Carlos Troyer

Carlos Troyer (Charles Troyer in his early years) was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1837 and died in Berkeley in 1920. Although he is regarded as an American composer, his professional career unfolded in San Francisco, the city where he settled and where he was a musician of local character, today remembered above all for his arrangements of Native American melodies.

He appears without interruption in San Francisco city directories between 1871 and 1917, under titles that varied from "musician" to "music teacher" and, later, "pianist and composer". According to his biography of 1913, he had met Jenny Lind, frequently played for Liszt and travelled through South America with an opera company; these claims, however, derive from his own account and should be treated with caution. He changed his first name from Charles to Carlos around 1885.

Inspired by the "Zuñi melodies" published by B. I. Gilman in 1891, he issued his first arrangement based on indigenous material, Two Zuñi Songs, in 1893. He then published, with Wa-Wan Press and Theodore Presser, a series of heavily romanticised arrangements intended for free performance, such as Midnight Visit to the Sacred Shrines.

His legacy is today associated more with the vogue for "Indian" music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than with any lasting contribution, although his scores reflect the period's interest in the folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America.