War Dances And Fighting
Fast Cheyenne War Dance (1)
Flutes and rattles convey the will to fight: the Cheyenne were from the Central Plains, open and often barren. Out there, you had to fight for territory .... and buffalo!
This is a lighter dance, featuring a repeated three note vocal figure (from the sixth to the dominant down to the third). It is almost relaxed, folk like.
There is a two step recognisable tune, which then adds more vocals an octave higher, scattered higher vocals. There is a tonic to dominant shift in the chant. It seems to show intent! Northern Plains.
A delegation of Arikora: the guy at right looks like Brett Michaels.
Kiowa Slow War Dance:
This is quite good, musical. The drums have a syncopated beat, and at 1:04 the singers end on (unusually amongst these selections) a sequence on a fourth note. Great Plains music.
Kiowa Fast War Dance:
Another good tune, with very interesting music . The music runs over major and relative minor chords.
There seems to be more emotion in the higher voice: colorful.
The helushka was danced in the Fall, and celebrates the great deeds of the warriors and leading tribesmen. To me, it has an interesting marching feel, slow and sure. I can imagine horses and warriors moving forward. Music supervisors, take note. Is the flute really supposed to be playing a flattened dominant?
This sounds as if it is from the African desert: it is particularly nasal. Deserts are dry and have that effect on the voice over time. The Navajo, like their "comrades in Hollywood Westerns" the Apache, lived in the desert regions inland from the west coast (see below).
Pawnee Hand Game Song
This dance is rhythmically interesting, with a bongo-like accompaniment, and is also blues-like. The Shawnee were in many parts of the "Eastern Woodlands", depending on the historical time you are looking at.
More bluesy, extreme: almost gutteral. It is therefore an example of the area's "extreme vocal tension" (the Plains- see below).
No particular tribe is mentioned for this song, but it is a great tune/piece, with constant drums and rattle beats.
The most important aspects of traditional Native American music can be described as vocals and percussion .... solo and choral song to response, unison and multipart singing, and drums and rattles as accompaniment. "Lyrics" were sung in the native language or were nonsense syllables). Wikipedia says: "traditional (Indian) music usually begins with slow and steady beats that grow gradually faster and more emphatic, while various flourishes like drum and rattle tremolos, shouts and accented patterns add variety and signal changes in performance for singers and dancers". So they used to speed up.
Before going into the regions, here is the "Steal Partner" song, from the Library of Congress.
So where did the tribes live, and how did their music differ?
THE AMERICAN INDIAN GEOGRAPHIC REGIONS
Eastern Woodlands
.... the east coast in other words.
Scholars have said that the eastern (east of the Mississippi to the coast) American Indian tribes were unusual amongst Indians in that they featured antiphonal (ie: call and response) singing. Flutes and whistles were the solo instruments.The most complex included the Cherokee and Iroquois, while the Shawnee had a relatively complex style (see the Hand Dance below).
Melodies seem mainly to descend (high to low).
The Plains
This area extends from Canada down to Texas. Plains music was nasal. "Large double-sided skin drums are characteristic of the Plains tribes, and solo end-blown flutes are also common", went a report of the time. Arapaho, Cheyenne and Kiowa are typical tribes of the region, and are included in the sound clips above.
Plain's music was characterized by "extreme vocal tension, pulsation, melodic preference for perfect fourths and a range averring a tenth, [and] rhythmic complexity." The musics of the Arapaho and Cheyenne intensified these characteristics, while the northern tribes, were simpler in their music (ie: smaller melodic ranges and fewer scale tones). The Arapaho Sun Dance (above) was performed in the summer, when the various bands of the Arapaho people would come to gether.
A song that seems to be on a different subject matter to the above clips is the Kiowa mescal song (Library Of Congress):
The Great Basin
The "Great Basin" is Nevada, Utah and some of southern Oregon. This area was not highly populated, so the music featured short melodies and ranges of less than an octave, some just over a perfect fifth. Tribes included the Piute and the Ute.
An interesting comment is that "scholars have attributed the simple lullabies, song-stories, and gambling songs found all over the American continent to the music of the Great Basin, which was preserved through the relative cultural isolation and low-population." Isolation can lead to gambling: see the Piute gambling song below. Gambling is clearly not new to Nevada! It has obviously been going on for aeons. There must have been little to do in the desert except gamble.
Listen to the Piute (from Utah) Gambling Song
The Southwest
Finally reaching the west coast ....
Beneath the Great Basin and towards the west coast, there were two main groups of tribes, the Athabaskan and the Pueblo. The former included the Navajo and the Apache, who sang in Plains-style nasal tones (there are clips above). The songs were usually fast, and employed drums, rattles and sometimes the "Apache violin" ("the wood that sings"). There you are themn, I have often thought classical orchestral music was the music of the forests!
The music of the Apache and Navaho has been described as the "simplest next to the Great Basin style", featuring "strophic form, tense vocals using pulsation and falsetto, tritonic and tetratonic scales in triad formation, simple rhythms and values of limited duration (usually only two per song), arc-type melodic contours, and large melodic intervals with a predominance of major and minor thirds and perfect fourths and fifths with octave leaps not rare. If Hollywood Westerns are anything to go by, these Indians were the fighters, so perhaps not a lot of attention was able to be given to making complex music.
The Pueblo music, including the Hopi (see clips above) and Zuni tribes, was slower and much more complex. Percussion instruments were used as backing. It has been called some of the most complex on the continent, and indeed the Hopi and Zuni were the most complex of the Pueblo. The music "features increased length and number of scale tones (hexatonic and heptatonic common), variety of form, melodic contour, and percussive accompaniment, ranges between an octave and a twelfth, with rhythmic complexity equal to the Plains sub-area."
The Northwest Coast
What was the Indian Seattle sound? Well, for one thing, this was the only area of North America with native polyphony ie: multiple lines of singing. Wikipedia: "Chromatic intervals accompanying long melodies are also characteristic, and rhythms are complex and declamatory, deriving from speech."
Instrumentation was also more diverse than in the rest of North America, and included a wide variety of whistles, flutes, horns and percussion instruments. Indeed, the musicologist Bruno Nettl wrote that this area's music was "among the most complicated on the continent, especially in regard to rhythmic structure," featuring intricate rhythmic patterns distinct from but related to the vocal melody and rigid percussion". There was also "unrecorded use of incipient polyphony in the form of drones or parallel intervals in addition to antiphonal and responsorial forms. Vocals are extremely tense, producing dynamic contrast (does this sound like Nirvana here?!), ornamentation, and pulsation, and also often using multiple sudden accents in one held tone."
In a word then, "grungy": it must be in the air.
The "music of the Salish tribes [and particularly that of the Northwest coast] intensifies the significant features of Inuit music, [though] their melodic movement is often pendulum-type ("leaping in broad intervals from one limit of the range to the other")." Sounds interesting. I wonder if it is on record?
Quotations and photograph from Wikipedia.