Native American Music

[8_octaves]

Hi all,

because I like this one very much (Indian Diary, by Busoni, played by Petri):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUUeOPUlcII

and because I recently went through the "Collection"- collection of IMSLP, by glance (1321 items in that section), I made up a short selected list of collections of different areas (e.g. Celtic / Scottish / Irish music, too, but also others), which are of interest to me and saved their Imslp-title-names on my computer. (But I won't bother you, and so I only will post my short "list of interest" here -in another thread then- if asked to do so.) .-

But what I found very interesting, is the following one:

https://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/1/1a/IMSLP229174-SIBLEY1802.21429.377c-39087011972926Pueblo.pdf

What do you think about ancient native American music? Do you like it? Or would it seem / sound too strange to you?

___

Here are some "fitting" background-info-snippets:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuni_Pueblo,_New_Mexico

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_music

___

Cordially, 8_oct!  

[jimfaston]

Perhaps you would like music from some of the American Indianist composers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianist_movement

[8_octaves]

Perhaps you would like music from some of the American Indianist composers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianist_movement

Hi Jim,

thank you for the quick reply!! I must confess I NEVER had heard of the expression "Indianist composers" or the "Indianist movement" before, though some names from the article I might remember to have heard somewhen!

It's very interesting, I'll read thoroughly through it and I'll check'em out!

Tyvm, again, from: 8_oct!

PS.: But pls feel free, @all, to add your opinions here, too!  

PS2: @all: please note, that Natalie Curtis, who's the author of the collection linked above, was Busoni's student, and in fact it was she who brought to Busoni the melodies of the Indians, which he then used in his "Indian Fantasy" and in the "Indian Diary". This is said in the "Harenberg Klaviermusikführer", which I have. I just re-read it 2 minutes ago! 

[cuberdrift]

Hmm...interesting.

As a matter of fact, are there actually ANY "Native American" classical pianists/piano composers? 

[8_octaves]

Hmm...interesting.

As a matter of fact, are there actually ANY "Native American" classical pianists/piano composers? 

Hi cuberdrift,

very difficult question, didn't find one, but maybe others could help?

There were some native American Indian Ballerinas, as stated on this old site:

https://www.badeagle.com/cgi-bin/ib3/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=Print;f=25;t=12063

(Maria Tallchief e.g. died in 2013) , but..American Indian native pianists and composers??    - ...

Cordially, 8_oct!

[j_menz]

There are a few composers listed on Wikipedia.

Only one of them, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, appears to be a pianist.

[8_octaves]

There are a few composers listed on Wikipedia.

Only one of them, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, appears to be a pianist.

Hi j_menz,

interesting find, though not both of his parents were of native American decent, only his father, who was Chicksaw.

But it's helpful, as well, since his Chickasaw father, Charles Tate, too, was a concert pianist,   which is stated here in the WP-article, and in a link from it:

With both parents involved in music, theatre and dance, he grew up immersed in classical music. His Chickasaw father, Charles Tate, is a classically trained pianist and baritone, who played at home as well as in professional performance.

and from https://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/native-composer-jerod-impichchaachaaha-tate/

The Native American part comes from being taken to pow-wows and other Native American gatherings by his Chickasaw father. But his father is also a concert pianist, and hearing his father play the classical literature while growing up also explains Tate’s affinity for the machinations of the standard repertoire:

__

From the linked site we can get another native American Indian composer:

Dr. Louis Ballard.

https://omhof.com/inductee/dr-louis-ballard/

Dr. Louis Ballard is a composer of Cherokee and Quapaw descent whose works are performed regularly by major symphony orchestras, choral societies, chamber music ensembles and ballet companies.

But even in the line of his ancestors we find Europeans:

His family forebears include a Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a Medicine Chief of the The Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma with Scottish, French and English antecedents.

___

It's something we'll have to accept as "normal", because European influences aren't unusual, I think. That's not only the case speaking of "Native" American Indians, but also in people of African-American-Indian origins / roots, like, e.g., Maud Cuney Hare, who is very very interesting to me, since she collected, e.g., six creole folk-songs, https://imslp.org/wiki/Six_Creole_Folk-Songs_%28Hare,_Maud_Cuney%29 , which are very important to me, since some of them would resemble the roots of some of Gottschalk's works (e.g. La Savane).
___

But as native INDIAN AMERICAN pianists and composers are considered here: Even if we found 1 or two, there don't seem to be many of them, at least as far as the PIANO is of relevance.

I think the native indian americans have a very good music-feeling, but perhaps are still enrooted in their own cultural world of music very much, and a piano doesn't belong to the traditional instruments, and written notation / scores, as we could read from Natalie Curtis' interesting foreword to the three corn-songs, are not part of their tradition.

Further comments on this broad topic are welcome!  

Cordially, 8_octaves!

[indianajo]

This is an interesting topic, I need to backup my hard drive and update my operating system to replace  the Shockwave " vulnerable to hacking" and inhibited by firefox, to play these links.  Up to now the only native American music I found the least interesting was some of the flute music from Peru.  
I'm about a third Native American, I'm a hobby pianist who was classically trained, but I'm not famous yet.  Professionally I'm a trained physicist who served as a maintenance officer in the Army, as electronics technician,  "electronics engineer" and maintenance man in later years.  
I'm partially native Am as determined by physical characteristics and blood type (B pos). Three of four grandparents were born in the mountains of West Virginia. the fourth was "English" from St. Albans, WV, but she was small and was a "Samuels". From the physical characteristics I inherited (short limbs, long torso, small generally. lots of brown hair that doesn't fall out on the head on males, sparse beard and  body hair on men, brown hair, archaic eye sockets and chin, slight bust or hips on women,  males susceptible to respiratory disease and pneumonia) I see very little possibility that the B blood came from the slave coast of Africa, and no possibility that it came from China.  That leaves Siberia and Native Americans.
There was probably some lying or wishful thinking going on in my Father's Mother's family, that claimed to be "Scotch Irish".  She was 55" tall, had black hair, brown eyes, no bust and slight hips, my father got the short arms and legs long torso and light bones from her.  With that diminutive stature, she had four healthy sons.    Being Native American made you "colored" or "mulatto" in Virginia, which meant you went to different schools before 1965 if you went to school at all. Colored weren't allowed to vote, before 1864 colored could be legally caught by the slave trader and if they couldn't show manumission papers, be sold to the cotton plantations of the deep south.
In my Mother's family, she met "Granny Roy" her great Grandmother in the 1930's, who was visibly a full native and spoke first some language she didn't know the name of.  She thought she might be Cherokee, which from histories is linguistically possible if she was from Tug Fork, but not likely for the area she came from, a coal camp in Summers county.   I think it  likely she was trying to identify herself with the "civilized" eastern Indians that farmed, read and wrote, and many had converted to Christianity by the time Andrew Jackson had them deported to the western badlands. Those natives that got away from the US Army, like my ancestors, were resourceful, very shy and retiring, not causing legal troubles like theft or raids like Geronimo,  and extremely intelligent to make a living off that poor mountain land before 1910.  In the economic booms at the turn of the century,  the coal companies came and would pay anybody by the ton that could wield a shovel.   My Grandmother's father was too small to be hired as miner, but made a living cutting "mine props" from trees in the woods, and selling them to the coal company.  
I am relating to the story of the Eastern Indian reporter in 1941 Myapore  being celebrated in the 1986 PBS series The Jewel in the Crown that started to rerun last week. The reporter was educated at an English upper class "public" school, was culturally totally an Englishman, but was ripped from that country by untimely death of his parents, and deported to live in India. As a native he is invisible to the British power structure of the Raj, even a guy he was best friends with in school snubbed him.  The reporter doesn't know anything about Indian culture and doesn't relate well to the native men that live there.  Like him, I'm much more impressed by Bach, Buxtehude, Brahms and Beethoven, than those native drum circles at the dances.  But the "normal" women of this country have made it totally clear, they can do without me except perhaps as a supporter of a church or charity event they have organized.  I was even more invisible to single women than this reporter on television.  
    

[8_octaves]

Hi Jo, thank you very much for your very interesting writing!!

you wrote:

This is an interesting topic, I need to backup my hard drive and update my operating system to replace  the Shockwave " vulnerable to hacking" and inhibited by firefox, to play these links.  Up to now the only native American music I found the least interesting was some of the flute music from Peru.

Here I think, we have another example on how subjective the taste of music can be!   For example, I like the flute-music of Peru, which may have its origins in the music and dances of the ancient Inca people, very much, and there are groups sometimes, in the cities, playing those melancholic, and tasteful tunes with flute accompanied by other instruments. In addition, there was a - or a group of - ancient melodies which were supposed to be played on ancient funerals, for example, when a member of the Inca-family had died. These melodies, to which sometimes was danced a little bit, too, are called "Ayarachi".-

You wrote:  

I'm about a third Native American, I'm a hobby pianist who was classically trained, but I'm not famous yet.  Professionally I'm a trained physicist who served as a maintenance officer in the Army, as electronics technician,  "electronics engineer" and maintenance man in later years.  
I'm partially native Am as determined by physical characteristics and blood type (B pos). Three of four grandparents were born in the mountains of West Virginia. the fourth was "English" from St. Albans, WV, but she was small and was a "Samuels". From the physical characteristics I inherited (short limbs, long torso, small generally. lots of brown hair that doesn't fall out on the head on males, sparse beard and  body hair on men, brown hair, archaic eye sockets and chin, slight bust or hips on women,  males susceptible to respiratory disease and pneumonia) I see very little possibility that the B blood came from the slave coast of Africa, and no possibility that it came from China.  That leaves Siberia and Native Americans.
There was probably some lying or wishful thinking going on in my Father's Mother's family, that claimed to be "Scotch Irish".  She was 55" tall, had black hair, brown eyes, no bust and slight hips, my father got the short arms and legs long torso and light bones from her.  With that diminutive stature, she had four healthy sons.    

It's very interesting, again, what you write here. But I think to follow the lines of ancestors in order to specify or locate their ethnicity they belonged to via their look / phenotype / physiological properties / morphology is a very hard thing, at least for me: I only can say that one of my grandfathers came from the west part of Poland - but I don't know this from his look, because he looked average, but from documents.  
And when we look at pictures, e.g. the one of Dr. Louis Ballard on the page linked above, it's very hard for me - as I'm not trained in it - to locate specific origins.

You wrote:

[...]that farmed, read and wrote, and many had converted to Christianity by the time Andrew Jackson had them deported to the western badlands. Those natives that got away from the US Army, like my ancestors, were resourceful, very shy and retiring, not causing legal troubles like theft or raids like Geronimo,  and extremely intelligent to make a living off that poor mountain land before 1910.  

hm. I yesterday read about some cruel incidents: The Wounded Knee Massacre (the whole WP article), since in our English-schoolbook of class 8, it was mentioned, and especially I remembered the scene in which the one, who was deaf, refused to deliver his rifle.... And after that I re-read about Custer and battle of the Little Big Horn.    

You wrote:

I am relating to the story of the Eastern Indian reporter in 1941 Myapore  being celebrated in the 1986 PBS series The Jewel in the Crown that started to rerun last week. The reporter was educated at an English upper class "public" school, was culturally totally an Englishman, but was ripped from that country by untimely death of his parents, and deported to live in India. As a native he is invisible to the British power structure of the Raj, even a guy he was best friends with in school snubbed him.  The reporter doesn't know anything about Indian culture and doesn't relate well to the native men that live there.  Like him, I'm much more impressed by Bach, Buxtehude, Brahms and Beethoven, than those native drum circles at the dances.  But the "normal" women of this country have made it totally clear, they can do without me except perhaps as a supporter of a church or charity event they have organized.  I was even more invisible to single women than this reporter on television.  

Addition: I forgot this part of my answer:

The Colonial-India is a very specific case, in my opinion. Very very lively descriptions which equally view both sides, the natives from India, and the british colonizers, too, can be found in the written stories of Rudyard Kipling. E.g., a man named Strickland, who was of English (or Netherlands?) descent, had very long time lived in India, and had managed to get along with the circumstances there, which wasn't easy. He occurs, e.g., in the scary story "Imray's Return" , and in "The Stigma of the Beast" ( i translated the titles freely) , which is scary, too, and deals with mysteries and spiritual power of priests and gods of India. But the views and opinions of native born India people aren't neglected in Kipling's works either.
Maybe he is, in a kind, fair?

End of addition.-


There are society-connected, sociologic problems still.. . Hmm. But let us think, again about the native american Indians, tribes, societies, etc.:

I think, in the same degree, in which we seldomly find, e.g., a concert pianist or a composer (classic style, and / or for piano) among them, we, on the other hand, will find few Americans of non-native-descent, who would be able to , correctly, perform their dances, or play their music: Traditions differ, but I think differing musical traditions can approach one another! That would be very nice, and as we can see, it's possible:

People with native Indian American roots interested in European composers, and Europeans, interested in native american melodies and music!  

Many greetings from 8_octaves!