Eleanor Hague
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Eleanor Hague | |
|---|---|
 Eleanor Hague, from a 1920 newspaper | |
| Born | October 7, 1875 San Francisco, California |
| Died | December 25, 1954 (aged 79) Flintridge, California |
| Occupation(s) | Folklorist, musicologist, antiquarian |
| Parent(s) | James Duncan Hague and Mary Ward Foote Hague |
| Relatives | Arthur De Wint Foote (uncle); Kate Foote Coe (aunt); Margaret Foote Hawley (cousin) |
Eleanor Hague (October 7, 1875 – December 25, 1954) was an American folklorist and musicologist, who specialized in the traditional music of Latin America.
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Hague was born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of geologist and mining engineer James Duncan Hague and Mary Ward Foote Hague.[1] Through the Foote family, she was related to the Beechers and to many other prominent New England families. Writer Kate Foote Coe was her aunt; her uncle Arthur De Wint Foote was a noted engineer, and husband of book illustrator Mary Hallock Foote.[2] Another aunt married politician Joseph Roswell Hawley; his daughter, her first cousin Margaret Foote Hawley, was an artist.[3]
Hague studied music in New York and Massachusetts, and abroad in France and Italy.[1]
Career
As a young woman in New York, Hague was a member of the New York Oratorio Society, and was a church choir director.[1]
Hague collected, preserved, and published folk songs from Latin America and Spanish California.[4][5] She was credited as arranger on a 1925 Victor recording of "Carmela" by Dusolina Giannini.[6] 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.[7] She also translated folksongs from Spanish to English, working with Luisa Espinel, Juan Bautista Rael, and Marion Leffingwell.[1] She sometimes performed the songs she collected, singing and playing piano or guitar.[8]
In 1932, Hague lectured on early Spanish music at the Los Angeles Public Library.[9] In the 1930s, she funded studies of Native American music, including composer Harry Partch's transcription of Charles Fletcher Lummis's wax cylinder recordings,[10] and Frances Densmore's anthropological work.[11]
Hague founded the Jarabe Club at a settlement house in Pasadena, California, to teach Mexican traditional music and dance to young people, and she directed the students' performances.[4][12][13] In 1941, she directed the Jarabe Club dancers when they performed in the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C.[14]
Publications
- "Mexican Folk-Songs" (1912)[15]
- "Brazilian Songs" (1912)[16]
- Folk songs from Mexico and South America (1914, with Edward Kilenyi)[17]
- "Spanish Songs from Southern California" (1914)[18]
- "Eskimo Songs" (1915)[19]
- "Five Mexican Dances" (1915)[20]
- "Five Danzas from Mexico" (1915)[21]
- Spanish-American Folk Songs (1917)[22]
- Early Spanish-Californian folk-songs (1922, with Gertrude Ross)[23]
- Latin-American Music Past and Present (1934)[24][25]
- "Regional Music of Spain and Latin America" (1943)[26]
