First Songs
Native American music is broad, diverse, and complex. It is only in the last hundred years or so, as recording and ethnography techniques have developed that we have any insight to the wide range of styles and meaning behind this art form. Culturally, we have been able to discern 6 to 8 different regional ways. People of the northwest fish, people of the southwest live in cliffside cities, people of the plains are nomadic, and groups from the north live in long houses, to name a few distinctions. Musically, we find an equally diverse set of traits. Hundreds of different singing forms and song structures cover multiple regions and groups. At yearly gatherings, where today, Native Americans from various clans gather to share traditions, this music is performed along side with modern country, rock, and spiritual songs. Because of the vast sea of languages, and as much of the music does not contain words, the conversation happens in English. It is difficult to grasp what this music may have sounded like prior to European influence, as much of our written knowledge comes after a long history of contact, but our early recordings have some glimpses into what this world may have looked like.
In terms of structure, the songs are too varied and immersive to describe in full. There are some key characteristics that some cultures maintain that are worth noting. The use of music for ceremony, rituals, and seasonal festivals is typical. Songs are often used in block of fours, where sets of songs are performed to represent a specific event. Some events can last hours or even days. Some tribes use high-pitch falsettos with rhythmic drumming and others use rattles and quick verses. All are captivating and speak to the rich depth of spirituality and history of these groups. While mostly monophonic, (with a few exceptions of northwestern areas where wind instruments are more developed,) each song form has a deep story to tell, and all are meaningful representations of this foundational group of American life.
There are three notable reasons to explain why the music of Native Americans did not develop into more interactions with the longer, complicated forms of the Western Art music idioms. First, oral traditions put limitations on the amount of complications that a person can remember over generational periods of time. Second, there really is a lot of intensity to their music at the finer levels that a listener may not discern at the initial hearing. Most importantly, as Bruno Netti so eloquently observes, “the idea of technical complexity has never been a criterion of musical quality to Native American peoples.” He continues, “The rather athletic view of music taken in Western culture , where star performances by individual composers and performances and their ability to do very difficult things is measured, is replaced in Native American cultures by quite different values.”
I would argue that this act of recording music creates the purpose of perfecting it. By creating a record, there instantly becomes an incentive to develop a specific memory, and the finer the detail of the recollection, the more the incentive to create a specific vision in the creators mind; non-distortable, and irreplaceable by another’s interpretation. In this act, it loses empathy at the sacrifice for specificity. This happens in the same way that we record history in literature. By its documentation, it becomes devoid of empathy and personal connection, for the benefit of its objectifiable veracity. In this current world amorphous musical taste, where the algorithms select gelatinous stylings in playlists, where composers and artists have more identity association in their clothing than in their melodies, we find solace in live performance. Hearing the music without the constrains of perfection necessary of the studio perhaps brings us closer to these Native American tenants of simple, powerful, and selfless communication.
For a culture that is largely monophonic, there certainly is a lot of harmony to be learned from them. The music that existed here first tells a powerful story of the foundations of America. Here is some footage from one of the gatherings of what that music sounds like today:
This is the Men’s Northern Traditional from the 2019 Gathering of Nations Pow Wow