Native American Music

Technology tends to destroy traditional music practices." *Make it Indigenous*: The power of Native American and Inuit Music on TikTok. Ethnomusicology and Western musical pedagogy have long grappled with the issue of Native American music in the classroom, as lessons can often become decontextualised by the use of recordings, videos, and pictures that lack nuanced understanding (Sarrazin 1995, 33). More broadly, representations of Native Americans in popular culture-for example, movies and television-have blurred the lines between specific tribal cultures and have caused the blending of previously unrelated practices into what Howard (1983) described as Pan-Indianism. In 2020, we have seen an astronomical rise in the use of the short-form video and music platform TikTok, including the growing popularity of Native or Indigenous TikTok.

Entrato in contatto con la musica degli Indiani nel corso della tournée americana del 1910, tra l'anno successivo e il 1916 Ferruccio Busoni lavora a una serie di composizioni su quelle melodie: lo schizzo preparatorio del Canto di mietitura (senza numero d'opera), la Fantasia indiana op. 44, i due volumi del Diario indiano op. 47. Esse gli offrono lo spunto e il banco di prova per elaborare una sintesi linguistica e un rinnovamento della forma musicale originali e coerenti.
Ripercorrendo gli eventi e l'evoluzione delle idee che accompagnano la genesi di tali pezzi – attingendo in particolar modo alle testimonianze contenute nell'epistolario – l'intervento intende ricostruire le tappe del rinnovamento del linguaggio musicale attuato da Busoni e illustrarne i principî estetici e tecnici, per presentare poi una ricognizione delle opere che ne costituiscono gli esiti concreti.

Early comparative musicology habitually ignored, even extinguished, timbre in its single-minded focus on pitch. This chapter traces the broader social, cultural, and political consequences of this framework. It surveys how, at the turn of the twentieth century, John Comfort Fillmore and Benjamin Ives Gilman followed the lead of Alice Fletcher and Alexander Ellis in deploying a broad range of technologies—phonograph, Helmholtz resonator, keyboard, and musical notation—to develop frameworks for analyzing essential similarities and differences between Native American and Western musics. It argues that such scholarship, while ostensibly aimed at salvaging Native American music, also served American efforts to reform and silence indigenous voices. The postscript examines the resonances between their theories and modern frameworks of parametric analysis that construe pitch and timbre as autonomous, and proposes that there may be unrecognized perils in overly articulating the boundaries between pitch and timbre to focus analytical attention exclusively on the measurable quantities of musical sound.

In 1927, George Herzog (1901-1983), an early ethnomusicologist, conducted a field trip to some of the tribes located along the Colorado River and also within Southern California. Based on the fieldnotes and the musical transcriptions that he made of Birdsongs, one of the genres of music that local singers perform today, I will be examining one of his Birdsong transcriptions. In the process, I will be asking and attempting to answer questions centered around why Herzog seemed to limit his musical explorations and did not, for instance, embrace both music and dance in his consideration of Birdsongs?  I hope to show that part of the answer lies in the particular types of training that Herzog received as he studied piano, counterpoint, some of the folk music of Europe, and also music from non-European cultures. This training, I will be arguing, had not trained him to embrace both music and dance, when making musical transcriptions of Birdsongs, for instance. At the same time, I will be arguing that such an approach is necessary because of the close relationship between music and dance that is so much a part of Birdsongs.

This dance drum is the result of a collaboration between David Boxley and his son David Robert Boxley, renowned Tsimshian sculptors actively engaged in the revival, preservation and recognition of the cul- ture and arts of the peoples of the Northwest Coast of the United States. The territory of these peoples had indeed been considerably reduced in the 19th century with the arrival of the settlers, and the prac- tice of their traditional way of life and native language had been prohibited. This drum is an example of the revival of Tsimshian culture, fostered by new generations proud of their roots. It is made from local materials traditionally used by the Tsimshian, such as red and yellow cedar and deerskin, also tanned and smoked using traditional techniques. The representation painted on the membrane refers to a story taken from Tsimshian mythology. It is the story of how Raven stole the Sun to offer it to Mankind, as the darkness in which the latter lived seemed to him to make its existence (and his own at the same time) particularly hard and unacceptable.

Ce tambour de danse est le résultat d’une collaboration entre David Boxley et son fils David Robert Boxley, artistes sculpteurs tsimshians renommés se consacrant activement à la renaissance, la préser- vation et la reconnaissance de la culture et des arts des peuples de la Côte Nord-Ouest des Etats-Unis. Le territoire de ces peuples s’était en effet vu considérablement réduit au 19ème siècle avec l’arrivée des colons, et la pratique de leur mode de vie traditionnel et de leur langue natale avait été interdite. Ce tambour est un exemple du revival de la culture tsimshian, porté par des nouvelles générations fières de leurs racines. Il a été réalisé dans des matériaux locaux utilisés traditionnellement par les Tsimshians comme le cèdre rouge, le cèdre jaune et la peau de cerf, tannée et fumée elle aussi selon des tech- niques traditionnelles. La représentation peinte sur la membrane fait référence à une histoire extraite de la mythologie tsimshian. Elle raconte comment Corbeau à dérobé le Soleil pour l’offrir aux Hommes, tant l’obscurité dans laquelle ces derniers vivaient lui semblait rendre leur existence (et la sienne par la même occasion) particulièrement pénible et inacceptable.

This article identifies Jim Pepper's 1971 jazz hit ''Witchi Tai To'' as a contact zone in which cultures (Native and non-Native) collide. In the song, Native powwow culture and Native identities are reclaimed and reinterpreted within a jazz idiom. While Native supratribal identities are celebrated within this popular culture artefact, the song retains an opacity that resists absorption and cooptation by non-Natives. ''Witchi Tai To'' is a song of Native religious reorientation within a context of modernity, and its legacy reverberates in at least two genres of contemporary Native popular music: Native American Church songs and Native American electronic dance music.

This dissertation studies traditional and popular music of the Wixárika (a.k.a. Huichol) people of western Mexico, focusing especially on the phenomenon of Wixárika musicians who intentionally represent themselves as indigenous “Huichol” people yet perform popular Mexican music primarily for non-indigenous audiences. This phenomenon markets ethnic identity within regional and transnational music industries, following in the footsteps of Wixárika people who have successfully inserted their arts and crafts into global markets. The process of becoming indigenous cosmopolitan capitalists is partly the result of direct assimilatory projects directed by early Mexican anthropologists and the indirect outcome of over a century of Huichol identity construction for consumption, aided greatly by foreign ethnographers and other outsiders. On one hand, the commodification of identity through handicrafts, art, and music generates income for the Wixárika people, and the resultant visibility—sometimes international in scale—may strengthen them politically as Indigenous people. Conversely, the process simultaneously supplants some of the very elements they consider central to Wixárika culture. Musicians often leave their homelands to pursue their craft, making it difficult or impossible to participate in community affairs and ceremonies, and leaving their children bereft of Wixárika language and “customs.” Such people who represent the “customs” but do not practice them are sometimes disparaged as “half disqualified” or “Huichol de pirata” (pirated Huichol), illuminating identity’s commodity form. As the first English-language study of Wixárika music, this dissertation examines the paradox of identity commodification, developing a tripartite model of identity that shows the vital (albeit sometimes inadvertent) role of ethnography in defining the essence of the commodity form of Huichol identity.