The Indigenous Experience in Twentieth-Century Musical Indianism
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The Indigenous Experience in Twentieth-Century Musical Indianism Victoria Clark Millsboro, Delaware M.A.T., Museum Education, George Washington University, 2015 B.A., Music and Spanish, Moravian College, 2013 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia for Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia May 2021 ii Abstract This dissertation reconsiders the American Indian experiences of and reactions to musical Indianism. Indianism was a non-Native intellectual ideology in the early twentieth century that capitalized on the spirituality, primitivity, and authenticity of American Indians as America’s “folk” people for philosophical and aesthetic desires. Some Indianist composers wrote original music inspired by the new influx of American Indian music published by music ethnographers like Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore at the turn of the century. Others borrowed transcribed melodies verbatim and composed a piece around what they assumed was an authentic American Indian melody. While the composers were White, American Indians were involved in every aspect of musical Indianism. They engaged in and resisted music ethnography, performed and popularized Indianist songs, outwardly supported and critiqued Indianist composers, and participated in Indianist concerts in boarding and reservation schools. American Indian lives are inextricably woven into the history of musical Indianism. Framing Indianism with their stories offers more profound insights into the complexities of Indianist music and its impact on the broader American Indian community in the early twentieth century. iii Dedication To my grandfather, Chief Red Deer, who passed on before I started this work. And to my family, my ancestors, whose strength and courage gave me the chance to write this dissertation. iv Acknowledgments This project grew from a paper I wrote for Michael Puri’s music and humor seminar. With guidance from my comprehensive exam advisers (Richard Will, Michael Puri, and Bonnie Gordon), my prospectus committee (Noel Lobley, Michael Puri, and Bonnie Gordon), and Kasey Keeler, this paper morphed into an archival project that allowed me to access the American Indian experience of Indianism. I am grateful to the entire University of Virginia Department of Music, as well as those outside the department, like Kasey Keeler and Kasey Jernigan, who helped me realize the potential of my initial idea. A very special thanks to Joanna Love and Jesse Fillerup, whose fastidious editing has made my writing more accessible and precise. I also want to thank Frank Mahoney and Mark Marvel, my music instructors from elementary school to high school, who always held me to my potential and encouraged me to continue music studies in college. During college, my flute teacher Robin Kani and music history professors Larry Lipkis and Hilde Binford inspired me to pursue my curiosities, which eventually led me to humanities work. My dissertation would not be possible without the dedicated reference and archival staff at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University, the Sibley Library at Eastman School of Music, Special Collections at Wichita State University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Getty Library, the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Folklife Center at the Library of v Congress. I especially want to thank Rose Miron, Keelin Burke, and Madeline Crispell at the Newberry Library for their help and guidance during my Frances C. Allen fellowship. I cannot imagine the past six years without the collegiality of my cohort and my friends through the music department, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collection Library (thank you for everything Anne Causey, Penny White, and Regina Rush) and The Scholar’s Lab. Lydia Warren, in particular, has been an invaluable sounding board for my midnight musings which, eventually, turned into this dissertation. And Tracey Stewart, a generous neighbor and friend who never hesitated to lend me helping hand. Of course, I am nothing without my family. My husband, Dan, has supported me since I started my graduate career. He moved to the middle of Virginia, took care of me in sickness and in health, and always keeps me nourished with fresh sourdough bread. To my mom and dad, Lisa and Ken, who sacrificed everything for their four children, and my sisters, Hannah, Catherine, and Rachel who continuously teach me about unconditional love and respect: “always remember there was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name.” vi Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…….....1 1. American Indian Interlocutors and Music Ethnography………………………………..5 Brief History of Ethnography…………………………………………………………..8 Participation…………………………………………………………………………..14 Participation as Modernity…………………………………………………………...21 Skeptical Participation………………………………………………………………..25 Resistance……………………………………………………………………………..29 Ethnography as Indianism…………………………………………………………….39 2. Indian Scenes and Indian Identities…………………………………………………...41 The North American Indian…………………………………………………………...42 “A Vanishing Race”…………………………………………………………………..47 Indian Scenes………………………………………………………………………….51 Indian Scenes as American Indian Music History……………………………………80 3. Princess Watahwaso and Sitting Eagle’s “By the Waters of Minnetonka”…………...82 Ethnography and Composition………………………………………………………..85 “By the Waters of Minnetonka”………………………………………………………96 Princess Watahwaso…………………………………………………………………108 On Authorship and Agency…………………………………………………………..118 vii 4. American Indian Progressives and Performers………………………………………120 American Indian Progressives and Music…………………………………………...123 Progressivism and Indianism in the Press…………………………………………..133 Progressive Musical Collaboration…………………………………………………142 American Indian Performers and Indianism in the Media…………………………..153 American Indian Performers on Indianism………………………………………….164 Public Narratives of Indianism and American Indians……………………………...171 5. Institutional Indianism……………………………………………………………….172 Public Indianism……………………………………………………………………..176 American Indian Schools…………………………………………………………….185 Student Reception……………………………………………………………………199 Toward an Ethics of Desire-Based Research……………………………………..…203 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...207 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………210 1 Introduction In the early twentieth century, a group of like-minded composers wrote musical works that were inspired by or quoted from ethnographic transcriptions of American Indian song. Arthur Farwell, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Nevin, among others, consulted compilations by ethnographers such as Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore when creating piano pieces, song cycles, and operas, and often borrowed verbatim from the transcriptions of American Indian melodies that appeared in these compilations. These composers did not constitute a compositional school in that they did not come from the same teacher or compose in the same city during the same years. Nonetheless, musicology has consistently categorized them as “the Indianists” since at least Gilbert Chase’s America’s Music (1955).1 The first monograph to study the Indianists in detail was Michael Pisani’s Imagining Native America.2 It provides a history of the many ways non-Natives represented, misrepresented, and imitated American Indians and their music since first contact. It reveals that Indianist music was part of a broader ideological and artistic movement at the turn of the century whose participants were searching for American’s folk tradition and believed that they had located it in American Indian culture. Indianist composers borrowed from or imitated American Indian music and stories. These appropriations served the purposes of nationalism or exoticism, both of which were 1 Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 399. 2 Michael V. Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 2 popular trends in Western music at this time. They also followed the advice of Antonín Dvořák, who compelled American composers to use American Indian themes.3 As its history is told, Indianism begins with Edward MacDowell and his Indian Suite from 1892. It then gains steam with Arthur Farwell’s Wa-Wan Press, which published Indianist songs in 1901, and culminated in staged works by Charles Wakefield Cadman in the early 1910s. Indianists often used American Indian music collected by those ethnographers who placed a high value on this art form. The composers either situated the melodies in a Western harmonic environment (often referred to as “idealizing”) or created compositions using characteristic material—themes, harmonies, and rhythms—that was found in or inspired by these scholarly collections of American Indian music. What is missing in these historical accounts of Indianism is a sustained effort to foreground the experiences of Native people, either in the ethnographic and compositional processes, or in the music’s performance history. There have been some studies in this direction—notably P. Jane Hafen, Catherine Smith Parsons, Tara Browner, and Beth Levy4—but, by and large, musicology has consistently