John Comfort Fillmore: A Student of Indian Music Reconsidered

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One popular authority on American Indians during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, consulted not only by eminent authors like Mark Twain but also by some twentieth-century scholars, summed up the musical abilities of Native Americans in the following manner: The singing of the Indian consists in the monotonous repetition of a few half-guttural, half-nasal sounds (notes they can scarcely be called, as they form no music), varied by an occasional yell. Whatever the occasion, the 'song' is the same, however varied the accompaniment.' But only a few years after this pronouncement, a number of ethnologists began to consider Indian music seriously. Theodore Baker, Alice Fletcher, Francis La Flesche, Jesse Fewkes, Carl Lumholtz, Charles Lummis, Franz Boas, and Washington Matthews made contributions in the years 1882-97.2 American composers, following this burst of activity, began to look at the transcriptions and recordings made by the ethnologists as sources for creative inspiration. Edward MacDowell, Arthur Farwell, Henry Gilbert, Charles W. Cadman, and others composed pieces or attempted to express the spirit of the Indian.3 This Indianist movement among high-brow composers had its complement in the popular music of the first decade of the twentieth-century-songs like Hiawatha by Charles N. Daniels, Iola by Charles Johnson, and Red Wing by Kerry Mills.4 These three groups--composers, popular song writers, and ethnologistsdefine the major types of positive responses to Indian music by Americans with European backgrounds. Like American writers and painters who began to romanticize the Indian after most of the tribes had been driven into the West and deci-