Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

2. "They Don't Know What Bliss Is!": Curtis's Musical Adolescence

2 Curtis’s Musical Adolescence natalie curtis came of age in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. One is tempted to look at these formative years to discover clues as to why a privileged young woman from New York City would choose to study and promote the music of Native Americans and African Americans. Why did Curtis forsake a career in classical music to devote herself to musical traditions so unlike those of her youth? Were there seeds of change already planted and taking root while she was young? What experiences prepared her to embrace the music of America’s marginalized “folk”? Although it is important to address these questions, if one were to focus solely on their answers, a significant part of her story would be lost. Curtis enjoyed a most interesting musical adolescence. Her passion for music allowed her to explore different facets of herself; the musical world gave her a means and a language through which to shape her identity as a young woman in the late nineteenth century. Scholars seeking to understand the lives of young women in this period have raised important questions concerning how they 38 shaped their identities and made choices. Helen L. Horowitz, in her study of the educator M. Carey Thomas, explores the impact reading had on Thomas as a youth: “Through reading she shaped an identity that . . . guided her personal relationships for the rest of her life. Through reading, M. Carey Thomas created herself.”1 Reading allowed Thomas to explore alternative paths otherwise unavailable to the young Quaker woman and gave her an outlet to express her aesthetic and personal passions. Thomas’s reading, further, took place with her female peers, with whom she discussed and wrote about the new ideas she encountered. In much the same way Natalie Curtis’s adolescence was shaped by her passion for music. Music became a means for Curtis to express her innermost feelings and explore facets of her identity. An examination of young Curtis’s musical life therefore opens new ways for historians to understand identity formation among women of her generation. In the same way that contemporaries like Thomas forged an identity through their reading, Natalie Curtis created and re-created herself through music. By sharing her musical experiences with her female peers Curtis found a means to express ideas about her gender, sexuality, spirituality, and intellect. Her intense devotion to the piano, her close association with the intellectual ideas of her instructors, and her avid participation in New York City’s musical scene, as well as her opportunities to study music and travel abroad, allshapedCurtis’sidentityasayoungAmericanwoman.Throughthe language of music she created ways to express her deepest thoughts, and she did this within a primarily female world. Her search for a personal identity as a young female musician eventually blended with a larger cultural search for an American musical expression in her earliest compositions. Her musical training and experiences prepared Curtis for her career as an ethnomusicologist, but they did not necessarily predict this path for her. Instead these formative events in her life provided Curtis with many options, many other roads she might have traveled instead. Her turn to Native American 39 and African American music was not so much a departure from her earliest search for an American identity as an extension of it. natalie curtis spent her adolescence at the “old family home” at 27 Washington Place in New York City, guided by her family’s influence. Curtis’s family members established a foundation for her that encouraged her to think broadly and act boldly, and they provided the financial and emotional support for her undertakings. She attended the Brearly School, a female private institution that offered a college-preparatory curriculum. She also studied music, took lessons in piano and singing, and participated in the city’s musical scene. Her family shared Curtis’s love of music, even if it occasionally interfered with her schoolwork. She and her father, “Bogey,” who unlike his daughter preferred the Italian operas so popular during his youth, attended German musical dramas at the Metropolitan Opera House. Curtis’s brother George recalled his sister’s passion for this music. “A lameness in one knee at the time caused her to use a crutch,” he remembered, “and often her enthusiasm led her to pound out applause so long and vehemently that her father had to take the crutch out of...