John Comfort Fillmore (1843-1898), an early American music theorist, was one of the most highly renowned American scholars of his time. In many sources, such as the Wisconsin Historical Society, Fillmore is referred to as a “one of the country's leading music theorists.” Fillmore was what McNutt refers to as a “pioneer ethnomusicologist” (1984); he was familiar with standard notation and able to transcribe the music that was being recorded. However, in practice, Fillmore’s “study” of Indigenous music was exclusively based on his training in European music traditions and reflected the ideology of social Darwinism that justified his arguments of natural harmonic sense. 

Fillmore was one of the first people--and arguably the most prominent--responsible for applying the harmonies of European art music to Indigenous melodies and he used this practice to hypothesize about Native Americans’ ideas of beauty. In his collection and harmonization of Indigenous music, Fillmore worked with many of the leading ethnologists of the time. His initial contact was with Alice Fletcher who reached out to him in 1888 for advice on transcription. He ended up being harmonizing some 90 songs which were published in Fletcher's A Study of Omaha Music (1893). He also worked with Franz Boas when he was the “assistant chief of the department of anthropology at the Exposition," meaning the Columbia Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where Fillmore recorded and transcribed music by the “Navaho, the Kwakiutl, and other peoples on the Midway Plaisance” (McNutt, 1984). Fillmore’s career in applying harmony to Indian songs was inaccurate, at best. His method of transcription, while heinous on its own, simply reflects the colonial attitude towards possessions of non-white people. Because Fillmore’s target audience was white society, there was no intention of accuracy in this type of extraction. Melodic and harmonic features of the songs that Fillmore collected were considered to be “discrepancies,” and he believed that melody evolved directly into harmony, rather than considering the possibility that it would evolve into other forms, or into nothing else at all. Colonialism in the form of modification of culture is the principle of these transcriptions, in that it refuses to acknowledge that cultures different from the dominant one are equally important, legitimate, and respectable. However, when analyzing these types of materials, we must acknowledge and understand context. Jesse Walter Fewkes, a white American ethnologist and anthropologist who, like Fillmore and Fletcher, was similarly responsible for the recordings and transcriptions of Indigenous songs, remarked “I have looked forward with great interest to a visit to some of those tribes which still remain in approximately the same condition that they were when first visited by white men” (Fewkes, 1890). Because this form of extraction was not the more violent and brutal kind that had, in Fillmore’s lifetime, recently taken form in the American slave trade and Indian Removal Act, and because this form of extraction acknowledged that cultures and people could exist and thrive without being white, Fillmore, Fewkes, and Fletcher would have considered themselves different from most white folk and as progressives in their field. However, this does not justify their actions in profiting off of Indigenous culture. Rather, Fillmore arguably diminishes the impact of this work by dismissing the importance of his relationship to Indigenous culture as a white male scholar.

Sources

• Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890. “On the Use of the Phonograph Among the Zuni Indians.” The American Naturalist 24(283):687-691.
• Fillmore, John Comfort. 1893. “Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music” from Alice C. Fletcher A Study of Omaha Indian Music. Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum, vol. 1, no. 5. Cambridge, Mass. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. 59-77. 
• McNutt, James C. 1984. “John Comfort Fillmore: A Student of Indian Music Reconsidered.” American Music 2(1).:61-70.