Eleanor Hague (October 7, 1875 – December 25, 1954) was an American folklorist and musicologist, who specialized in the traditional music of Latin America.
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 Jose 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]
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]
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]
Personal life and legacy
Hague died in 1954, at the age of 79, in
Flintridge, California. She left her papers to the
Southwest Museum, including the Jose María García manuscript.[27][28] In 1996, the Children of the Hague Manuscript, an ensemble of young musicians in
Atascadero, California, performed music based on the Jose María García notes at several concerts.[29]
^Russell, C. H. (2019). "The Eleanor Hague manuscript: A sampler of musical life in eighteenth-century Mexico", Inter-American Music Review 14(2), 39 – 62.
Evelyn Louise McCarty, "A Performance Edition of Selected Dances from the Eleanor Hague Manuscript of Music from Colonial Mexico" (Northwestern University, D.M.A. dissertation, 1981).