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Natalie Curtis, later Natalie Curtis Burlin (26 April 1875 – 23 October 1921) was an American ethnomusicologist. Curtis, along with Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore, was one of a small group of women doing important ethnological studies in North America at the beginning of the 20th century. She is remembered for her transcriptions and publication of traditional music of Native American tribes as well as for having published a four-volume collection of African-American music. Her career was cut short by her accidental death in 1921.
She came to be fascinated by Native American music, and began to devote herself to its study, which she furthered during a trip to Arizona with her older brother George.
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 modern and abstract expressionist artist Paul Burlin. They moved to France in 1921 to escape what Burlin's biographer described as "the bitter reaction against modern art in the years immediately following the First World War."
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.Grainger, Percy. "Mrs. Burlin's Study of Negro Folk-Music", New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1918. 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 bell pattern in ethnomusicology, and triple-pulse son clave in Afro-Latin music (1920: 98). The book features musical contributions from C. Kamba Simango, a speaker of the Ndau language, and Madikane Čele, a speaker of the Zulu language.
She died in a traffic accident in Paris, France, on 23 October 1921.
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.For example: Unsigned review of Negro Folk Songs, book I in The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 3, number 3, July 1918. pp. 330-331.
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