Michael Pisani has produced an impressive volume that makes a major contribution to the study of Indianism in music. Culling information from a vast array of materials—including scores and sheet music, archival documents, published historical chronicles, and a large panorama of secondary sources—Pisani carefully disentangles the changing perceptions of Native Americans held by Europeans and North Americans, and the ways in which these perceptions have been expressed through music. In its broadly interdisciplinary design and content, the book is refreshing, engaging, and insightful. Thanks to Pisani's excellent writing style, the book is also highly accessible and fun to read. It covers roughly 450 years of music history and is richly illustrated with musical examples, figures, and maps. The appendices provide selected lists of parlor songs and instrumental character pieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ample footnotes are included as well as an extensive bibliography, and a companion Web site is available.Footnote ¹

The book is divided into nine chapters, which are presented in four parts. Part One, “New World Americans,” discusses representations of Native Americans in European court entertainments, 1550–1760, as well as in British American theater and song, 1710–1808. Part Two, “Exotic Peoples, Exotic Sounds,” contains chapters on imagining the U.S. frontier in music, 1795–1860, and the role of Longfellow's Hiawatha in North American music history. Part Three, “Nostalgia for a Native Land,” explores the impact of early ethnographic research on composers' involvement with Native American music, particularly in reference to the development of musical nationalism and the quest for authenticity in rendering the sound of Native America. Part Four, “Americans Again,” focuses on musical representations of Native peoples in opera, musical theater, vaudeville, and film during the twentieth century. A brief conclusion provides final reflections on racial and ethnic stereotypes in American music history, and how these characterizations influence our society as a whole.

To explain the ways in which music can be used to express and shape ethnic stereotypes, Pisani explores “music's metaphorical relationship to representation” (11). He explains that before the nineteenth century, composers used certain individual musical devices—as basic semantic units—to allude to Native Americans. In later works, however, composers signified Native Americans through musical tropes or collections of semantic units deployed simultaneously. He refers to Boris Asaf'ev's (1884–1949) theory of intonation, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, to show how musical references apparently derived from folk song can become absorbed into national musical styles (12, 189–90).Footnote ² Pisani also draws upon the work of Charles Peirce (as interpreted by Tara Browner) to establish three categories of compositions based on Native American topics: “symbolic (merely native-inspired), indexical (attempting to approximate native sounds), and iconic (using materials from native music)” (12).Footnote ³ This theory provides the framework for the close musical and sociohistorical analysis of the many composers and compositions that follows.

Perhaps the most valuable feature of this book is Pisani's compelling musical analysis, which identifies and explains the musical devices that have been used at various times by different composers to represent Native Americans in sound. Pisani explains that in the seventeenth century, French court composers had already begun to represent Native Americans through musico-rhetorical devices such as drone basses, moresca tempo and rhythm, and the keys of G minor and B-flat major, used to signify “the mysteries of imaginary worlds” (30). Eighteenth-century composers expanded this set of devices to include phrases with short, repeated passages, leaping octaves in the bass line, timpani and other instruments that were considered unusual at the time, and the tempo and rhythm of the march (to suggest heroism and resistance to colonization). By the early nineteenth century, the musical lexicon for representing Native Americans had grown to include gapped pentatonic scales, descending melodic contours covering an octave range (in imitation of Plains Indian singing), and the use of iambic rhythm (the “Scottish snap”). Before 1800, composers did not use these devices consistently or in combination, but during the course of the nineteenth century they began to link the devices together into tropes that came to define Indianism in music. Nineteenth-century composers became increasingly familiar with Native American music as staged performances featuring Indian singers and dancers became more common. At the turn of the twentieth century, the advent of ethnographic transcription inspired composers to incorporate Native themes into their music, often in settings dominated by the already well-established tropes of primitivism. Composers continued to use these tropes well into the twentieth century, in all kinds of media ranging from opera to musical theater to film.

Musical analysis also anchors Pisani's discussion of the role of musical stereotypes in shaping public perceptions of Native Americans, perceptions that have changed from one century to the next. Some of the most illuminating examples he presents include the sense of awe and wonder toward the New World and its peoples expressed by Jean-Baptiste Lully in his music for the ballet Les Indiens (1657), the admiration of Native heroism in the face of conquest expressed by Anne Home Hunter in her “Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” (ca. 1780), and the reverence for antiquity expressed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in his Hiawatha cantatas (1898–1900). Pisani also confronts some of the more repugnant examples head-on, including the offensive “Osceola Quickstep” (ca. 1840), published soon after the imprisonment and death of Seminole chief Osceola (1804–38) during the forced removals of the southern tribes instigated by the U.S. government. Some examples of early-twentieth-century popular entertainments are downright embarrassing—such as Samuel Goldwyn's 1930 film adaptation of the musical comedy Whoopee! (originally produced on Broadway by Florenz Ziegfeld), with its outrageous production number “Song of the Setting Sun,” choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Pisani explains that this number “featured not only Ziegfeld's ubiquitous long-legged dancing girls—as lovely Indian maidens—but also stalwart males in splendid Sioux regalia, a blazing sunset, . . . thundering tom-toms, a chieftain with an operatic baritone voice, and, of course, a live . . . Hollywood orchestra” (1). Pisani analyzes all of these examples, and many more, to demonstrate that “race served as an essentializing category not only in politics, journalism, and literature, as is well known, but also in music” (5).

Interestingly, some early music ethnographers reported that Native American musical styles featured polymeter, or “different metrical subdivisions for the singer and drum” (185). Pisani explains that a few “Indianists,” such as John Comfort Fillmore, used polymeter in their settings of Native American songs to suggest this stylistic feature. Contemporary ethnomusicologists have a rather different perception of time elements in Native American music. Whereas Native styles use a wide variety of rhythmic idioms, such as syncopation, triplets, hemiola, frequently changing beat groups, and long or irregular beat groups, polymeter is rare, occurring in only a handful of songs, such as the Yuchi Turtle Dance or the Choctaw Quail Dance. The general avoidance of polymeter may reflect broader Native American musical and social values, which emphasize unison rather than independently sounding parts. What music scholars and composers of the late nineteenth century perceived as polymeter would be described today as a loose correlation between the singers' tempo and the drummers' tempo.

Pisani's goal in Imagining Native America in Music was “to provoke readers into thinking more subtly about the language of musical stereotypes and their complex chain of influences,” because “racial and ethnic stereotypes, though always limiting, have historically taken new forms rather than fading away. Focusing the broader cultural discourse on the details of the stereotypes . . . may help to limit their destructive influences on people” (331). Pisani has accomplished his goal admirably. In combination with other recent, related work, this book makes it impossible for those who teach courses on North American music history to ignore or gloss over the complex issues surrounding “Indianist” music for the concert hall, opera theater, parlor, stage, and screen.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, this book gives those who teach courses on North American ethnic musics from ethnomusicological or cultural studies perspectives extensive material for thought-provoking discussions of musical stereotypes and their social and historical impact. Furthermore, this book provides a foundation for future studies of Indianism in music, including the roles that Native artists have played in either overturning the stereotypes or further manipulating them in popular, film, and art music.