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

3. "I Am Full of Plans": Curtis Discovers Native Americans and Their Music

3 Curtis Discovers Native Americans and Their Music in the summer of 1903 natalie curtis excitedly wrote President Theodore Roosevelt to share her enthusiasm for Native American music and art and her proposal to preserve and promote these valuable treasures with “all educated persons.” Thanking the president for supporting her endeavors, Curtis exclaimed, “I am full of plans.” Her plans included collecting, preserving, and popularizing Indian music for the benefit of Indians and all Americans. Believing she shared in the president’s “clarity of purpose and promptness of action,” Curtis yearned to fulfill her new vision for American music.1 Evincing the same enthusiasm for her new undertakings as she earlier had for Wagner and the musical world of New York, Curtis again threw herself into her work. This time, however, her labor did not consist of hours of practice at the piano or poring over Wagnerian opera scores. Now Curtis devoted her efforts to the collection and popularization of Native American music. She found herself transported from the stylish music halls of New York City to a desolate government building in an isolated Hopi village, yet her enthusiasm for music and its potential for human better- 82 ment only increased as her physical comfort subsided. Beginning in 1903 Curtis published a number of articles on Native American music and culture, particularly from the Southwest. After the 1907 publication of The Indians’ Book she portrayed herself as an advocate of Native American rights, particularly regarding their music, poetry, and arts. What accounts for Curtis’s transformation from a classically trained pianist and devotee of Wagner and highbrow music to a spokesperson for Indian song and folklore? This transformation can be accounted for in part by the experiences of Curtis’s youth. Her family’s relatively liberal values regarding gender, race, and culture, as well as their emotional and financial support, certainly provided some basis for her decision to study Native American music. Family ties also led her to important patrons who encouraged and financed her research in the West. The Curtis family’s Transcendentalist heritage and openness to non-Western ideas as a source of personal identity could also have paved the way for her newfound interests. Her earlier attempts to create Americanist music as a composer of small parlor pieces may also have led Curtis to seek out alternatives. Importantly, in Curtis’s youth music provided her with a sense of personal identity and fulfillment, as well as a means for engagement with the broader world. In Native American music she found even greater promise. In this quest for new ways of understanding herself and her world Curtis joined other Easterners, particularly upper- and middle-class educated white women, in traveling to the American Southwest. Like other women she discovered that chances to work on behalf of Native Americans were becoming increasingly available. First as a travel writer reporting on the West and then as a self-appointed mediator between Native Americans and Eastern audiences, Curtis found people and places to fulfill her search for meaning and purpose in life and the desire and means to share this with others. In her discovery of Native American music Curtis found an identity for herself as a woman, a musician, and an American. 83 Some time around 1900 Curtis’s younger brother George, after graduating from Harvard and working briefly as a librarian in New York, moved to the Southwest. George suffered from ill health, and the Curtises hoped that the Western climate would help. Like other young men from well-established and well-connected Eastern families George Curtis may have had additional reasons for his journey west. Other young men in similar circumstances, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister, also went west as they bridged the gap between adolescence and adulthood. These young men viewed the West—as their fathers and grandfathers had often viewed the “Grand Tour” of Europe—as a place of temporary refuge from the maladies of their increasingly industrialized and specialized worlds. For this new generation the West became more than a place for young men to renew their health; it also provided an outlet for cultural and artistic talents that the modern industrial order no longer provided. It became a place for them to articulate an identity and even begin new lives. For George and other young men the West could also serve as a place to display their manhood...