This dissertation documents and analyzes the (re)discovery, restoration, and revival of the music of Jack Frederick Kilpatrick (1915-1967), a composer and intellectual who identified as Cherokee and who spent his career in Oklahoma, California, Washington DC, and Texas. Jack Frederick Kilpatrick was one of the first professional classical composers whose work was based on his intimate knowledge of Native American culture. His compositional output is made up of over 250 pieces, including 188 officially completed opus numbers. Jack Kilpatrick’s compositional style was influenced by his experience growing up in Stilwell, Oklahoma, and his immersion in Cherokee culture. Jack’s musical output mediates between Cherokee and Euro-American culture through songs that include both English and Cherokee text, librettos that describe Cherokee cultural practices, and compositions that translate traditional Cherokee performance practices including intonation, scales, and rhythms into the Western European tradition of song structures, orchestration, and musical notation. These pieces connect listeners to Cherokee life as told through Cherokee histories, performance traditions, language, and medicine.

When we found 31 boxes of Jack Kilpatrick’s personal manuscript collection and hand-written notes in the attic of Catlett Music Center at the University of Oklahoma in 2018, our discovery opened a window into the mediating intercultural and musical experiences of Jack and the Oklahoma Cherokee during the mid-20th century. In addition to providing the most comprehensive biography of Jack Frederick Kilpatrick available to date, my research is focused on four additional main areas: first, the archiving and collection building of the Jack Kilpatrick Collection at the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections; second, the transcription and repertoire construction of Kilpatrick’s musical works; third, my work creating critical editions and performance materials of selected Kilpatrick compositions; and finally, an ethnography of my first five years of efforts to ignite a revival of Kilpatrick’s music with Alexander Mickelthwate and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. Throughout this document, I also self-examine my role as an ethnographer and researcher attempting to apply decolonizing methodologies at the intersectional crossroads of music, language, heritage, and anthropology, while also attempting to act as a translator, caretaker, and animateur for a music that is not mine to own. The core analytic concepts explored in this dissertation are focused on identity; archive building; the relationship of language and music in discourse; the entextualization and recontextualization process revealed by the relationship between manuscript scores, performance materials, and musical performance; the role of context in shaping performance and reception; and the structure and cultural role of music revivals.