ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationships between composers and field ethnographers and explains the actual process of 'idealization' from field ethnography to finished product. It discusses the repercussions of these choices on the American Indians who served as consultants and collaborators in this chain of events. The chapter focuses on the opera The Robin Woman by Charles Wakefield Cadman to illustrate how some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers collaborated with ethnographers in choosing songs for their scores. In 1888 Alice Fletcher, an ethnographer, enlisted academic and composer John Comfort Fillmore in a project to transform Native songs into pieces for piano and voice, to be titled A Study of Omaha Indian Music. After publishing A Study Of Omaha Indian Music, Fletcher returned to more purely ethnographic projects and ceased directly collaborating with composers. A parallel and somewhat similar movement to Indianist styles of composition, known as 'indigenismo' happened in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s.
