This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Structural Peculiarities.jpg 2019-12-20T00:28:26+00:00 John C. Fillmore (1843-1898) 7 A brief introduction to John C. Fillmore & His Harmonization Experiment plain 2022-06-07T20:08:05+00:00 The late 19th-century American ethnologist and anthropologist, Alice C. Fletcher was one of the first researchers to focus her studies on Omaha peoples and their music practices. After her first stay among the Omahas in 1881, she began to record and transcribe Omaha songs and melodies with Western musical notation (also known as staff-notation) with the help of indigenous scholar Francis La Flesche, amassing as many as three hundred songs by 1888 (Pantaleoni 1895: 219). Sifting through all of the material she had ‘collected’, she began to catalog, analyze, and theorize about the importance of these songs, their text, and their tonal structure. Later that same year in 1888, Fletcher sent a transcription she took of an Omaha song to John Comfort Fillmore to get his advice on how the song may be analyzed and, preferably, harmonized, as she believed harmonizing these melodies would help spread the songs. Fillmore, a musicologist, music theorist, textbook author, and professor, studied organ and piano at Oberlin College from 1862-65 and then theory of music and organ, Leipzig, 1866-67. He taught at Oberlin 1867-68, received an Honorary A.M in 1870, and eventually became Director of Music at Pomona College (McLean 2006: 142; Oberlin College Archives). At the time Fletcher wrote to him in 1888, he would have been director of the Milwaukee School of Music, which he founded in 1884. 
  
  In 1890, Fillmore composed a short orchestral work entitled Indian Fantasia No. 1, which was a set of 14 variations on the very first song he received from Fletcher: “Hae-thu-ska Wa-an” (Pisani 2005: 172). This composition was one of the first concertized works to be inspired by the music of an Indigenous community in America at the time. And after releasing this new setting and spending a week with La Flesche in Washington D.C. intensely studying Omaha music, Fillmore expounded on his theories of harmonization in his Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music which was published alongside Fletcher’s and La Flesche's monograph A Study of Omaha Indian Music.  
  
  
  
  Fletcher's volume included 92 harmonizations by Fillmore in addition to the 14 renditions of “Hae-thu-ska Wa-an” (which were presented as No. 11 - No. 24 in the 1893 collection: click here to see a gallery of these harmonizations). With the creation of these harmonizations, Fillmore sought to “employ the natural harmonies implied in the melody,'' as he states in his report (1893: 291), believing that Indigenous musical practices were less ‘evolved’ due to the lack of harmony in their songs. In an article published by a scholar who reconsiders Fillmore’s report, James McNutt states that Fillmore “assumed, among other things, that melody evolved more or less directly into harmony and ignored the possibility that more complex melodies, for example, might just as easily develop instead of harmony” (1984: 64). In other words, Fillmore is using an evolutionist lense to explain why the Indigenous music he began writing about did not use harmony in an equivalent way to the Western art music he spent his life studying; a belief that the refined homophonic melodies of North American indigenous populations were not as progressed as their western counterpoint since they did not utilize a Euro-centric harmonic sensibility.
  
  After Fillmore released this initial report, he became increasingly invested in explaining why Omaha melodies did not contain vertical harmony in their original form, continuing to publish many articles which contained theories about a universal idea of harmony which imposed ideas of Western classical music onto the unrelated musics of other cultures, particularly Indigenous ones (McNutt 1984: 64). In an 1895 paper published by Fillmore in The Journal of American Folklore entitled “What Do Indians Mean to Do When They Sing, and How Far Do They Succeed?”,he structures an argument that implies Western music theory and harmony have a certain objective truth (1895: 138-142). In the paper, he argues that “the Indian always intends to sing precisely the same harmonic intervals which are a staple of our own music, and that all aberrations from harmonic pitch are mere accidents” (Fillmore 1895: 138), claiming these “accidents” are due to “imperfect training, or rather to the total lack of it” (Fillmore 1895: 138). Fillmore’s logic infers that Indigenous musicians educated in music vis-a-vis their own culture still lack ‘formal training’ because their approach to music is not informed by a Western methodology. We can even see this ideology play out in the title, where he assumes that native singing is inherently unsuccessful if it doesn’t closely align with music rules and harmonic structures of Western Art Music. It seems his research, like that of his peers at the time, lacks the understanding that Indigenous songs in their original form can inherently be authentic and intentional. 
  
  Fillmore’s research, and publications, into this notion of a universal harmonic principle, came to a halt after his untimely death in 1898, just a few years after initially embarking on this research trail. And his work, though problematic in some respects, remained a seminal piece of scholarship which shifted the way subsequent scholars and society at larger viewed indigenous music in America.
  
   

  CITATIONS

  • 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. 
  • Fillmore, John C. 1895. “What Do Indians Mean to Do When They Sing, and How Far Do They Succeed?” The Journal of American Folklore 8 (29): 138-142. 
  • Pantaleoni, Hewitt. 1985. “A Reconsideration of Fillmore Reconsidered” American Music, 3 (2):217-228.  
  • Pisani, Michael V.  2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven: Yale University Press
  • McNutt, James C. 1984. “John Comfort Fillmore: A Student of Indian Music Reconsidered.” American Music 2(1).:61-70.