Imagining Native America in Music

by Michael V. Pisani

This book offers a comprehensive look at musical representations of native America from the pre colonial past through the American West and up to the present. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, from the ballets of Lully in the court of Louis XIV to popular ballads of the nineteenth century; from eighteenth-century British-American theater to the musical theater of Irving Berlin; from chamber music by Dvoˆrák to film music for Apaches in Hollywood Westerns.Michael Pisani demonstrates how European colonists and their descendants were fascinated by the idea of race and ethnicity in music, and he examines how music contributed to the complex process of cultural mediation. Pisani reveals how certain themes and metaphors changed over the centuries and shows how much of this “Indian music,” which was and continues to be largely imagined, alternately idealized and vilified the peoples of native America.

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Michael Pisani was born in Gary, Indiana and attended an excellent drama and music program at his Catholic High School (Andrean). He grew up playing the accordion (classical as well as ethnic musics) and went to Oberlin College, studying music composition and conducting. He earned a PhD in musicology from the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester, New York).

Professor Pisani was also an accomplished pianist and worked for several major opera companies in the 1980s, among them, the Houston Grand Opera, the Seattle Opera Wagner Festival, and the Opera Company of Boston. He taught music at Vassar College from 1997 until his untimely death in 2019. He was committed to the study and promotion of American Music, all 450-or-so years of it. He served on the boards of the Society for American Music and served as editor of the quarterly journal American Music.

In addition to his own books, Professor Pisani has a chapter in The Oxford Handbook to Film Music (Oxford University Press, 2013) that demonstrates some of the clear precedents for film music in the way music was designed and used for the stage, and he contributed the chapter on music in the Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama.

He has also published articles on opera and film music, including an essay on “Teaching Film Music in the Liberal Arts Curriculum” first published in Teaching Music History, ed. Mary Natvig (Ashgate, 2002) and the other in Film Music II, published by the Film Music Society of Los Angeles (2004).