Eleanor Hague (October 7, 1875 – December 25, 1954) was an American folklorist and musicologist, who specialized in the traditional music of Latin America.
Early life and education
Hague was born in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
, the daughter of geologist and mining engineer
James Duncan Hague
James Duncan Hague (18361908) was an American mining engineer, mineralogist, and geologist.
Early years
Hague was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to the Rev. William Hague and Mary Bowditch Moriarty. Through the Foote family, she was related to the Beechers and to many other prominent New England families. Writer
Kate Foote Coe
Katherine Elizabeth Foote Coe (May 31, 1840 – December 23, 1923) was an American educator, journalist, and traveler from Connecticut.
Early life
Foote was born in Guilford, Connecticut, one of the ten children of George Augustus Foote and Eliza ...
was her aunt; her uncle
Arthur De Wint Foote
Arthur De Wint Foote (1849–1933) was an American civil engineer and mining engineer who impacted the development of the American West with his innovative engineering works and entrepreneurial ventures. In Northern California in the late 1890s, ...
was a noted engineer, and husband of book illustrator
Mary Hallock Foote
Mary Hallock Foote (November 9, 1847 – June 25, 1938) was an American author and illustrator. She is best known for her illustrated short stories and novels portraying life in the mining communities of the turn-of-the-century American Old West ...
. Another aunt married politician
Joseph Roswell Hawley
Joseph Roswell Hawley (October 31, 1826March 18, 1905) was the 42nd Governor of Connecticut, a U.S. politician in the Republican and Free Soil parties, a Civil War general, and a journalist and newspaper editor. He served two terms in the Un ...
; his daughter, her first cousin Margaret Foote Hawley, was an artist.
Hague studied music in New York and Massachusetts, and abroad in France and Italy.
Career
As a young woman in New York, Hague was a member of the New York Oratorio Society, and was a church choir director.
Hague collected, preserved, and published folk songs from Latin America and
Spanish California
The history of California can be divided into the Native American period (about 10,000 years ago until 1542), the European exploration period (1542–1769), the Spanish colonial period (1769–1821), the Mexican period (1821–1848), and Un ...
. She was credited as arranger on a 1925 Victor recording of "Carmela" by Dusolina Giannini. She is best known for discovering the bound manuscript notebooks of Joseph María García, an eighteenth-century Mexican dance master, who made shorthand notations about how to perform specific dance steps. She also translated folksongs from Spanish to English, working with
Luisa Espinel
Luisa Espinel (December 8, 1892 – February 2, 1963), born Luisa Ronstadt, was an American singer, dancer, and actress. She toured, taught, performed in vaudeville, and appeared in a movie with Marlene Dietrich.
Early life
Luisa Ronstadt was ...
,
Juan Bautista Rael
Juan Bautista Rael (August 14, 1900 – November 8, 1993) was an American ethnographer, linguist, and folklorist who was a pioneer in the study of the people, stories, and language of Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the Southwes ...
, and Marion Leffingwell. She sometimes performed the songs she collected, singing and playing piano or guitar.
In 1932, Hague lectured on early Spanish music at the
Los Angeles Public Library
The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) is a public library system in Los Angeles, California, operating separate from the Los Angeles County Public Library system. The system holds more than six million volumes, and with around 19 million resid ...
. In the 1930s, she funded studies of Native American music, including composer
Harry Partch
Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century com ...
's transcription of
Charles Fletcher Lummis
Charles Fletcher Lummis (March 1, 1859 – November 25, 1928) was an American journalist, civil rights activist, preservationist, poet and librarian who promoted Native American rights and historic preservation. He founded the Southwest Museum ...
's wax cylinder recordings, and
Frances Densmore
Frances Theresa Densmore (May 21, 1867 – June 5, 1957) was an American anthropologist and ethnographer from Minnesota. Densmore studied Native American music and culture, and in modern terms, she may be described as an ethnomusicol ...
's anthropological work.
Hague founded the Jarabe Club at a
settlement house
The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity an ...
in
Pasadena, California
Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commerci ...
, to teach Mexican traditional music and dance to young people, and she directed the students' performances. In 1941, she directed the Jarabe Club dancers when they performed in the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C.
Publications
* "Mexican Folk-Songs" (1912)
* "Brazilian Songs" (1912)
* ''Folk songs from Mexico and South America'' (1914, with
Edward Kilenyi
Edward Kilenyi Jr. (1910 – 2000) was a classical pianist. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 7, 1910. Kilenyi studied in Hungary with the composer/pianist Ernő Dohnányi at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, earning a diploma in 1 ...
)
* "Spanish Songs from Southern California" (1914)
* "Eskimo Songs" (1915)
* "Five Mexican Dances" (1915)
* "Five Danzas from Mexico" (1915)
* ''Spanish-American Folk Songs'' (1917)
* ''Early Spanish-Californian folk-songs'' (1922, with Gertrude Ross)
* ''Latin-American Music Past and Present'' (1934)
* "Regional Music of Spain and Latin America" (1943)
Personal life and legacy
Hague died in 1954, at the age of 79, in Flintridge, California. She left her papers to the
Southwest Museum
The Southwest Museum of the American Indian was a museum, library, and archive located in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States, above the north-western bank of the Arroyo Seco canyon and stream. The museum ...
, including the Joseph María García manuscript. In 1996, the Children of the Hague Manuscript, an ensemble of young musicians in
Atascadero, California
Atascadero ( Spanish for "Mire") is a city in San Luis Obispo County, California, United States, located on U.S. Route 101. Atascadero is part of the San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles metropolitan statistical area, which encompasses the extents of t ...
, performed music based on the Joseph María García notes at several concerts.