Writing American Indian Music: A Musicological Odyssey

Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine

I will never forget the hours I spent in classes on notation, the history of music theory, and American hymnody at the University of Illinois some 20 years ago. At the time, these courses seemed irrelevant for an aspiring ethnomusicologist. After all, I would be out in the field working with American Indian singers, not stuck in a library looking at seventeenth-century mensural notation, eighteenth-century theoretical treatises, or nineteenth-century hymnals. As it happens, the training I received in those courses became central to my work when I embarked on the musicological odyssey that resulted in Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements (MUSA volume 11).

By 1991, I completed my dissertation and a co-authored book on Choctaw music, joined the faculty of Colorado College, and started a family. It was time to begin a new research project, but with an infant and a preschooler in tow, fieldwork seemed out of the question. In the midst of this quandary, a letter arrived from Bruno Nettl, suggesting that I undertake a volume for MUSA. He explained that when MUSA was being planned, there had been some debate on the inclusion of Native American music, and on how a music that lived principally in oral/aural tradition could be represented in a way that satisfied the criteria of monumentality and American-ness. He expressed the need for a collection of musical facsimiles to illustrate the history of transcribing American Indian music, and he encouraged me to take a crack at it. Of course, I had no inkling of the complexity of such a project, but it seemed like a good way to stay active as a scholar until my children were old enough to join me on fieldwork. Thus began an intellectual adventure that ultimately lasted more than a decade, involved hundreds of sources spanning two continents, and explored more than four centuries of American music history.

I began the project by examining transcriptions made by comparative musicologists of the early twentieth century, such as Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore. I started to realize what I had gotten myself into when I saw that Fletcher had published a composer’s arrangements of Native American songs and produced most of her transcriptions in collaboration with Francis La Flesche, her Native research partner, while Densmore had included indigenous notations in some of her books. Furthermore, both Fletcher and Densmore had arranged their transcriptions for performance by children. I decided that the book could not be limited to a survey of ethnographic transcriptions; instead, it must encompass all kinds of visual representations in order to depict the reciprocal influences among Native Americans, scholars, composers, educators, and hobbyists. Only in this way could it contribute to an understanding of American music that reflects our social and cultural reality.

After looking at over 6,000 visual representations of American Indian songs produced between 1607 and 1996, I chose 116 musical examples to reproduce in facsimile. The facsimiles are divided into four sections: Explorations of American Indian Music (transcriptions made by explorers, missionaries, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists); Native Notations and Transcriptions (indigenous notations, such as Ojibwa birch bark scrolls, as well as transcriptions by scholars who are themselves Native Americans); Popular Arrangements (made for use by children in school music programs or by hobbyists); and Composer Arrangements (made for concert performance by composers, both European American and Native American). Thus as a compendium of historic materials, the edition illustrates the development of European American attitudes and approaches to American Indian musics; the infusion of Native musics into American musical culture; and Native American responses to and participation in the enterprise.

One of the most interesting facsimiles is the very first transcription of a North American Indian song, which was made circa 1607 by the French explorer and composer Marc Lescarbot using traditional European solfège syllables. The song was harmonized in four parts and rewritten in white mensural notation by the French missionary Gabriel Sagard-Théodat, who published the first arrangement of American Indian music in 1636. The most surprising facsimile is a selection from the Walam Olum or “Red Score,” a supposedly indigenous notation collected in 1833 by the naturalist Constantine S. Rafinesque that turns out to be the earliest confirmed hoax in the history of American Indian music. The most perplexing facsimile is an Achumawi Puberty Dance song transcribed by the linguist Jaime de Angulo using his own idiosyncratic graphic notation that consists of flags and banners of various sizes. Fortunately for us, the musicologist Marguerite Béclard d’Harcourt transcribed the same song using European notation a few years later.

Among the materials is also a famous facsimile “Old Indian Hymn” (1845) by Thomas Commuck, who was the first North American Indian composer to write in European notation; his hymn was later incorporated into a piece by Edward McDowell with an ironic twist that seems emblematic of the entire history of the musical encounter. The most striking example in the book is the score for Mtukwekok Naxkomao (The Singing Woods) (1994), a string quartet written for the Kronos Quartet by the Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids that combines hand-drawn graphic illustrations with European notation. All of these materials make an important contribution to Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the editors of MUSA: Richard Crawford, Mark Clague, Marcello Piras, Jeffrey Magee, and Wayne Schneider. Without their patient guidance and endless support over the past 11 years, this work would never have come to fruition. In addition, I am deeply grateful to everyone at A-R Editions for their thoughtful design and flawless execution in producing an especially challenging volume.

Victoria Lindsay Levine is Professor of Music and Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies at Colorado College. In 1998 she resumed fieldwork among Native communities in eastern Oklahoma, where she collaborates with the anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson.

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