"Breathing the Indian Spirit": Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the "Indianist" Movement in American Music

Abstract

In the summer of 1880 a young Theodore Baker traveled to the Seneca Nation of western New York state to engage in the kind of research we now call fieldwork. His intent was to collect songs of North American Indians for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leipzig. Baker's enterprise was a first. Although anthropologists and explorers had written about Native music from the perspective of individual and tribal-specific musical expression, until this point no one had attempted a more general continent-wide survey of Native music.1 Baker's dissertation was published in 1882 as iiber die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the Music of the North American Indians).2 Baker's research reflected not only the biases of his time, but also broader interests in real (as opposed to Hiawathaesque) Indian cultures, which were just beginning in the 1880s. He was the first European American to explore Native American musical territory in a systematic way and make its songs available for use by composers through his transcriptions. Baker's efforts, along with those of ethnologist Alice Fletcher a decade later, fueled the movement in the United States, which lasted roughly from 1890 to 1925. Indianist music illustrates a distinct kind of nationalistic cross-cul-