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| Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838-1923) |
This blog post has been a long time coming - well, at least a few weeks! As some of you have noticed, I've been quite slack with updating the blog, and my radio program 'Offbeat' is also going through something of a revamp, partly because of work/study commitments and partly because of ill-health (which is quite normal for most of us this time of year). One of the main changes to 'Offbeat' will reflect my existing research interests and new 'direction' in life, but more about that soon.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts on two pioneering, inspirational women in music, best remembered as two of the most significant scholars of North American music between the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. There is a strange serendipity to this blog post, for it was ten years ago that I found myself in a sleepy college town in Ohio, America: Oberlin, famous for its music conservatory and liberal arts college. As you will see, there is an 'Oberlin' connection with both Densmore and Fletcher.
So, who are these women, and why should you know about their work? Both Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore are best remembered in the discipline of 'ethnomusicology', which, when in its earliest form was called 'comparitive musicology'. Early music historians felt that 'comparitive musicology' was best understood as the study of non-Western, 'exotic' or 'primitive' musics, as opposed to 'musicology' which was limited to the study of European Art music (what we think of as western classical). The term 'comparitive' presumably reflected the trend of early studies of non-Western or 'primitive' musics that were mainly focussed on comparing these musics to existing musics (i.e. art music). No surprise then, that the term 'comparitive' was eventually dropped by the mid 1950s in favour of 'ethnomusicology' which was coined by Jaap Kunst. However, over half a century before this, there were two distinct 'schools' that had developed under 'comparitive musicology' - the German school, which included acousticians and psychologists who emphasised 'lab work' in their collection and dissemination of 'primitive' musics (of whom Carl Stumpf and Eric von Hornbostel of the Berlin Phonnogrammarchiv are notable examples) and the American school, which emphased more practical, field-based research, mainly of the music of the Native American Indians. Elsewhere in Europe, nationalist sentiment played an important part in the revival of interest in folk music, reflected in the collections of Hungarian folk musics of Bartok and Kodaly, as well as of English folk musics by Sharpe and Grainger (more about him soon). Throughout Europe, composers of 'classical' or 'art' music were also incorporating the song of the 'peasant' as it were, into their compositions, to enrich and enhance this music.
Turning to 'comparitive musicology' of the American school from the late 1880s until the outbreak of the second World War, I found it fascinating that four out of five of the most important ethnomusicologists (even though they didn't call themselves that, at the time) working with North American Indian music were women. Apart from Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore, the other pioneering scholars were Natalie Curtis and Helen Roberts.
But both Fletcher and Densmore were amongst the first to go into the field, live with their informants, transcribe, record and analyse this music. And both women did so in incredibly dangerous and difficult conditions, giving up relatively comfortable lives to endure long journeys and live in the most isolated communities. Both women were also involved in 'engaged activism' (Fletcher more so than Densmore), in that they cared deeply about the communities and people they were working and living with, as opposed to being merely concerned with extracting their music and culture so that it could be studied under a microscope by 'white, affluent scholars'. This sort of 'engaged activism' is a priority for many current ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, who want to distance themselves from the colonial origins of their field and 'give back' to the communities and people they work with.
ALICE CUNNINGHAM FLETCHER (1838 - 1923)
Alice Cunningham Fletcher was engaged in activisim, defending minority rights and fighting for land reforms amongst the Indian tribes at the turn of the century, well before anyone else was. And even though she considered herself an ethnographer (or amateur anthropologist) as opposed to a 'musicologist', her work is mainly acknowledged in historical accounts of the discipline of ethnomusicology. Ironically, in anthropological circles she is largely ignored - perhaps because of her lack of professional training, or the fact that she could not boast of a fine 'European lineage'. However, Fletchers studies, writings and findings must be credited for the development of the field of ethnomusicology in North America, and I really do hope students and scholars of North American music, in particular, continue to examine these in their own historical context for years to come.
Alice Cunningham Fletcher is most closely associated with her monograph 'A Study of Omaha Indian Music' from 1893 and she is also best remembered for publishing the first detailed description of a ceremony with detailed transcriptions (The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony, 1904). Some of her writings and books are found in Native American community bookstores to this day, something that indicates just how respected she was amongst those whose musics and cultures she studied. In her article 'The Study of Indian Music' from 1915, Fletcher is still concerned with understanding this music in the context of its own people and their traditions as well as in relation to the beginning of what she calls 'culture music'.
' By the study of Indian music it is possible to retrace some of the steps that have led from song to culture music'
Assessing some of Fletcher's writings and placing them in their own historical context (remember, this was the late 1800s!), there are some problems typical to the ethnomusicological literature of that period. For instance, in the article from 1915, Fletcher mentions that most of her intensive study is focussed on people 'classified as Plains Indians', but there is no mention of the name of any tribe or tribes she has studied or of any cultural/musical findings specific to that tribe. I presumed that this particular article was based on her experience with the Omaha tribe (given that most of her 'ethnomusicological' work was done in this area, with the help of Francis La Flesche), but since Fletcher was actively involved in campaigning for and administering land allotments for the Pawnee, Dakota and Cheyenne tribes, the article could be based on her studies with any one of these tribes. The 'great plains' span a very large geographical area, and while there are some general similarities between the musics of this region, there are also differences between each tribe's music. As Bruno Nettl (1956) points out, the music of the Dakota tribe is quite different to that of the Blackfoot, in that the former tends to encompass a large vocal range, and is rhythmically and melodically more complex, where as the latter tends to feature simpler melodies and rhythms spanning a smaller vocal range.
Despite these broad generalisations which were quite typical of early ethnomusicological writings, and despite the fact that Fletcher's writing style is very descriptive, and romanticised, with frequent insertions of historical information, her findings of the main characteristics of 'Indian music' are those that you would find in most 'World Music' college textbooks today. As she observes, 'Indian music' is nearly all vocal (sung usually by males or choruses), with a large proportion of song texts containing vocables such as 'yu-waw', 'hi-hi', 'yu waw hi'. Fletcher also observes that melodies are mostly monophonic and that tone systems vary from pentatonic to diatonic and even chromatic. Fletcher is also very sensitive to the spiritual, sacred and religious beliefs of the Indians, the significance of 'dreams' and 'spirits' in their songs, and again, a lot of what she explores in this context matches other literature on this music from more recent times. Some may argue that because Fletcher was so passionate about Indian music and Indian culture, her writings were not sufficiently 'scientific' or 'objective'.
Another problem that arises from Fletcher's pioneering ethnographic work, is the transcriptions of the songs she collected and recorded, which were prepared with the help of another Oberlin trained musician, John Filmore. Fletcher would only attempt to notate the basic melodic outline, and Filmore would then prepare extensive transcriptions by listening to the wax cylinder recordings. However, Filmore's transcriptions contain 'harmonisations' of these Indian melodies and songs - in other words, what is certainly NOT 'Western' music suddenly looks like it on paper. There are key-signatures, time-signatures, and, as I said, harmonisations. The result is that while these may sound absolutely delightful if played on piano and sung, they bear little resemblence to the original song. These transcriptions are also one reason why Fletcher's work is so overlooked or ridiculed by modern historians, for they felt she was trying to 'Westernise' or 'Americanise' the native people. However, Fletcher does outline the reason for these harmonisations in her 1898 paper, where she describes an experiment of sorts that she conducted together with a friend from the Indian community she was living with. She played on piano the melody of a song he had recorded for her and he failed to recognise the tune, because his ear was drawn to (and distracted by) the mechanical sound of the hammers striking the keys. Fletcher then sang the melody and played the tune on piano simultaneously, and the Indian singer found it easier to sing along with her. However, he claimed that the music still did not sound 'natural' to him. It was only when Fletcher played a few simple chords underneath the melody line, that her Indian collaborator was satisfied. This led both Fletcher (with greater insistance from Filmore) to conclude that the Indian people had some idea of harmony. Unfortunately, the transcriptions bear little or no resemblence to my experience of this music, even though Fletcher's own annecdote was fascinating to read. Moreover, the transcriptions lack any 'descriptive' markings to indicate any peculiarities in the music, such as vocal pulsations, or the 'crying' or sobbing sound that breathing vocables are meant to portray. Her writings also tend to be filled with words that describe very 'Western' notions of music and song, for example she uses the words 'piano' and 'forte' instead of 'soft' and 'loud' and also uses the word 'aria' instead of 'melody' or 'song'. Despite this, I do feel that accusations and criticisms towards Alice Cunningham Fletcher are utterly unwaranteed, given that she devoted most of her life to campaigning for land-reforms, and 'giving-back' to the Indian community well before anyone else in ethnomusicology was concerned with this sort of engaged activism. As Jeff Titon points out on his Sustainable Music blog, even though today's historians fault Fletcher for failing to respect the native cultures, her writings, transcriptions and work must be best understood 'in light of the prevailing climate of opinion regarding Native Americans. The alternative to Americanisation after all, had for nearly three centuries been to exterminate them and confiscate their lands.'
Ultimately, Alice Cunningham Fletcher's life-long interest in Indian society, music and culture as well as her passionate advocacy for Indian rights and reform is visible in these earliest writings and in the work she did to 'give back' to those she lived and worked with. Most importantly, through her evocative writings and recordings, she inspired a generation of young American ethnomusicologists, most notably a young Frances Densmore who would go on to become a pioneering woman ethnomusicologist in her own right.
