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Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Manuscript: Zeisberg, No.1 "Omaha Rest Song of the Leader (He dhu shka)"

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Introduction to this project
Three crucial events mark the beginnings of ethnomusicology in the United States... All of them related to the study of American Indian tribal music (rather than exotic art musics which interested earlier scholars), and necessarily involved both field work and an anthropological approach to the work. They were Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, which made field recordings of actual sound possible; Theodore Baker's 1881 thesis on Seneca Indian music resulting from his own field work; and the first field recordings of North American Indian music, made by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890. (Mervyn McLean, 2006. Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. p. 52).
This project is the product of an upper-level ethnomusicology class dedicated to exploring ethnomusicology’s colonialist legacies and moving beyond them, engaging in what many today might call “decolonizing” the field, though later, following the lead of Tuck and Yang (2012), we propose a more measured and cautious approach to this term. The class came about for several reasons, including the social justice orientation of Oberlin’s students demanding a better future. But it was also mobilized by receiving a series of piano arrangements for what were called “Primitive Indian Tunes.”

When I, Jennifer Fraser, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, received these items from a community member in 2017 or so, I tried to make sense of these arrangements as social artifacts. Why and how did they come into being? Why were there piano arrangements of Indigenous materials? What was their social history? Who made these transcriptions, and why? What experiences led them to do so? Who used them, and for what purpose? And just how did they come to be in my hands, donated because they “might be useful to the ethnomusicology program?” Through whose hands have they passed over the years, from the original one that scripted them? We can't answer all these questions with certainty, but we can sketch out plausible answers to a number of them, postulating a social history for the life these transcriptions.

Just how these artifacts came to be was a mystery I wanted to solve. I became even more intrigued as I uncovered Oberlin connections to them and, therefore, complicity in colonialist engagements with Indigenous practices. You can read about that more in the next post. At the very least, these piano arrangements helped reshape the ways I now teach the history of ethnomusicology, from my introductory courses to this course that helps not just imagine, but engage in, the implementation of ways that we might envision and sound decolonial futures.

In this website, we tell some of this story and present entries on colonialist legacies and strategies to move us towards sounding decolonial futures. We tell the stories of some of the individuals connected to the social history of these transcriptions, along with stories of others doing remarkably similar work in the collection of ethnological material of Indigenous practices in the late 19th and early 20th century. Like all ethnographic work, our site represents a partial and selective telling. The first entries came out of class taught in Fall 2019. Then we only briefly began the work of laying out some strategies and approaches that people might engage to move towards decentering the colonialist legacies. More this has been added with the class in Spring 2022. This project, like most Digital Humanities initiatives, is iterative, an ever evolving project.

It is our hope that this site might be useful to students, faculty and colleagues alike as they join us on the journey to move towards sounding decolonial futures.
Introduction to the Collection, "Primitive Indian Tunes" 2 Introduction to the Collection, "Primitive Indian Tunes," a series of piano transcriptions by F. J. Zeisberg plain 2020-10-21T20:45:03+00:00
This collection of manuscripts, titled "Primitive Indian Tunes," were donated to the ethnomusicology program at Oberlin College in 2017 or so in hopes they might be useful. I am not sure what the donor imagine the use to be, but for me they have become valuable artifacts in a story about the social history of engagement with Indigenous sonic materials. I've opted to use the term "sonic" here rather than "music" to signal that some of the Indigenous practices referenced might not be identified as such by practitioners, at the time of collection or now, and remain semantically distinct from this thing we call "music."

When I received them, I tried to make sense of these manuscripts as social artifacts.
- Why and how did they come into being?
- Why were there piano arrangements of Indigenous sonic materials?
- What was their social history? That is, who was the person who made these scores, and why? What experiences led them to do so? Who used the scores, and for what purpose?
- How did they come to be in my hands? Or rather, through whose hands have they passed over the years, from the original one that scripted them?
We can't answer all these questions with certainty, but some sleuthing has meant we can sketch out plausible answers to a number of them, postulating a social history for the life these transcriptions. I became all the more fascinated in these "transcriptions" as I uncovered Oberlin connections.

The story of the three individuals named on the top of the title page are told in more depth on this site and in the section on the colonialist legacies of early ethnological work. You can get there following the links in this entry. A brief version of the story goes something like this. Alice C. Fletcher began ethnographic work with the Omaha peoples in 1881, where she started transcribing musical practices and later recording them on wax phonograph cylinders. She then reached out to John Comfort Fillmore in 1888, asking for his assistance on musical matters. He suggested there was an implied harmony, meaning a Western tonal sense to the music, that was not yet realized, so he'd just fill it in for the "Indians." Fillmore took Fletcher's transcriptions (graphic depictions of specific instances of sonic practices that one has heard directly, either in live performance or from a recording) and proceeded to provide harmonized arrangements of them, modifying them significantly in the process. Fillmore collaborated with Fletcher (and other early ethnologists) until his death in 1898. His harmonized arrangements of Fletcher's materials were published in at least two venues: 1) a serious ethnographic study by Fletcher with her Indigenous collaborator, Francis La Flesche, entitled A Study of Omaha Indian Music, published in 1893 by the Peabody Museum of Harvard, where Fletcher was a fellow, and 2) in a book designed for a broader, general public readership, Indian Story and Song from North America, published in 1900. Franz Joseph Zeisberg, noted in the historical record as a composer and arranger, clearly consulted the latter given the parallels and overlap in musical materials, borrowing the published arrangements and elaborating on them, producing the hand-written arrangements that are included below. The act of arranging assumes their performance and an audience, but we can only imagine the possible shape of those.

While the person who penned this title, presumably F. J. Zeisberg, called the collection of scores "Piano Transcriptions," technically they are not transcriptions. Given the relative inaccessibility of the cylinder recordings at the time of these transcriptions, it is unlikely that Zeisberg heard the cylinder phonograph recordings that Fletcher recorded in the field, but rather more likely that he consulted Fillmore's published piano arrangements of Fletcher's transcriptions included in the volume, Indian Story and Song from North America. It would be more accurate to say Zeisberg's scores are re-arrangements of what are themselves are arrangements of transcriptions. The source material, moreover, comes from sources other than Fletcher, as we will see below.

One of the facts that I encountered early on that intrigued me was the connection to Oberlin College: the connection of early ethnologist and collector of Indigenous music, Frances Densmore, to Oberlin has long been know. But it turns out that Fillmore, acknowledged on the title page as recording the tunes along with Fletcher and the proto-theorist almost single-handedly responsible for instigating the harmonization of Indigenous practices, also has an Oberlin connection: he studied organ and piano at the Conservatory and was a member of the class of 1866, was a faculty member in 1867, and received an Honorary A.M. in 1870.

And there is at least one more Oberlin connection: these piano arrangements also came into my hands through a community member via another alumna, Janet Knapp Byle (1922-2010), Oberlin College A.B., 1945, Oberlin College M.A, 1952 and Yale University Ph.D., 1961. Byle was a musicologist and music history professor. "Her teaching career was spent at Oberlin, Yale (1958–1963), Boston University (1963–66), Brown University (1967–1971), and Vassar College (as Mellon Professor of Music, 1971–86)" and significantly she "was the first woman to be elected President of the AMS, serving in that capacity in 1975–76" (2010 Obituary in AMS Newsletter 40(2):31). It is not hard to imagine why or how they might have come to be the hands of a musicologist, but it is hard to say whether she used these manuscripts in teaching or research. There is a note that suggests the owner of the documents prior to Knapp, but we can't trace them all the way back to Zeisberg.
Franz Joseph Zeisberg (1863-1951)
Franz Joseph Zeisberg is the author of the hand-written piano arrangements entitled "Primitive Indian Tunes." It should be noted that unlike Alice C. Fletcher, Francis La Flesche or Frances Densmore, he was not an ethnologist by training. Like, John C. Fillmore, he was a trained musician, who focused on teaching, composing, and arranging. I have not yet encountered evidence to support--or deny--that he personally met the authors of the collection--Fletcher and Fillmore--that inspired the piano arrangements. Of anyone, it is possible he had the acquaintance of Fillmore through professional music circuits, given parallels in their careers of teaching at and administration of conservatories and schools of music.
A biography from the Cole County Historical Society tells us that Zeisberg moved from Schonfeld, Grafschaft Glatz, in the Sudenten mountains of Prussia Silesia to Jefferson City, Missouri, in the spring of 1881 at the age of eighteen.
He grew "up on a farm and was accustomed to manual labor from childhood. In Germany [farmwork] did not interfere with educational pursuits, including the study of music. His father, Clemens Zeisberg, played several instruments and belonged to the church orchestra and the community band. His mother Theresia, nee Reinsch, sang in the choir...

Professor Zeisberg was educated in a state teachers’ college in which the study of music was an important part of the curriculum. After trying farm life in Osage County... working in a brickyard in Jefferson City... and clerking in a book and music store until he gained a working knowledge of English, he embarked on a music teaching career. Together with Professor Carl Preyer, he established a music school then called the Jefferson City Conservatory. He was also [an] organist in several churches. Eventually Preyer went to Kansas State University and Zeisberg taught at the Elizabeth Aull Seminary, Lexington, MO.

Encouraged by William H. Sherwood to come to Chicago for a more suitable field, he went to that city where he soon became favorably known in the musical world. Answering a call from Martha Washington College, Abingdon, Virginia, he took over the directorship of the conservatory there in 1892 and what he had considered to be a temporary tenure became a term of thirty years in the service of that institution, with a brief intermission at Sullins College, Bristol, Virginia. His teaching specialties included piano, violin, organ, harmony and composition.

Professor Zeisberger’s compositions include many teaching pieces, many songs, male and mixed choruses, church music, two masses and about seventy fugues for organ and piano. In 1922 he gave up his exacting post at Martha Washington and he and Mrs. Zeisberg returned to Jefferson into practical retirement.

(Text excerpted from Cole County Historical Society)
For our purposes, the significant part of the story includes his training and career in music, including his activities in both teaching and composing. At the time he penned these piano arrangements, Zeisberg would have been in retirement, living in Jefferson, Missouri, and around 74 years old. I have not yet found evidence that suggests he published any compositions using Indigenous sources or themes and we don't know enough about his life to know how or why he came into contact with these materials or to what use he may have put them.