author
Frederick R. (Frederick Russell) Burton
1861–1909
A Harvard-educated American composer and writer, he moved easily between fiction, musical theater, and the study of Native American song. His work includes the novel Strongheart and the 1909 book American Primitive Music, which gave special attention to Ojibway songs.
1 Audiobook
The Mission of Poubalov
by Frederick R. (Frederick Russell) Burton
About the author
Born in Michigan in 1861, Frederick Russell Burton studied at Harvard and later worked in New York as a music teacher and composer. Sources from Yale and Oberlin describe him as a scholar-composer, and surviving catalogs and editions show a career that ranged across concert music, songs, and literary work.
Burton wrote both fiction and music. His published books include Her Wedding Interlude (1902) and Strongheart (1908), while his musical works include Hiawatha and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He is especially remembered for American Primitive Music (1909), a study that focused in part on songs of the Ojibways.
He died in 1909. Although he is not widely known today, his work offers an interesting glimpse of an early twentieth-century American artist whose interests stretched from popular storytelling to ambitious musical and ethnographic subjects.