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• 1 2022-05-29T21:11:33+00:00 Educational Compositions 12 Compositions made for use in the classroom using Indigenous material plain 2022-06-07T20:23:06+00:00

  In the early 1900’s in the United States, the philosophy behind music education shifted from teaching theory through written exercises to teaching theory through rote song (Parker). This new approach called for short melodies that highlighted and taught different aspects of “western” classical music theory. During this time, there was also a strong desire for music that strengthened the emerging national identity (Tomlins 1927: iii). These two factors pushed publishers of American songbooks to include what they thought were appropriate representations of Indigenous music. The first of these song books was called The Laurel Music Series. Created by William L.Tomlins, it was published in 1901 and contained compositions by Arthur Farwell that were based on transcriptions made by Alice Fletcher (Levine 2002: xxxi). In 1914, the Progressive Music Series edited by Horatio Parker was published. This songbook contained “The Eskimo Hunter” and “The Indian Song,” both of which had English lyrics. “The Eskimo Hunter” was based on an arrangement by John Phillip Sousa of transcriptions made by Franz Boas that were originally published in his book, The Central Eskimo. In many cases, the music listed in these musical readers as ‘Indian Folk Song’ were altered to fit a major or minor tonality in order to teach western music theory. The resulting compositions, while made digestible for colonial ears and eyes, had little to no resemblance of the music they claimed to represent. 

  Francis Densmore and Alice C. Fletcher both published books based on their fieldwork that were meant to be used in schools. Fletcher published her book Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs in 1915. The purpose of this book was to help children, and Americans in general “learn to feel at home with the winds, the clouds, the fields and the woods” by learning about the “ancient people” who lived on the land originally (Fletcher 1915: 3). Here, her use of the word “ancient” completely disregards the continued existence of Indigenous peoples and plays into the common belief at the time that Indigenous peoples and cultures were disappearing which was used as a justification for salvage ethnography. In the first chapter of the book, Fletcher describes not being able to hear the melodies in Indigenous Peoples music until her “Indian friends” sang to her while she was ill. After this experience she says she “never failed to catch the hidden melody” (Fletcher 1915: 4). With this statement, she shows how she made the decision to emphasize the parts of the music that she struggled to make out over the “tumultuous din” (Fletcher 1915: 4), referring to the non-western qualities of Indigenous sounds. Additionally, she explains her choice to add words to melodies, even when there were none there to begin with, because “unaccustomed as we are to the use of songs that have no words…we would lose much pleasure when singing them. To obviate the perplexities arising from the Indian’s peculiar treatment of words and to make clear the meaning of a song, words have been supplied” (Fletcher 5). Despite these actions of cultural appropriation and cultural erasure, she acknowledges that what she has presented in the book does not “stand alone or apart from the ceremonials or pleasures of which they form an essential feature” (Fletcher 6). She also states that anyone participating in the dances, for which she wrote instructions in a published book meant to be consumed by a western audience, “should never attempt to imitate what is supposed to be the Indian’s manner of singing or his dancing steps and postures…the result would probably be an unmeaning burlesque” (Fletcher 8). 

  Contrastingly, Densmore's  Indian Action Songs published in 1921 specifically calls for “Pantomimic Representation in Schools and Community Assemblies” (Densmore 1). Using her field recordings and experiences from her time spent with the Chippewa, Densmore created a short play complete with songs, actions, and explanations. It was published by the American Ethnology Society and permission to use the melodies, which had been previously published, was granted by the chief of the society at the time, Jesse Walter Feweks. Notably, there is no mention of permissions granted by the tribes from which the information was taken in the first place. There is a long history of Indigenous knowledge and music being appropriated for use in schools. Even to this day, the practice continues. While it is important to recognize and learn from Indigenous knowledge, it is damaging when such knowledge is taken from its original context without permission and altered to be digestible for non-Indigenous ears for the benefit of non-Indigenous people. It is important to learn from Indigenous knowledge but only when it is done in a collaborative way with Indigenous people at the center. To see some examples of how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into educational settings please visit Steps to Revise a Lesson Plan and Indigenous Storytelling withing Educational Contexts.
  
  Works Cited 

  • Densmore, Francis. 1921. Indian Action Song. Boston: C.C. Birchard & CO.
  • Fletcher, Alice. 1915. Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs. Boston: C.C. Birchard & Company.
  • Levine, Victoria Lindsay, ed. 2002. Introduction from Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements. Middleton, Wis.: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc.
  • Parker, Horatio; McConathy, Osbourne; Birge, Edward; and Meissner, Otto W. 1916. The Progressive Music Series Teacher's Manual. Boston, New York, Chicago: Silver, Burdett, and Company.
  • Tomlins, W.L. The Laurel Song Book. 1927. Boston: C.C. Birchard & Company.
• 1 media/1. Cover page.jpg 2022-05-24T22:01:37+00:00 The Indian Congress at Omaha in 1898 8 Trans-Mississippi Exhibiton plain 2022-05-26T18:02:46+00:00 In 1898, in Omaha Nebraska, Indigenous people were displayed in “live exhibits'' at the Omaha Congress. The Omaha Congress was a world’s fair intended to educate Americans on Indigenous culture. This rhetoric of an educational purpose was saturated with academic Social Darwinism and condescension toward Indigenous people, as well as blatant dehumanization of them  with these “living” exhibitions. To exemplify this point, one of the creators of the Omaha Congress, said that many families hoped to leave this fair with "memories that will make all the rest of their lives brighter and more hopeful."’ (quoted in Rydell 1981: 588) This quote also reveals the false cover of any “educational” goal for this event; it was expressly intended to entertain.
  
  In conjunction with this event was the Congress of Musicians, attended by one of the most influential ethnologists of music, Alice Fletcher. The Congress of Musicians consisted of many ethnographers and other specialists in music attending daily sessions where they observed concerts held at this Omaha Congress. Fletcher recorded many Indigenous songs that she heard at the congress, later transcribing them and thereby extracting these tunes from any sociocultural context. She made the tunes palatable to white people, later publishing them in a book called Indian Story and Song from North America and turning a profit. In the preface for this book, she notes the “scientific value” (Fletcher, 1900, viii) of these songs, thereby disregarding the cultural values and people behind it, reducing indigenous culture and experiences to a useful statistic – useful, that is, to white people. At one point, Fletcher outright acknowledged that white people can benefit from this music, noting the Indigenous songs’ “availability as themes, novel and characteristics for the American composer” (Fletcher, 1900, viii). This act of extraction and transcription for personal benefit is a very common form of epistemic violence found in the colonial underpinnings of ethnomusicology, as it removes the piece from cultural context, often fails to cite the creator, and generally uses it for the larger benefit of westerners, keeping it from the rightful owners, sometimes for decades. 
  
  This world’s fair was an atrocity in its own right, displaying Indigenous people as “primitive” and “savage.” These people  were made to recreate battles in mock Indigenous villages, forced to pretend to fight with cowboys (the “Cowboys vs Indians” exhibit, where the Indigenous people were portrayed as savages who attacked heroic, noble white men and lost), and, overall, were used as entertainment for profit. 
  
  These atrocities seem so far in the past, but they affect the way our world works today. The academic colonialism demonstrated in this event has not gone away, and even the language often used in more recent ethnomusicological literature demonstrates this academic colonialism. For example, typically white, educated, and privileged ethnomusicologists travel to other countries to ‘study’ certain ‘subjects’ and conduct 'research.' These words are in quotes because, despite being widely used in many fields and seeming relatively harmless, they can be interpreted as having a hint of condescension in them. Oftentimes, these research projects or studies do little to benefit the people who are being studied. This is extraction, and this practice has become so normalized that many people have only just started to question whether or not, as privileged Americans, we have the right to explore this music and this culture, and more importantly, why we feel entitled to this knowledge or experience. The history of white saviorism and epistemic violence is still relevant and continual today, and these ideologies and habits need to continue to be looked at critically. 
   
• 1 media/Alice_Cunningham_Fletcher_at_her_Writing_Desk.jpg media/Alice_Cunningham_Fletcher_at_her_Writing_Desk.jpg 2019-12-19T18:18:40+00:00 Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838-1923) 6 A Brief Biography plain 2022-03-30T19:13:27+00:00 Alice Cunningham Fletcher (15 March 1838-6 April 1923) was an early fieldworker and collector of Indigenous sonic practices. Trained in archaeology and ethnology, Fletcher is renowed as one of the very first ethnologists to conduct fieldwork among Indigenous peoples in the settler state of the U.S. and engage musical practices in their context. She first visited the Omaha peoples in 1881. At first, she engaged their sonic practices through the act of transcription, rendering complex practices into "Western" staff notation. Later, she employed wax cylinder phonograph technology to document, study, and preserve them. 
  
  She was employed by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and later the Bureau of American Ethnology, which was part of the Smithsonian Institution. She was a member of the American Folklore Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Women's National Indian Association.
  
  Important moments in her career: 
  • in 1881, she started fieldwork with the Omaha, marking the beginning of her collaboration with Francis La Flesche
  • in 1888, she reached out to Prof. John Comfort Fillmore, requesting his assistance in approaching and transcribing Indigenous materials. They remained in collaboration until his death in 1898. 
  • in 1893, she published A Study of Omaha Indian Music acknowledging with La Flesche a co-author. This was considered to be first systematic ethnography on Indigenous music in the settler state of the U.S. 
    • This publication included "A Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music" by Fillmore
    • All 92 transcriptions are presented in "Western" staff notation and virtually all are harmonized by Fillmore
    • As Pisani writes, 

  This book was particularly significant for musical composition because it included transcriptions by the music historian and prototheorist John Comfort Fillmore, who proposed ways in which monophonic Indian chants could be harmonized and, as he saw it, made more palatable to "cultured tastes." (Pisani 2005: 168)

  • in the same year, she "delivered papers [drawing on her studies of North American Indians] at three of the international congresses (music, anthropology, and religion)" at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Pisani 2005:174).
    • it should be noted that a young Frances Densmore was in the audience, having learned of Fletcher's work during piano studies in Boston in 1888
  • in 1898, she presented at the Congress of Musicians at Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, along with La Flesche and Fillmore. 
    • Several Omaha performed, in coordination with their talks, largely "for an audience composed largely of trained musicians"
    • More significant, however, was the evening concert "devoted to compositions 'founded upon Indian themes,' so the [Musical] Courier reports, and included 'the famous 'Indian Suite' recently composed by [Edward] MacDowell and a symphonic poem [Hiawatha] composed by Ernest Kroeger of St. Louis.'... 

  the Omaha Congress was probably the first occasion that scholars and ethnologists heard Indian tribal themes transformed into iconic concert works" (Pisani 2005:175-6) 

  • in 1900, she published Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), which included thirty songs and accompanying stories about them. Contrasting with The Study of Omaha Indian Music, this publication was designed not for scholars, but public consumption. 
  Other key contributions: 
  • in 1888, she transcribed around 300 tunes by encouraging Omaha visiting Washington, D.C., to sing for her 
  • over her lifetime, she recorded 300+ wax cylinders
  • a progressive in her time who lobbied for Indigenous rights in Washington, however misguided some of those policies now seem from contemporary perspectives 
  • active as a suffragist
  • Secretary, Association for the Advancement of Women, 1873-76
  • President, Women's Anthropological Society of America, 1890-99
  • Department of lnterior consultant, World's Columbian Exposition [i.e. Chicago World's Fair ], 1892-93
  • President, American Folklore Society, 1905
  Biographical data informed by
  • McLean, Mervyn. 2006. Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press.
  • Pisani, Michael V.  2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven: Yale University Press.