Natalie Curtis

Theodore Roosevelt was a family friend of Curtis, and one of her biggest influences. Curtis used Roosevelt as a helpful tool when it came to preserving Native American cultures. At one point, Curtis even entered Roosevelt's house to ask for tribal land rights with Mojave-Apache chief. Roosevelt addressed Curtis as one "who has done so very much to give Indian culture its proper position".[1] He also contributed a brief foreword to her collection of Native American music and folklore The Indians' Book, in which he remarked on "the depth and dignity of Indian thought".[3]

In 1905, Curtis published The Songs of Ancient America, three Pueblo corn-grinding songs with piano accompaniment. Characterizing her own task as a transcriber, she wrote, "I have in nowise changed the melodies, nor have I sought to harmonize them in the usual sense, nor to make of them musical compositions…My one desire has been to let the Indian songs be heard as the Indians themselves sing them..."[5]

In 1907 Curtis published The Indians' Book, a collection of songs and stories from 18 tribes, illustrated with handwritten transcriptions of songs as well as with artwork and photography. Most of the 200 songs are presented only in manuscript notation with no piano accompaniment at all. The book served as source for her former teacher Busoni's Indian Fantasy, a work for piano and orchestra, first performed in 1915 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski.

Around 1910, Curtis broadened her research to include transcription and collection of African American music, working at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, a college established in 1868 to educate former slaves. The work was funded by philanthropist George Foster Peabody. In 1911, she and David Mannes founded the Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York, and in 1912 she helped sponsor the first concert featuring black musicians at Carnegie Hall, a concert that featured the Clef Club orchestra, directed by James Reese Europe.

In 1917 she married artist Paul Burlin; at some point they moved to France.

In 1918 and 1919 Curtis (now Curtis Burlin) published four volumes entitled Negro Folk-Songs; the volumes included spirituals, and “work-and play-songs." She published the songs in four-part harmony, a task that brought praise from composer Percy Grainger in 1918.[6] Proceeds from the volumes went to the Hampton Institute. Curtis also began to study the music of African tribes and in 1920 published Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent, in which she notated the written example of what is known as the standard pattern in ethnomusicology, and triple-pulse son clave in Afro-Latin music (1920: 98).

She died in a traffic accident in Paris, France on 23 October 1921.[7]

Her published work rarely appeared in scholarly journals of anthropology or folklore. Instead, she published in more popular periodicals such as the Southern Workman, The Craftsman, and The Outlook, as well as in general musical publications such as Musical America. Reviews of her work appeared in such magazines as well as in standard scholarly journals of the day.[8]