Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852-1933) was an American psychologist whose nascent work in studying “primitive music”, as the West called it, developed into the modern field of musicology. The historical moment in which he worked allowed for him to contribute to and exist within a particular intellectual ferment in a number of developing or fast-approaching fields, including psychology and, eventually, ethnomusicology and museum theory. While his work is no longer at the forefront of any field of study, Gilman’s legacy of colonial and racial subjugation is one that remains imbued in present-day practice, and understanding the overlap across these disciplines provides a clear perception of how profusely harmful Gilman’s work truly was.

The tight quarters that these fields occupied during their development in the late 19th century certainly influenced Gilman’s career trajectory. Prior to working with music, Gilman had pursued studies in philosophy, logic, and aesthetics, learning with such notable intellectuals as C.S. Peirce and William James, the latter of whom is considered the father of American psychology. Following his education, Gilman offered a course at Clark University on the psychology of pleasure and pain, in which he only consulted music briefly but felt comfortable asserting that European music was the only kind of “developed [musical] art” due to being based on Western scales (Gilman 1893, 50). His later work with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, somewhat separate from his musicological and psychological studies altogether, involves his background in aesthetics. His 1904 report to the museum’s trustees about what he felt was necessary for a museum to center their audience’s experiences is so formative that many historians consider it “the birth certificate of the modern American art museum” (Lubar 2017). Gilman’s skiascope exemplifies his ideas behind this developing museum theory, as the tool’s rigid and limiting frame isolates a museum object or exhibition from outside influence, for better or for worse.

 As his treatment of music in the psychology course implies, though, Gilman held an expertise in what he called “developed” musics from his ethnological study, and the significance of that research supersedes his other academic pursuits. In 1890, prior to teaching, Gilman and ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes  were commissioned by philanthropist Mary Hemenway to research the music of Indigenous Puebloans in the southwestern United States. This project, known as the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, focused predominantly on recording the music of the Hopi and Zuñi tribes and drawing analyses and transcriptions from wax cylinder recordings. The novelty of both new recording technology and the beginnings of the field of music ethnology (to become musicology) itself means that Gilman’s work in the expedition set a precedent for the developing discipline. This precedent cemented the glaring ethical and moral flaws involved in his research methods as acceptable practice. For example, Gilman’s research of Hopi music correctly asserts that it functions separately from Western temperament and form, but he comes away feeling that because the Hopi music he heard will never “submit to a trammels of a system”, such music is “unhistoric rather than … prehistoric” +. Gilman’s experimental research in psychology, aesthetics, and the study of music beyond the American Southwest reflects similarly bigoted and racist justification: an 1892 article on the psychology behind “specimens of Chinese music” reduces a wealth of Chinese scalar function to a monolith, one supposedly belonging to a “time immemorial” despite making comparisons to prior knowledge of Greek and Western structures (Gilman 1892a, 55;59).

In summary, the disconnect between the nature of Gilman’s research and his academic distillations is obvious and astounding. How can so-called “primitive” musics, “inexplicable by interpolation and transcription”, be dissected with analysis that forcibly compresses musics outside of Western art music into the Euro-American mold (Gilman 1909a, 11)? Gilman’s lack of respect for Indigenous communities, as well as his desires to divulge their musical cultures by and for the academy, dehumanized groups like the Hopi and Zuñi through scientific abstraction rather than by social Darwinism alone. As a result, the foundation of the music ethnology discipline was tempered by its self-fulfilling desire to hold court with already established disciplines, reducing vibrant musical cultures to wax cylinders and transcriptions that hold no value to the communities whose sonic and ceremonial practices were poached for intellectual commodification.
 

Below are some additional publications by and about Gilman for further reading:

Gilman, Alexander William. 1895. “Search Into the History of the Gillman or Gilman Family” (London: E. Stock) 257-9. https://archive.org/details/searchesintohist00gill/page/724/mode/2up. 

Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1892b. “Report on an Experimental Test of Musical Expressiveness” The American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 4, no. 4: 558-576. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1410803?seq=2. 

GIlman, Benjamin Ives. 1909b. “The Science of Exotic Music” Science. Vol. 30, no. 772: 532-5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1635211.pdf .

Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1891. “Zuñi Melodies” A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology. Vol. 1, sec. II: 63-91. https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP665127-PMLP1067374-A_Journal_of_American_Ethnology_and_Arch.pdf. 

In the introduction to 100 Years of American Folklore Studies, published in 1988 on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Folklore Society (AFS), President Alan Jabbour wrote, “It behooves us always… to reflect on the ancestral missions that have shaped us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future” (Jabbour, vii). 100 years earlier, the AFS was built on the frameworks of white intellectuals such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose four main objectives of the brand new discipline of Folklore were to document,

“(1) physical type of man;
(2) material existence [material culture]...
(3) intellectual existence including music and poetry, oral tales and legends, medical knowledge, and mythology; and
(4) geographical phenomena affecting or modifying the above features'' (McNeil, 2)

This desire of Schoolcraft’s and of other intellectuals and anthropologists of the time to observe, analyze, and categorize the bodies and cultures of various groups of people was focused on Indigenous peoples in North America, and was spurred by the belief that Indigenous peoples were “dying out,” their cultures were disappearing, and “civilized” America must rescue the “primitive customs,” not the people, from this inevitable fate (Pisani, 73).

In the years following its founding, the AFS continued to practice salvage ethnography. Much of the material that was collected and written about by members of the AFS was published in the accompanying journal, The Journal of American Folklore (JAF). Although the AFS endeavored to include material taken from both Indigenous peoples in North America that was collected by anthropological folklorists known as “the Indian men,” and European folklore collected by “literary folklorists” or “English folklorists,” a small minority of the material published in the JAF was European (Zumwalt, 9). William Wells Newell, the first active president of the AFS, considered the discipline of folklore to be included within anthropology. Newell argued, “In its broader meaning..., folklore is a part of anthropology and ethnography, embracing the mental side of primitive life, with especial reference to the narratives in which beliefs and habits are related or accounted for” (Zumwalt, 9). Anthropological folklorists traveled to Indigenous groups around North America, collecting written stories as well as narratives and songs recorded on the phonograph.
They then analyzed and published these stories in publications such as the JAF, whereupon they were consumed and dissected by other white academics such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher, John Comfort Fillmore, and Jesse Walter Fewkes.

• Arrangement
• Arrivant
• Community-based repatriation
• Culture
• Decolonizing
• Denial of Coeval Presence
• Epistemicide
• Ethnomusicology
• Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition
• Indigenous
• Mary Hemenway
• Orientalism
• Primitive
• Repatriation
• Salvage Ethnography
• Settler
• Settler Colonialism
• Social Darwinism
• Transcription