Charles Wakefield Cadman

Charles Wakefield Cadman ( born December 24, 1881 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, † 30 December 1946 in Los Angeles ) was an American composer.

Cadman began piano lessons at age 13 and soon composed simple pieces. He studied music in Pittsburgh and in 1908 music critic of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. A year earlier he had read Alice Fletcher's treatise on the songs and stories of the Indians, who drew his composition into new paths. On Fletcher's recommendation, he traveled to the Omaha Indians in Nebraska, whose tunes he recorded and transcribed. Cadman learned the instruments of the Indians and idealized their music then by including it in the harmonious musical language of the 19th century.

His first resounding success as a composer presented in 1909 with his songs From the Land of the Sky blue water and At a dawning. His opera Shanewis based on authentic Indian melodies. It was performed in 1918 at the Metropolitan Opera and was the first opera, which was given there in two consecutive game plans.

Riding on its success wave traveled Cadman in the 1920s, North America and Europe, where he gave lectures on the Indian music. At the same time he wrote film music.

In the following decade dried up the American public's interest in the Indian music and thus to Cadman. Once prosperous and ever asked yourself Cadman could not prevail beyond California to the public in his last decade of life. He died in 1946 as impoverished and forgotten artists.