(b New York, 19 Feb 1852; d Boston, 18 March 1933). American psychologist and ethnomusicologist. He studied at Williams College (AB 1872) and did postgraduate work as a Fellow in Logic at Johns Hopkins University (1881–2); he then attended the University of Berlin (1882), was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard (1883–5) and in 1886 studied at the University of Paris. He lectured at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard on the psychology of music (1890–92) and was assistant professor of psychology at Clark University (1892–3). He then became secretary of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts until his retirement in 1925.
Much of Gilman’s musical research was given impetus by Mary Hemenway, who commissioned an expedition to study the Pueblo Indians; in 1890 she entrusted the study of the songs to Gilman, who was the first to scientifically analyse Amerindian melodies through recordings. He held that the Amerindians had their own set of conscious norms for intervallic relationships and, in his article on Zuñi melodies (1891), showed minute discrepancies in the deviations from the Western tempered scale. Stumpf pointed out technical flaws in the equipment that affected the recordings’ reliability, while John Comfort Fillmore argued that the deviations from the Western scale were accidental and insignificant. Gilman’s publication nevertheless served as a model for many later treatises based on recorded material.
In 1891 the Hemenway Expedition moved on to Hopi villages. The Hopi transcriptions, which include a chapter with a detailed description of his methodology, appeared both in standard music notation and in a more precise graphic notation. His tabular analysis of melodic intervals in the songs used the ‘cents’ measurement employed by A.J. Ellis and the German comparative musicologists. In 1893 Hemenway commissioned Gilman to record exotic music at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He had already recorded Chinese music for his 1892 article and returned with 101 cylinders of the performances at the Javanese, Samoan, Serbian and Kwakiutl Indian exhibits, which he never published; these appear to be the earliest extant recordings of indigenous music from Java, Samoa and Serbia. He also devoted six cylinders to the tunings of the individual gamelan instruments. The cylinder recordings he prepared for the 1893 exhibition were rediscovered in 1976 and now provide fundamental evidence of change in the structure and form of these musics during the 20th century.
‘Zuni Melodies’, Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, i (1891), 63–91
‘On some Psychological Aspects of the Chinese Musical System’, Philosophical Review, i (1892), 54–71, 154–78
‘Hopi Songs’, Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, v (1908) [whole issue]
‘The Science of Exotic Music’, Science, new ser., xxx (1909), 532–5
E.M. von Hornbostel and O. Abraham: ‘Studien über das Tonsystem und die Musik der Japaner’, SIMG, iv (1902–3), 302–60; repr. in Hornbostel: Opera omnia, i (The Hague, 1975)
O. Abraham and E. von Hornbostel: ‘Über die Bedeutung des Phonographen für die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xxxvi (1904), 222–36; repr. in Hornbostel: Opera omnia, i (The Hague, 1975)
F. Densmore: ‘The Study of Indian Music in the Nineteenth Century’, American Anthropologist, xxix (1927), 77–86
C. Haywood: A Bibliography of North American Folklore and Folksong (New York, 1951, 2/1961)
B. Nettl: North American Indian Musical Styles (Philadelphia, 1954)
J. Hickerson: Annotated Bibliography of North American Indian Music North of Mexico (diss., Indiana U., 1961)
SUE CAROLE DeVALE