Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music (Book Review) (original) (raw)

Discovering Metis and Inuit Dance Music ' Saturday , October 31

2002

s from the 1998 Conference Friday evening, October 30 Richard Burleson: "The Pen and the Voice: Approaches to Aboriginal Music in the Academic Setting" These styles of music have been embraced by Newfoundlanders everywhere and can be found throughout the island in bars, folk festivals, and the mass media. For many, there is little difference between the traditional and the contemporary, for they share many elements, especially in textural content. Newfoundlanders have embraced certain aspects of their music and have created new ones in an attempt to maintain their unique identity, despite the ever increasing presence of music from outside. In this paper I will attempt to better define what Newfoundland music is, demonstrating its different perceptions by various groups of people. I will be looking at musical and textural changes, such as the retention of traditional instruments in combination with non-traditional ones, and the mixing of older texts and songs with newer one...

Transmission of Song-Making in Interior Athabascan Tradition, Alaska

Traditional Musics in the Modern World: Transmission, Evolution, and Challenges, 2018

Vocal music remains a central part of the cultural life of native tradition in the interior of Alaska even as language shift from Athabascan languages to English has accelerated in the last 30 years. The elders are still engaged in musical composition and documentation, but their number is quickly diminishing. Many elders have shown a concern for the continuation of song-making which is essential above all in memorial ceremonies. Young people have also developed the ambition to learn and to carry on this practice. This chapter focuses on the ongoing processes in the middle to lower Tanana River area and the situation of language knowledge and songmaking there. Song and language are closely related and how the two interact in the learning and practicing situations will be explored. It will also consider the interplay among elders, younger learners, Athabascan language teachers, teachers of music in school, archivists and researchers in processes of transmission.

Music and Northern Forest Cultures

European Journal of Musicology

This article argues that it is critical to recognize the importance of northern forests in Finno-Ugric musical contexts (Finnish and Karelian) by focusing on the question of cultural survival, which is connected with thinking about global challenges, including climate change and environmental pressure. The discussion highlights cultural survival by outlining the significance of the forest, the politics of language transmission with reference to the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic), Sibelius’s nature-based aesthetic (especially in Tapiola, 1926), and the evocation of the forest in contemporary folk and popular music. Overall, the main aims are to consider the resilience of northern forest cultures in the nexus of music, language, and ecology, and to emphasize that resilience cannot be taken for granted under environmental pressure.

Answering Herzog (1935): An Historical Model for North American Indian Music

Flower World: Music Archeology of the Americas, 2014

George Herzog’s essay “Special Song Types in North American Indian Music” (1935) posed a problem that classic comparative musicology never solved. Published in an era when Herzog and others were struggling to classify musical areas analogous to culture areas in anthropology, Herzog (1935) described several genres that blurred the boundaries between tribal and regional repertories, either because they had spread through historical interactions or because they were survivals of earlier practices that were once widespread but were later superseded by newer styles. Rather than being uniform, actual repertories were shown to include a multiplicity of styles or “strains” reflecting various historical phases or influences. Bruno Nettl addressed this problem in an historical study of Shawnee Indian music (1953), but his analysis was limited by focusing mainly on musical style characteristics. In the present paper I propose an approach in which musical “systems” are defined not only by musical style but also by “non-musical” elements such as function and symbolic content. The concept is borrowed from Alfred Kroeber (1948), who distinguished systemic patterns in culture from whole culture patterns like language. Studies based on this model could analyze the historical “layers” in a local repertory, trace the distribution of particular musical systems, or even consider the major divisions or watersheds in a general outline of Native American music history. This paper focuses on indigenous cultures north of the border with Mexico but has relevance for comparative and historical research in any area of world music.

The sound of contact: Historic Inuit music-making in northern Labrador

The ethnohistoric literature suggests that musical instruments figured in diverse ways in early Inuit-European contacts, but to date there has been little archaeological attention to Inuit music. The present paper reviews indigenous musical practices in the North American Arctic, and the changes that contact precipitated, with particular attention to Labrador, where the promotion of European performance genres was a key component of Moravian missionaries' conversion efforts. The unusual case of the jaw harp or trump, which is rarely mentioned in the documentary record but appears widely on historic Inuit sites in Labrador, is then explored. Jaw harp performance parallels traditional throat singing (katajjaq) in interesting ways, and hints at the alternative musical practices that were enjoyed in the intimate recesses of Inuit house life.