THE STUDY OF INDIAN MUSIC 



By Fbances Densmobh 

 Collaborator, Bureau of American Ethnology 



[With 6 plates] 

 INTRODUCTION 



The invention of the recording phonograph opened a new era in the 

 preservation and study of Indian music. Previous to that invention 

 it had been necessary for students to write down Indian songs by 

 hearing them, a proceeding which involved many diflBculties. Dr. 

 Theodor Baker, of Germany, collected songs in that manner in 1880, 

 and Dr. Franz Boas did his remarkable work among the Central 

 Eskimo in 1883-84, the resulting publication (6th Ann. Rep. Bur. 

 Amer. Ethnol.) containing more than 20 Eskimo songs with a descrip- 

 tion of their melodic form. Ten Omaha songs were presented in a 

 paper by Miss Alice C. Fletcher entitled "The 'Wawan' or Pipe Dance 

 of the Omahas," published in 1884 by the Peabody Museum of Amer- 

 ican Archaeology and Ethnology. When the phonograph became 

 available, Miss Fletcher used that method of collecting Indian songs, 

 and her name is forever linked with the study of Indian music. The 

 phonograph that she used among the Omaha, about 1890, was later 

 transferred to the Bureau of American Ethnology. This instrument, 

 which I saw in Miss Fletcher's home, had a high mandrel, at least 6 

 inches above the plate of the machine, and she said it was a sturdy 

 instrument as it had "traveled across the prairie in the wagons of the 

 Indians and even rolled down hill without injury." Ninety songs 

 recorded among the Omaha were transcribed by John Comfort Fill- 

 more and contained in Miss Fletcher's book entitled "A Study of 

 Omaha Music with a Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the 

 Music by John Comfort Fillmore,"^ published by the Peabody 

 Museum in 1893. Twelve aluminum disk records of Arapaho, Kiowa, 

 Caddo, and Comanche songs, collected by James and Charles Mooney 

 in 1894 and marked "E. Berliner's Gramophone, pat. Nov. 8, 1887, May 

 15, 1888," are in the possession of the Bureau of American Ethnology. 



* Peabody Mns. Amer. Archaeol. and Ethnol., Harvard Univ., Pap., vol. 1, No. 5, 1893. 



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