Helen Heffron Roberts

Helen Heffron Roberts
Born (1888-06-12)June 12, 1888
Chicago, Illinois
Died March 26, 1985(1985-03-26) (aged 96)
North Haven, Connecticut
Nationality American
Alma mater American Conservatory of Music, Columbia University
Occupation Anthropologist, ethnomusicologist

Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985) was an American anthropologist and pioneer ethnomusicologist. Her work included the study of the origins and development of music among the Jamaican Maroons, and the Puebloan peoples of the American southwest. Her recordings of ancient Hawaiian meles are archived at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Roberts was a protege of Alfred V. Kidder and Franz Boas.

Early life and music background

She was born in Chicago on June 12, 1888, the oldest of three children born to accountant William Hinman Roberts and his wife, artist Dana Alma McDonald Roberts. Her parents provided piano lessons for her at an early age and encouraged her towards a career as a classical pianist. Upon the completion of her basic education at Monticello Seminary, Roberts furthered her studies, graduating from Chicago Musical College in 1909 and the American Conservatory of Music in 1911.[1]

Anthropological studies

While at the conservatory, Roberts began to realize that she did not have the abilities to achieve her parents' dream of becoming a classical pianist. Besides not having the hand dexterity, she suffered from unspecified recurring health issues. In an interview in later years, she cited both her health and an early interest in Native American culture as the motivations for her travels to the southwestern United States. Over the next several years, her continued post graduate work at the conservatory was interspersed with employment as a music teacher in Kansas, Texas and Mexico, where she was often joined by family members.[1]

Her archaeological interests also began during this time period, and she apprenticed under Alfred V. Kidder at his site excavations in Pecos, New Mexico. In 1916, she published "Doubling coiling" (pottery) in American Anthropologist.[2] Berthold Laufer of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History added his encouragement to that of Kidder who advised her to enroll at Columbia University. Under the tutelage of Franz Boas, known as the father of American anthropology,[3] she changed her life goals from a career as either a music teacher or professional musician, to the study of the origins and progression of music in ethnic cultures. Boas advised her that as pioneer in the relatively new field of ethnomusicology she would have little competition.[1]

By the time she received her 1919 M.A. degree in anthropology, her blended fields of interest were beginning to evidence themselves in her publications. She reviewed H. E. Krehbiel's book Afro-American Folksongs in 1917 for the Journal of American Folklore; and in 1918 with co-author Herman K. Haeberlin, published Some Songs of the Puget sound Salish in the Journal of American Folklore. During 1919 she did two reviews, Nabaloi Songs by C. R. Moss and A. L. Kroeber For American Anthropoligist and Teton Sioux Music by Frances Densmore for The Journal of American Folklore. Her master's thesis Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region, written with Haeberlin and James A. Tiet, was published in 1928.[2]

Field work and transcriptions

Under the aegis of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Folklore Foundation at Vassar College, Roberts spent several months 1920–1921 in Jamaica with foundation chair Martha Beckwith. Their collaborative efforts resulted in recordings and published works on Jamaican forklore. Roberts published Possible Survivals of African Song in Jamaica in 1926, that centers around the history and culture of the Jamaican Maroons.[2]

The field work completed by Roberts in Hawaii during 1923 and 1924 produced the recording of 1,255 individual meles that are currently archived at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu.[2]

Her initial apprenticeship with Alfred V. Kidder served not only to change her career choice, but also provided a path to exploring her ongoing interest in Native American culture. In 1923, she published Chakwena Songs of Zuñi and Laguna in The Journal of American Folklore. She began doing field work among the Puebloan peoples in 1930, and an Alan Lomax 16mm video reel collection of American folk songs includes a Tewa dance that Roberts filmed in 1936 near San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. [4]

In between field assignments, Roberts collaborated with several professionals with whom she would be associated for most of her life. Clark Wissler and Jesse Walter Fewkes involved her with their work on Pawnee music, and it was for Edward Sapir that she transcribed the Diamond Jenness collection of Songs of the Nootka Indians of Western Vancouver Island. In 1924, she accepted a Yale University staff position at the request of Wissler who was helping spearhead a new project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Sapir became her supervisor at Yale in 1931, where she would remain until 1936.

Edwin Grant Burrows, after two years on the staff of Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum, arrived at Yale in 1933 to work on his both his M. A. and Ph.D anthropology degrees,[5] and according to Roberts came under her mentorship. Her professional work and associations for Yale took her to Europe where she formed a lifelong friendship with Beatrice Blackwood.[1]

A 1934 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York provided for her procurement of specially designed recording equipment to facilitate her Yale project of copying wax cylinder recordings to aluminum discs. Additionally, Roberts became a collector of wax cylinders recorded by other researchers in her field. She eventually donated 400 such wax cylinder recordings to the permanent collection of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress.[6]

Along with musicologist and composer Charles Seeger, composer Henry Cowell, ethnomusicologist George Herzog and Dorothy Lawton of the New York Public Library, Roberts was a founding member of the American Society for Comparative Musicology in 1933, the parent organization of the American Library of Musicology (ALM). Seeger envisioned the short-lived ALM as a publisher of music-related resources, but the it ceased to exist by 1936.[7][1]

Later life

Roberts moved to Tryon, North Carolina, in part to care for her father, after a 1935 funding slash eliminated her position at Yale. In this small southern environment, she learned to grow her own food and became an accomplished horticulturist. During World War II, Roberts joined other Tryon women in cooking and canning foods to be sent to Europe.[1] After her father's death, Roberts relocated to New Haven, Connecticut in 1945 where she spent the rest of her life. She became a member of the Horticultural Society of New York and sat on the Board of Directors of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. She died on March 26, 1985, and the bulk of her records are at the repository of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale.[8]

Sound recordings

Partial listing

Publications

Partial listing

Misc

See also

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Recorded by John Peabody Harrington and his wife Carobeth Harrington Laird in 1916–1917. Transcribed and analyzed by Roberts in 1921.
  2. ↑ Recorded for Beckwith by Roberts. Donated to the Library by Roberts on February 21, 1937.
  3. ↑ Possibly recorded by James Barnes. Donated to the Library of Congress in 1937 by Helen Heffren Roberts.
  4. ↑ Donated to the Library of Congress in 1937 by Helen Heffren Roberts.
  5. ↑ Included in the footage is a Tewa dance recorded by Roberts near San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico.

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Frisbie, Charlotte J. (Winter 1989). "Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985): A Tribute". Ethnomusicology. University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology. 33 (1): 97–111. JSTOR 852171. (subscription required (help)).
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Special Bibliography: Helen Heffron Roberts". Ethnomusicology. University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology. 11 (2): 228–233. May 1967. JSTOR 849821. (subscription required (help)).
  3. ↑ Messer, Ellen (Spring 1986). "Franz Boas and Kaufmann Kohler: Anthropology and Reform Judaism". Jewish Social Studies. Indiana University Press. 48 (2): 127–140. JSTOR 4467327. (subscription required (help)).
  4. ↑ Lomax, Alan (1936). Archive of American Folk Song films, 1936–1942, a collection of amateur films made by Alan Lomax and others (AFC 1990/017) (16 mm). Washington, D.C.: Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. LCCN 2015655354.
  5. ↑ Barnett, James H. (February 1959). "Edwin Grant Burrows 1891-1958". American Anthropologist. Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association. New Series, Vol. 61, No. 1: 97–98. doi:10.1525/aa.1959.61.1.02a00110. JSTOR 666217. (subscription required (help)).
  6. ↑ "Helen Heffron Roberts, (1888-1985)" (PDF). Folklife Center News. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Volume X, Number 3: 10–11. Summer 1988.
  7. ↑ Pescatello, Ann M. (1992). Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 120–122. ISBN 0-8229-3713-1.
  8. ↑ "Helen Heffron Roberts collection". Yale University. Retrieved May 8, 2015.

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