John Comfort Fillmore

John Comfort Fillmore (February 4, 1843 – August 14, 1898) was an American music educator, organist, arranger, and ethnomusicologist.

Early life and education John Comfort Fillmore was born in Franklin, Connecticut, United States, on February 4, 1843. His father worked in Connecticut as the superintendent of a large cotton mill. His distant cousin was the railroad magnate J. A. Fillmore (namesake of Fillmore, California).

In 1888 Fillmore was contacted by ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher to assist her study of Native American music. Fletcher perceived her own training in musical analysis inadequate, and relied upon Fillmore's expertise to transfer field recordings into music notation. They were joined by Francis La Flesche. Fillmore believed in an evolutionary construction of anthropology in which all people groups go through the same stages of development, a common view of civilizations in the 19th century. This conception led him to develop a concept of acoustic universalism in which he argued that natural laws of physics and sound were true across the music of all cultures. He perceived that the basic elements of Western music (harmony, melody, rhythm, etc.) had evolved from primitive forms, and believed that the study of Native American music, which he perceived as being more primitive in its development, would enlighten scholars about how Western music evolved.

While studying the music of the Omaha people in the field with Fletcher, Fillmore perceived a "cosmic connection" in their music to that of Richard Wagner. He believed that inherent within Native music there existed implied harmonies. In transcribing Fletcher's field recordings into music notation, with her blessing Fillmore inserted harmonies not originally found in the recordings that were based in the harmonic language of Western music. This was based on his belief that deviations in Native American music from the Western diatonic scale were due to an "underdeveloped sense of pitch discriminations". Fletcher and Fillmore presented their findings at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, and that same year the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University published Fletcher's A Study of Omaha Indian Music which contained within it a "report of the structural peculiarities of music" authored by Fillmore.

Fillmore was critical of Benjamin Ives Gilman's transcriptions of Native American recordings, believing that they adhered too closely to the whims of the particular individual performer recorded and that the result was transcriptions that were too detailed and too technical to be of ethnographic use.

In 1895 Fillmore relocated to California to care for their daughter who was seriously ill. At that time he joined the faculty of Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he held the posts of professor of music and director of the music school until his death three years later. His daughter died in 1897. He died on August 15, 1898, in Taftville, Connecticut, shortly before he was scheduled to give a lecture on Native American music to the American Society for the Advancement of Science in Boston. He was visiting his relative, George D. Fillmore, at the time. The cause of death was heart failure.

Selected publications Books

Other Fillmore, John Comfort (1893). "Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music" from Alice C. Fletcher "A Study of Omaha Indian Music". Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum, vol. 1, no. 5. Cambridge, Mass. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. 59–77.