Imagining Native America in Music
Imagining Native America in Music
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Overview
Michael Pisani demonstrates how European colonists and their descendants were fascinated by the idea of race and ethnicity in music, and he examines how music contributed to the complex process of cultural mediation. Pisani reveals how certain themes and metaphors changed over the centuries and shows how much of this “Indian music,” which was and continues to be largely imagined, alternately idealized and vilified the peoples of native America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300130737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Michael V. Pisani is associate professor of music at Vassar College.
Read an Excerpt
Imagining Native America in Music
By MICHAEL V. PISANI
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2005 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10893-4
Chapter One
Noble Savagery in European Court Entertainments, 1550-1760
When Columbus first encountered the welcoming Tainos of the West Indies in the 1490s, he called them Indios, thinking he had met the Indian peoples of the Far East. "Indian" became and remained a term by which people in the Western Hemisphere identified the native peoples of the Americas. It has also remained, to some extent, the term by which many of American Indian descent have chosen to identify themselves. "Native American," a liberal derivation that originated in the 1970s and that would seem to be a modern political correction of the original "Indian" misnomer, is in fact a reversion to the colonial frame of reference. Between 1507, when the word "America" first appeared on a globe of the world in Saint-Dié, France, and the colonists' declaration of independence in 1776, "Americans" from the European perspective meant specifically the native peoples of the continents. The tension that arose between Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British colonial interests-and the "savages" who resisted these invasions-stimulated much of Europe's endless fascination with the New World.
When the final lavish entrée of the balletFlore unfolded before Louis XIV at the Grand Salon of the Tuileries in 1669, it was intended to reflect the major racial groups of the world. Each section represented one of the "four corners" of the earth: the Europeans, the Africans, the "Asiatics," and the Americans. The music, still surviving in manuscript, was by court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. From this and from other balletic entrées for "Americans"-"Zelmatide, le Prince du Pérou" in Ballet d'Alcidiane (Lully, 1658), Louis's equestrian carrousel of 1662, Le temple de la paix (also Lully, 1686), and the ballet des nations that concluded Isse (Destouches, 1697)-it is evident that French court composers knew nothing of any actual Native American music (or at least did not attempt to imitate the style). This does not mean, however, that indigenous cultures of America were entirely unfamiliar to the French royal court, for the design of the costumes and the peculiarities of movement in each of the entrées were crafted by Louis's dancing masters, based on their study of the peoples of each region. Yet in 1669, while histories of the Americas were rich in detail about the customs and behavior of "the Americans"-or les sauvages américains, as the French sometimes called them-little was commonly known about the music. It is essential to understand how noble savagery developed in the musical language of France from Louis XIV's time to the years before the Revolution as a foundation for later representations of native America. France's role was significant, but not singular. England, as the principal agent in the colonization of North America in the seventeenth century (alongside Spain), followed a similar path and established much of the culture in North America until the 1840s. It was largely at that point that French and other continental influences broke through the hold that English music had on the cultural imagination of the new republic. These issues, then, particularly the literal struggle between France and England for North America (or its cultural equivalent), reveal tensions in the way culture was first imposed upon, and then took root in, the North American continent.
European Observers in America
Putting aside the content of Lully's ballets for Louis XIV for a moment, we might ask what educated Europeans in the 1660s would have known about music and the practice of music among the indigenous peoples of North America. The simple answer is probably very little, as far as most Europeans were concerned. But if we phrase the question another way-what would an educated person living in Europe in the 1660s have been able to learn about the music of les sauvages américains ?-then the answer leads us to the roots of musical exoticism.
According to Ramón Pane, a Catalonian cleric writing in 1496, the Tainos of Hispaniola sang religious chants in a call-and-response pattern (arieto), and these island Indians danced to the accompaniment of a two-keyed slit drum called the mayohayau. Placed directly on the ground, Pane informs us, the drum could be heard as far away as "a league and a half." From the Caribbean to the far westerly reaches of New Spain, some form of the hollowed-out log drum was used to accompany singing or dancing, as the early European explorers observed. Shortly after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the texts of over one hundred Nahuatl songs were written down, most of them to be sung to the accompaniment of the teponaztli-again a notched log drum. In Aztec culture the drum was normally slit to have two keys-like the mayohayau-but some drums resembled the xylophone and had a range of up to five. While many Spaniards recorded their observations of Aztec music making, there were some, such as Juan de Zumárraga, first archbishop of Mexico, who authorized the destruction of ancient books and pictographic documents. Such plundering left later Spanish chroniclers with a limited basis for an understanding of Aztec culture, including music and worship.
The Spanish explorers also noted a wide variety of other instruments as they made their way across the North American continent. In the 1530s Cabeza de Vaca (writing from an area that is now western Texas) remarked on the importance of gourd rattles, not just for keeping rhythm but also for the virtue that many Indians of the region believed resided in them. In the Sacramento Mountains of what is now California, Andrés de Carrança thought it important to mention copper jingle bells, again noting the spiritual value that they held for the local tribes. Flutes of all sizes were described by many of the Spaniards. Antonio de Mendoza wrote of the importance of flute playing among the Zunis. The highest pitched flutes-what today resemble piccolos or fifes-Mendoza called flageolets, and in 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado reported a warm and sonorous welcome by the Pecos with flageolets and atambores ("drums"). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European civilization, drums as well as pipes had largely military associations, and as such they were considered the responsibility of the royal stable (écurie), not the church or court. But in the Americas, drumming was a means of providing continuity for a large portion of musical life-worship and inauguration ceremonies, celebrations, and seasonal holidays among them.
On this same expedition, Pedro de Castañeda noted a remarkable incident among women who sang while grinding corn. "One crushes the maize, the next grinds it, and the third grinds it finer," Coronado's chronicler wrote. "While they are grinding, a man sits at the door playing a flageolet, and the women move their stones, keeping time with the music, and all three sing together. They grind a large amount at one time." Songs, even those unaccompanied by rhythm instruments such as drums or rattles, were not just for work or worship, but were employed in times of conflict. Hernando de Soto's team, settling uncomfortably among the Natchez in roughly what is now Arkansas, noted that the tribe used songs to taunt the Spaniards, hoping to drive them away. The Natchez, the central group of mound builders whose villages bordered the Mississippi River, were one of the richest cultures in North America and still relatively intact as a civilization at the time of the Spanish expeditions. Partly dispersed from the ancient city of Cahokia (and perhaps related culturally to their Toltec neighbors to the south), they were also sun worshipers. According to chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, when they greeted the rising sun, they did so with a great clamor and clatter of voices, trumpets, drums, fifes, shells, and other loud instruments. At the same time, they could be fierce when singing to no other accompaniment than the sound of the waves of their canoes and of their oars hitting the water. De la Vega describes how only a portion of De Soto's men escaped, the Natchez angrily pursuing them down the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico while singing canoe-rowing songs to maintain their remarkable speed.
These are some of the important examples of Indian music making that the Spanish described in their travel diaries during the first fifty years of European exploration in the Americas. There are similar English accounts from different regions. Shortly after the British landed on the East Coast and established the colony of Virginia, William Strachey wrote about dancing and singing (1609), noting that the Algonquian word for "dance" and "song" was the same: cantecante. He mentioned rattles of various sizes, also small gourds or pumpkin shells (with different pitches or ranges) and pipes or "recorders" made from cane. The latter were gentle and were played "without great strayning of the breath." He also described their singing and dancing in some detail, adding that rattles sounded in different pitches and mingled with their voices, "sometymes 20 or 30 togither." He called their love songs tuneful and their "angry songs" full of taunting strophes, meant to drive away the Tassantasses, as they called the invading English. Though Strachey's descriptions are vivid, the musical sounds from the civilization of Pocahontas and Powhatan are perhaps forever mute.
Neither the Spanish nor the English explorers had the skill (and perhaps not even the desire) to notate any of the American music they heard. The French were the first to do so, beginning with the Calvinist pastor Jean de Léry (the "patriarch of transcribers," according to Roger Savage). Accompanying Admiral Villegaignon on his expedition to Brazil in 1557, Léry heard singing Tupinambá near modern-day Rio de Janeiro. Although he admitted that he could not fully capture the "ravishing" sound of some 500 voices, Léry did notate the text and music of the song's simple refrain and went on to transcribe several other songs as well. He published five of these in 1585. Seven years later, Théodore DeBry's published account of travel in Brazil included a more elaborate report on the music of the nomadic Tupinambá. DeBry was an engraver by trade, but his travel writings are protoethnomusicological in that he not only transcribed melodies but also based his analysis on recognizable patterns, among these the fixed range of a fifth and the internal repetition of short melodic phrases. From the French perspective, the Brazilian "Tupí" were an extraordinarily graceful and musical people, and it was they who received the first invitation to dance before the French court in 1613. The French in general were much more interested in the musical culture of "the Americans" than either the Portuguese or the Spanish. On an expedition to Acadia (modern-day Nova Scotia), Marc Lescarbot observed and notated some Micmac songs, ones he allegedly obtained from Membertou, a medicine man. Gabriel Sagard, traveling in 1632 in the Georgian Bay area, wrote about the Wyandot Hurons. He did not think much of Huron singing and generally found it disagreeable. On one occasion, however, he overheard the singing of a group of sauvages preparing for a feast. They sat around a stewing pot, singing sweetly rather than forcefully. First one led off, then all sang together, eventually singing the same music in alternation. Sagard found himself "carried away with admiration" by the singing. He also took many notes on Huron dancing, observing a variety of round dances. He was especially pleased to watch the dancing of young Huron women, whom he likened to nymphs, and rhapsodized over their lightness of foot.
Sagard, a Recollet lay brother, was a missionary of extraordinary perception and courage. Many of his observations have been corroborated and hold up today. Not all observers focused on sweet singing and delicate female dancing, however. An anonymous Jesuit writing from Quebec (published in 1659) noted the distinctiveness of the Amerindian body, and he drew on concepts like vigorous and violent to describe the physical motions of the dancers. The author noted how the Hurons repeatedly struck the ground with their feet "as if determined to make it tremble." In 1655 Jesuit missionary Claude Dablon wrote similarly of dancing among the Iroquois. One of the songs sustained a "rhythmic tattoo sounded by tribesmen beating their feet, hands, and pipes against the mats."
In 1636 the Franciscan and music theorist Marin Mersenne quoted a "Chanson Canadoise" in his Harmonie universelle, saying that it had been sent to King Louis XIII by one of his "captains" in New France. Mersenne also noted that reports from Canada indicated that the sauvages américains were beginning to sing songs they had learned not only from other Indians but also from the French traders settled among them. Similarly, the Jesuit missionaries Dablon and Chaumonot among the Iroquois noted in 1655 that the Indians were creating songs in their own language that were clearly European in style. The Iroquois tribesmen greeted them at Onondaga with "six airs, or chants, which savored nothing of the savage." To seventeenth-century European ears, each air expressed "the divers passions they wished to portray." Less than a hundred years after the French first began to send missionaries to North and South America, a process of acculturation was already under way. Not only European observation but also European participation in this process would problematize the very nature of mapping indigenous Indian cultures. When Dablon notated an Illinois melody in Winnebago County in 1670, he admitted that he could no longer be sure to what extent the tune was truly native to the Americans in question.
An Exchange of Cultures?
Even if musicians in seventeenth-century Europe had not known any of the writings that contained descriptions of American Indian music (and these expensive books were not widely available), they certainly would not have missed the numerous reports of New World visitors to the royal courts of Europe. In 1500, only a few years after the Portuguese began their exploration of South America, Pêro Vaz de Caminha sent several Tupinambá to the king at Lisbon. The distinctive features most often written about the Brazilians were the feathers that adorned their headpieces and cinctures, their bows and arrows, their strong bodies, and of course the amount of exposed bare flesh. The strength and beauty of the Amerindian male body quickly became a source of fascination and drew hundreds of onlookers wherever these New World visitors appeared. In 1527 Hernán Cortés similarly sent a group of Aztec males to Charles V. The king was amazed at the physical strength they displayed in their synchronized dancing. Encouraged by this success, Cortés the following year brought more Aztecs to Europe, where their reputation as skilled jugglers had preceded them. They never failed to dazzle their courtly audiences, and Christoph Weiditz's 1528 sketch of a young Aztec male spinning a log in the air with his feet depicts one of the first American performers in Europe. But Cortés brought these people to Europe for other reasons: the Aztecs served to convince skeptical Europeans of his discoveries; their subjugation demonstrated his authority over the Mexican people; and with their presence he hoped to allay the church's fears that he was a ruthless murderer.
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