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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/Louisiana Purchase Exposition tickets.jpg 2022-05-26T16:56:09+00:00 The St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 7 Exhibitions in the St. Louis World's Fair and Their Effects plain 2022-06-08T15:29:21+00:00

  The St. Louis World Fair of 1904 introduced and perpetuated a magnitude of racist ideologies. The fair was meant to memorialize the Louisiana Purchase, hence its official name, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.” Though this deal was a huge success for the United States, almost doubling its size, it resulted in the displacement of multiple Indigenous tribes who originally inhabited the land. The exhibits in this event were intended to be used as a form of education, but they appeared to be more of a form of entertainment for the intended audience: white people who   had an extreme superiority complex and believed that the white race was genetically more advanced than any other race. To demonstrate this ideology and to spread awareness and information about different cultures, the fair held “a comprehensive anthropological exhibition, constituting a Congress of Races, and exhibiting particularly the barbarous and semi-barbarous peoples of the world, as nearly as possible in their ordinary and native environments” (Rydell 1984:162). This agenda was violently carried out by using twelve hundred Filipino people as live props and forcing them to “live in villages on the forty-seven-acre site set aside for the display” (Rydell 1984:168). 
  
  These exhibits were promoted all over the country and were especially aimed at college students. One program through the University of Chicago encouraged students to come to the St. Louis exposition by giving them free admission and credit in a course called “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Class in Ethnology” if they took an exam after a three week session at the fair. The class focused on subjects such as cannibalism and physical characteristics of race (Rydell 1984: 167). Along with the so-called information that was given by this event, the fair also contributed to the development of music studies that would turn into ethnomusicology.

  Frances Densmore, an Oberlin student and famous ethnographer, visited the St. Louis World Fair and claimed to have learned a great deal from it. She spent her time visiting the Philippine exhibits and learning about their style of life and also their music. She undertook the task of transcribing a handful of traditional Filipino songs that she heard there. By documenting Indigenous music using Western methods and distributing these arrangements without permission, Frances Densmore used transcription and extraction to aid in the colonization of Indigenous people. While Densmore’s  efforts were some of the first in the field that would become ethnomusicology, her methods of preservation were a harmful example of extraction. Moreover, after visiting the live exhibits, she continued to write about her experiences and referred to Filipinos as “primitive” and insisted that they would be a successful race if they were directed in the proper way. 
  
  Unfortunately, this practice allowed for American composers to be able to  use samples of indigenous music in composing works for American orchestras. Overall, the St. Louis World’s Fair was a cruel attempt to learn more about indigenous communities, not only because of the inhumane living environments that people were forced to inhabit as part of the  live exhibits, but also because it furthered ideas of social darwinism and white colonialism.