CHAPTER 9 | AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC AND ITS COLLECTORS 211
Fletcher’s work owed much to her collaboration with Francis
La Flesche, a man of mixed Omaha, Ponca, and French ancestry
who grew up on an Omaha reservation. First meeting in 1881, the
two combined forces to document Omaha traditions, culminat-
ing in their monograph The Omaha Tribe (1911). The transcription
labeled “Ritual. Song of Approach” dates from an early stage of the
collaboration. The musical source for this melody was La Flesche
himself, who had learned the song in his youth. He sang it for
Fletcher, who carefully notated not only pitches, rhythms, and syl-
lables but also the singer’s phrasing and accents.
Fletcher’s interest in the melodies she collected grew over
time, and she became intrigued by the question of where Ameri-
can Indian music belonged in the full range of human music
making. In 1888 she wrote that “the Indian scale” could not be
illustrated on the piano, and “there is no notation in common use that would
make it feasible to describe it.” Experience as a transcriber had taught her that
rather than singing out of tune, Indians sang and heard music according to a
logic that had so far eluded non-Indians. Because her Indian informants had a
concept of intonation, or “in-tune-ness,” different from that of Western music,
Western notation could only approximate the pitch relationships she heard.
In the same year, Fletcher established contact with John Comfort Fill-
more, a classical musician and teacher who believed that all music, Western
and non-Western, written and nonwritten, shared a common harmonic basis.
To Fillmore, Indians’ departures from major and minor scales refl ected “an
underdeveloped sense of pitch discrimination” that was likely to mature in the
future—an ethnocentric way of interpreting the differences in intonation that
Fletcher had observed. Moreover, Fillmore heard harmonic implications in
monophonic Indian melodies. When he fi rst tried to harmonize Omaha melo-
dies that Alice Fletcher had collected, he found that “no satisfactory scheme of
chords could be made without implying the missing scale tones.” The experi-
ment convinced him that though Indian melodies seldom used all the notes in
a standard major or minor scale—much like the pentatonic tunes found in both
black and white A merican folk music—they were g rounded in incomplete forms
of those scales.
Alice Fletcher was persuaded by Fillmore’s evolutionary hypothesis, at least at
this point in her career. W hen her Study of Omaha Indian Music was published in 1893,
only four of the collection’s ninety-three melodies were left without accompani-
ment. The rest appeared with Fillmore’s harmonizations, chiefl y in the major mode.
The study of Indian music making was transformed after researchers started
recording the music on Thomas A. Edison’s cylinder phonographic machine.
The recordings, begun around 1890 and continuing through the next century,
are the basis of a major collection at the Smithsonian. The effort to preserve
what remained of North America’s oldest musical traditions seems all the more
noteworthy when we consider the sheer foreignness of American Indian music
to people outside their cultures and the delicate, highly demanding human
endeavor musical fi eldwork proved to be. In overcoming these two obstacles,
scholars of American Indian music helped to establish fi eldwork as the basis of
a new discipline that emphasized ethnography, recording, transcription, and
cultural and musical analysis. They stand among the key founding fi gures of
ethnomusicology, a fi eld that only in the 1950s would gain a foothold in academia.K Alice Fletcher’s
transcription of this
traditional Omaha song was
taken from a performance
by her assistant, Francis La
Flesche, in 1884.the cylinder
phonograph172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 211 23/01/13 11:28 AM