Indianist movement

The Indianist movement was a movement in American classical music that flourished from the 1880s until the 1920s. It was based on attempts to synthesize American Indian musical ideas with some of the basic principles of Western music. Chief practitioners of the form included Charles Sanford Skilton, Arthur Nevin, Arthur Farwell, and Charles Wakefield Cadman; many other composers were also involved in the craze at various points throughout their careers. In his book Imagining Native America in Music Michael Pisani argues that there was no such thing as an "Indianist" movement in American music, but that American composers' borrowing melodies of native America (beginning around 1890) was simply one part of a larger interest in the use of folk musics of all ethnicities on American soil. (A similar interest can be found in the work of several classical composers of Central and South America at this time as well.)

The Indianist movement could trace its roots to certain trends in nineteenth-century American Romanticism, although its musical roots go back much earlier; examples of music on "Indian" themes can be found dating back to the early years of the seventeenth century, and stories relating to the conquest of the Americas were popular with composers through the late eighteenth century as well. It bears many similarities with the cult of the noble savage, espoused by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Edwin Forrest, too, influenced the movement with his star performance in the play Metamora. At least one composer, Anthony Philip Heinrich, a contemporary of these artists, is recorded as having spent some time among the Indians on the American frontiers; he was also the first to set Longfellow's Hiawatha to music. He did not, however, use Indian musical themes in his work.

...
Wikipedia