sonorities

Musicology: Lessions From Native American Music

Bruno Nettl, professor, emeritus of musicology

Many of us who began working in ethnomusicology in the late 1940s started our studies by learning something about Native American music. It was a kind of music that sounded to us about as different from what we were used to as we could imagine; and also, it was easier to undertake a summer’s field work on a Native American reservation than in Africa or Asia. It’s an interest I’ve maintained, and now, looking back at the 55 years since my first encounter with this—to me—very exotic sounding singing and percussion, I realize that Native American music has taught me a lot about the music of the whole world, and gave me things to wonder about. Let me share with you some lessons.

I first heard a recording of Native American music when I was nineteen, at Indiana University, in a class of Dr. George Herzog’s, who told me that to go into ethnomusicology, I’d first have to learn to transcribe this music—which of course lived in oral tradition—into notation, and he gave me a wire recording (the most advanced technique we had in 1949) with which, repeating each phrase many times, I managed to get a two-minute song down on paper in two or three hours. But how to write down the (to me) strange singing style, the slightly but consistently fluctuating intervals, the note-value relationships that didn’t fit into our system of notes and dots? This first lesson I’m laying on you here was an introduction to the immense variety of musics in the world, and I think it’s this variety that initially turned many ethnomusicologists on to their field, and that they can share with the world of musicians. I also had to analyze the forms of these songs and was amazed at their sophistication. Then I learned that many Native Americans conceived of songs as coming to them in dreams, often taught by animals who were their guardian spirits. And I wondered: didn’t these complicated song forms have to be produced by composers who worked hard while they were awake? Or was it really the guardian spirits? I learned that the world’s societies have different ways of conceiving of how music is created.

In 1951, I met my first Native American teacher, an Arapaho with the curious name of Bill Shakespear (the name given by a whimsical teacher at the Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania), who visited the Bloomington campus for a summer. Bill, about fifty, a gentle man who took an avuncular interest in my education, sang for my primitive tape recorder all of the songs he knew. But the question came up: what’s a song? Most didn’t have words, and there wasn’t a good way to identify them. Once, after he had sung one song, I asked him to sing it again to see whether it would be different, and it was totally different, but he insisted that it had been the same, “only a little different in tone.” Another time, he sang two songs that sounded identical, but insisted they were not the same, maybe just “a bit similar.” But then he would sometimes say such things as “I got this song from my grandfather.” I began to learn that the world’s cultures differ as much in their conception of what music is as they do in their musical sounds and styles.

Third lesson: Years later, beginning in the 1960s, I had the good fortune of doing some fieldwork (sporadically over several years), on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, in beautiful country just east of Glacier National Park. The Blackfoot nation maintained a vigorous culture in which they combined being modern Americans with trying hard to preserve and revive older traditions. I got to hear some songs that people usually sang at private ceremonies, and I attended the grand pow-wow, and if I were to bring back the one main lesson from my various activities, it would be this. Music—their own music—is just enormously important to the Blackfoot. Of course they also listen to (and play), country music and jazz and classical music; they have a high school band and church choirs. But what they call “Indian music” may be the most important emblem of their ethnic identity.

Two illustrations (the first, from the “old days”): Calvin Boy, one of my principal informants, or teachers, once said to me, “the right way to do something is to sing the right song with it.” Then he corrected himself: “the right Blackfoot way to do something is to sing the right song with it.” What did he mean? obviously, people weren’t constantly singing. Some of the older authors who recount life about 1900, talk about hearing a lot of singing all the time. But surely Blackfoot homemakers didn’t sing “ironing songs” and auto mechanics didn’t sing “tune-up songs.” But Calvin—and others—had the idea that what made Blackfoot culture unique was this concept of a world of supernatural power, symbolized by songs (and dances and ceremonial acts that went with them), that paralleled the everyday world. Here’s how I interpret this: songs and dances connected the natural world to its analogue, the supernatural world. You learned songs in dreams from your guardian spirits who sang them to you once, and now, too, people say they learn songs in one hearing. A song couldn’t be divided or changed, but some songs could be given or sold. I got the feeling that the Blackfoot thought of songs as objects, like drums, rattles, blankets, or headdresses. If two men learned (dreamed) what might sound to us like the same song, these would be two different songs, because they were the products of two acts of creation. But my second example moves us to recent times. Modern American Indian musical life revolves around pow-wows, gatherings, and celebrations at which Native American identity is represented mainly by singing and dancing. Small pow-wows may have a dozen dancers, one singing group (known as “Drum”) with some five to eight singers; or even just one singer. The large pow-wow of the Blackfoot has as many as 25 drums, taking turns, and hundreds of costumed dancers moving around a circle, with maybe a thousand spectators—natives, tourists, hobbyist dancers. In a lot of ways, the Blackfoot people were acting pretty much like their white neighbors. They even presented a color guard of U.S. military veterans, they flew the stars and stripes; they had come in pickup trucks, and (except for the dancers) dressed in T-shirts and farmer’s caps. But the music, the singing and drumming, was totally Indian, there wasn’t, for four days, even a moment of rock or blues, hymns or patriotic songs, no national anthem for the flag, or Taps for memorials. It seemed to me that it was through this insistence on Indian music that they were asserting their Indianness or Blackfootness. That’s a lesson, my fourth, that would apply to many Native American peoples.

I’ve visited the Blackfeet reservation some eight or ten times, often rather briefly, and there’s lots I learned and lots more I haven’t learned. I’ve had the privilege of teaching courses on American Indian music at UIUC regularly since the 1960s, and also to advise some graduate students who have gone on to distinguished research and teaching in this field: Richard Haefer (Ph.D. 1981, now a professor at Arizona State), Robert Witmer (M.M.’72, now at York University in Toronto), Victoria Levine (Ph.D.’90, at Colorado College) and Christopher Scales (Ph.D.’04, at William & Mary College).

My fifth lesson, though, concerns a relationship between the Blackfeet reservation and our campus in C-U. When I came to the University of Illinois, over forty years ago, I learned about Chief Illiniwek and saw the dance, and I thought to myself, well, that doesn’t look like any Native American dancing I’ve seen, but there’s lots of variety there, so who knows? And I let it go at that, feeling that the Chief didn’t really have much to do with real Native Americans anyway; it sure wasn’t anything that I could use in my courses. Then, as I got more experience in fieldwork, I came to realize that American Indians were willing to share a lot, though not all, of their culture with others, but it was important to them that they should have the right to decide how they would be represented. My teachers, for example, wanted to be sure that I got right the things they were trying to explain; and they weren’t always optimistic. Two years ago, in Browning, I asked a couple of people whether they had heard of our “Chief” controversy. They had heard, but weren’t sure what it was all about. Except for one man, who couldn’t help wondering why a bunch of people, mostly White, some also African American and Asian American, would want to be symbolized by a man in a Native American costume, in a dance inspired by what he thought Native American dances were like, to music in which a marching band tried unsuccessfully to give an impression of Native music. He couldn’t understand how this spectacle could conceivably honor any Native Americans he knew, and surely he didn’t see why this would make all those non-Natives feel good about themselves. I guess I don’t either.

WINTER 2005