American Indian musics, past and present

Levine, Victoria Lindsay

doi:10.1017/chol9780521454292.002

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…Comparative musicology has established the existence of cultures where music traits remained essentially unchanged over extremely long periods of time, wide geographical areas, and different environments (ibid). For example, the comparison of recordings of Choctaw Indian music between 1909-1985 reveals that their social dance songs changed very little in their style, shape, and content-despite dramatic changes in the musical performance contexts (Levine, 1998). Similar findings are revealed by comparative analysis of Siberian field studies between the 1890's and modern day (Alekseyev & Nikolayeva 1981).…”

Section: Musical Development Generally Follows Verbal Developmentmentioning

confidence: 74%

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Nikolsky¹

2022

Preprint

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This book draws a new perspective on music as a special form of cognition that provides growing children with the means to mediate their emotional state and attitude to suit their physical and social environment. My conclusions are based on new evidence coming from: 1) musicological analysis of the original and spontaneous vocalizations by children, selected to represent the milestones in the development of music cognition; 2) comprehensive research on "ear development" throughout early childhood, systematically conducted in the USSR/Russia on a large pool of subjects during the 1920-1980s; 3) data on music perception by people habituated to non-Western forms of music, including timbre-oriented music traditions of northeast Eurasia; and 4) research coming from Vygotskian school on sociogenesis and objectivization of musical sound in early childhood (published in Russian only). The principal objective of this book is to arm researchers and students with tools to analyze, interpret, and evaluate the patterns of tonal organization in children musicking - and to inter-relate these patterns to cross-cultural patterns of early verbal, social, and emotional development. Children’s musical cognition needs a thorough revision because of the old erroneous belief, still widespread amongst developmental psychologists, that the principles of Western tonality constitute a universal modus operandi, intuitively sought by children from birth. According to this view, early children’s musicking constitutes a “defective” implementation of adult’s music due to children’s deficiencies in vocal control and its coordination with hearing. In reality, early childhood musicking constitutes a peculiar type of music, different from adult’s music – very much like children’s early speech that follows its own principles, different from adult’s speech. The principles of children’s musicking ought to be inferred from the structural organization of their non-imitative attempts to make music - bottom-to-top (as opposed to the current "a priori" top-to-bottom method of describing children's music in terms of Western tonality). Some other important issues covered in this book are the goals of musical development in childhood, the issues of musical attrition, bimusicality, and normalcy of musical abilities, the modularity of musical hearing, and the relation between musical and real-life emotions.

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Section: Musical Development Generally Follows Verbal Developmentmentioning

confidence: 74%

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Nikolsky¹

2022

Preprint

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“…The study presented here has adopted Densmore's own content descriptors, thus allowing to compare results of the computational analysis with Densmore's observations. Digital encoding of the Densmore collection [56] offers opportunities to complement Densmore's features by computational feature extraction [57] and sequential pattern mining [35], both to systematically analyse aspects occasionally mentioned in Densmore's narrative analyses but not captured in her features (e.g., linking melodic and duration features) and to add further music content descriptors (e.g., aspects of melodic contour or melodic motifs [20,58]). Computational features applied to symbolically encoded music data focus on structural features and generally do not reflect aspects of performance or context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Number Percent Melodic 3,4,5,8,9,12,13,14,15,16,18,19,22,23,24,25,28,31,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,42,43,44,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,58,59,60,61,62,64,65,66,67,72,73,76,78,80,81,83,84,85,…”

Section: Structure Serial Number Of Songsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

Neubarth

Conklin

2019

Applied Sciences

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This paper presents a method for outlier detection in structured music corpora. Given a music collection organised into groups of songs, the method discovers contrast patterns which are significantly infrequent in a group. Discovered patterns identify and describe outlier songs exhibiting unusual properties in the context of their group. Applied to the collection of Native American music collated by Frances Densmore (1867–1957) during fieldwork among several North American tribes, and employing Densmore’s music content descriptors, the proposed method successfully discovers a concise set of patterns and outliers, many of which correspond closely to observations about tribal repertoires and songs presented by Densmore.

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“…269 Though not formally an "Indianist," John Philip Sousa, famous for his marching band music, published a collection in which he applied harmonies to Native American melodies. 270 The musical influence was reciprocal. The performance patterns of Native Americans were also changed.…”

Section: Interlude Three: Americanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Race in the American West

Schneider¹

2000

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This thesis explores the complexities of race relations in the nineteenth century American West. The groups considered here are African Americans, Anglo Americans, Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. In recent decades historians of the West have begun to tell the narratives of racial minorities. This study adopts the aims of these scholars through a new lens-music. Ultimately, this thesis argues that historians can use music, both individual songs and broader conceptions about music, to understand the complex and contradictory race relations of the nineteenth century west. Proceeding thematically, the first chapter explores the ways Anglo Americans used music to exert their dominance and defend their superiority over minorities. The second chapter examines the ways racial minorities used music to counter Anglo American dominance and exercise their own agency. The final chapter considers the ways in which music fostered peaceful and cooperative relationships between races. Following each chapter is a short interlude which discusses the musical innovations that occurred when the groups encountered the musical heritage of one another. This study demonstrates that music is an underutilized resource for historical analysis. It helps make comprehensible the complicated relations between races. By demonstrating the relevance of music to the history of race relations, this thesis also suggests that music as a historical subject is ripe for further analysis.

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American Indian musics, past and present

Cited by 6 publications

References 64 publications

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

Music and Race in the American West

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