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Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Image: Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America

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Alice C. Fletcher's Indian Story and Song from North America This little volume, designed not for a scholarly audience but rather public consumption, was published in 1900 following the Congress of Musicians at Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha in 1898. Until this time, most transcriptions of Indigenous practices from settler states of U.S. and Canada had been published in scholarly venues and, therefore, were not accessible to the public (Fletcher 1900:vii; recounted in Pisani 2005:176 ). The preface to the volume makes it clear that Fletcher, herself, hoped for broader distribution.

The volume includes thirty songs, many of them Omaha, and likely collected during her fieldwork or recording sessions in Washington, D.C. It is not clear the origins of those songs that are not identified as Omaha. The song titles, and the accompanying descriptive stories, are problematic from today's perspective. As was was standard practice for the time, the transcriptions rely on "Western" staff notation, rendering complex rhythmic and melodic patterns into more simplistic--and frankly inaccurate--formats. More egregious yet, just like the transcriptions included in A Study of Omaha Indian Music, was the presentation of them in a harmonized format. This volume also drew on the work of Fillmore who had "proposed ways in which monophonic Indian chants could be harmonized and, as he saw it, made more palatable to "cultured tastes." (Fillmore, 1893 "Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music" quoted in Pisani 2005: 168).

Fletcher's preface reveals both her hopes for the volume and her embodiment of the colonialist attitudes of the time: that the transcriptions might provide raw material for composers and that, like her contemporaries, she subscribed to social Darwinism, i.e. social evolutionist trajectories about the relative development, civilization, and, thus, worth of Indigenous peoples and their sonic practices.

As Fletcher writes in the preface,
several essays upon the songs of the North American Indians were read [at the Congress], in illustration of which a number of Omaha Indians, for the first time, sang their native melodies to an audience largely composed of trained musicians.

The unique presentation [of these songs at the Congress] not only demonstrated the scientific value of these aboriginal songs in the study of the development of music, but suggested their availability as themes, novel and characteristic, for the American composer. It was felt that this availability would be greater if the story, or the ceremony which gave rise to the song, could be known, so that, in developing the theme, all the movements might be consonant with the circumstances that had inspired the motive (1900: preface, vii).
The setting of Indigenous materials as source material for settler composers was just gaining traction at the time. Fillmore himself was one of the first to engage this practice, composing Indian Fantasia No. 1, "a set of variations on the original "Hae -thu-ska" song he received from Fletcher" in 1890 (Pisani 2005:172; see Levine 2002 for more details about the earliest arrangements and compositions).

The social Darwinist attitudes are encompassed in such statements as the following, where Fletcher comments that she put together the volume so
that the general public may share with the student the light shed by these untutored melodies upon the history of music; for these songs take us back to a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared among the ancients, and reveal to us something of the foundations upon which rests the art of music as we know it to-day (preface viii).

As she goes on to state,
this music possesses a charm of spontaneity that cannot fail to please those who would come near to nature and enjoy the expression of emotion untrammelled by the intellectual control of schools. These songs are like the wild flowers that have not yet come under the transforming hand of the gardener (preface viii-ix).
Such statements suggest that the sonic practices of Indigenous peoples, identified as music, are evidence of an earlier phase of musical development, a more "natural"--or "wild"--state. They also function to deny the contemporaneity of Indigenous practices, projecting them--and the people who practice them--into a distant past. This is a fundamental denial of the coeval presence of Indigenous people, an attitude that has continued to exist since the time of Fletcher's time of writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The final sentence here, as Pisani suggests, is that despite extensive fieldwork among and friendship with Omaha peoples, she still viewed their musical practices as less developed and in need of being tamed by the gardener, that is the composer would take the raw tunes and turn them into something more beautiful.
Indian Story and Song, then, was intended to provide source material for composers to use for arrangements and compositions. As Pisani states, "The book circulated widely and remained one of the chief sources for composers of "Indian music" for the next two decades" (2005:176), i.e. through to the 1920s. My aim is not to track all the sources that referenced it here, but to illustrate the social use to which these stories and harmonized transcriptions were put through the collection that Franz Joseph Zeisberg titled Primitive Indian Tunes. Twelve of the twenty-one arrangements he presented, mostly re-arrangements of Fillmore's original harmonizations, drew on material from Fletcher's book.
The Indian Congress at Omaha in 1898 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.
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.