes of the southwestern United States for the study of the Passamaquoddy in New England (Hough 1932: 261-267). Such qualifications and presumptuous descriptions tied to cultural practices, stolen from the original owners, besmirches the meaning and heart of the original owners, erasing their identity and ownership and incurring epistemic violence.
Fewkes had a heavy influence over the sonic colonization and appropriation of several Native American tribes such as the Zuñi and Hopi tribes, not to mention the Passamaquody. These living peoples and their cultural practices were pronounced dead, and their definitions and identities changed in the western eye over the course of ethnographer's “research” over them.

Works Cited:
- Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890a. “On the Use of the Phonograph Among the Zuni Indians.” The American Naturalist 24(283):687-691.
- Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890b. “A Contribution of Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore” The Journal of American Folklore 3(11): 257-280.
- Hough, Walter. 1932. “Biographical Memoir of Jesse Walter Fewkes.” National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Biographical Memoirs. Volume XV - Ninth Memoir. 261-267.
- Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “A Resonant Tomb” in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press. 287-333.

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