A Study of Omaha Indian Music

A Study of Omaha Indian Music
Author: Alice Cunningham Fletcher
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780803268876

"Among the Indians, music envelopes like an atmosphere every religious, tribal, and social ceremony as well as every personal experience. There is not a phase of life that does not find expression in song," wrote Alice C. Fletcher. The famous anthropologist published A Study of Omaha Indian Music in 1893. With the single exception of an 1882 dissertation, it was the first serious study ever made of American Indian music. And it was the largest collection of non-Occidental music published to date, ninety-two songs, all from a single tribe. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, her Omaha coworker and adopted son, divided the songs into three categories: religious ones, to be sung by a certain class either through initiation or inheritance; social ones, involving dances and games, always sung by a group; and ones to be sung singly, including dream songs, love songs, captive songs, prayer songs, death songs, sweat lodge songs, and songs of thanks. John Comfort Fillmore, a professional musician, added a "Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music." Those interested in a vital aspect of Indian culture will want to own this book, which contains the musical scores as well as the native-language words for the songs.

Modernity's Ear

Modernity's Ear
Author: Roshanak Kheshti
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2015-10-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1479867012

Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

The Omaha Tribe

The Omaha Tribe
Author: Alice Cunningham Fletcher
Publisher:
Total Pages: 820
Release: 1911
Genre: Omaha Indians
ISBN:

Indian Story and Song from North America

Indian Story and Song from North America
Author: Alice C. Fletcher
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803268883

"Music enveloped the Indian's individual and social life like an atmosphere."-Alice C. Fletcher. Anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher (1838-1923) was a pioneer in the study of Indian music. Originally published in 1900, Indian Story and Song from North America came out of her fieldwork and friendship with the Omahas (among whom she lived), Poncas, Arapahoes, and other tribes. Fletcher provides the stories behind these songs and the scores for authentic Indian melodies in native language (which is also translated into English). They run the gamut of experience, from making war to making love. Fletcher writes: "Universal use of music was because of the belief that it was a medium of communication between man and the unseen. The invisible voice could reach the invisible power that permeates all nature, animating all natural forms. As success depended upon help from this mysterious power, in every avocation, in every undertaking, and in every ceremonial, the Indian appealed to this power through song." When hunting, he sang to insure the aid of the unseen power in capturing game. When confronting danger and death, he sang for strength to meet his fate unflinchingly. In using herbs to heal, the men and women sang to bring the required efficacy. When planting they sang for abundant harvest. In their sports, courtship, and mourning, song increased pleasure and comforted sorrow. All occasions for singing are covered in this volume. The achievement of Alice Fletcher is discussed in an introduction by Helen Myers, associate professor of music at Trinity College and ethnomusicology editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1
Author: Franz Boas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0803269846

"The introductory volume to the Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, which examines Boas' stature as public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography and activism"--

Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology
Author: Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2013-10-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1136509720

This anthology of 25 scholarly articles offers a broad historical overview of the history, definition, and scope of ethnomusicology. The essays range from early summaries of the field's subject matter and state of research to later, comprehensive discussions spanning the discipline at large, its intellectual history, and future prospects. Ethnomusicology surveys the field, its methods, philosophy, and goals, and is well-suited for use as an introductory text. SPECIAL FEATURES The study of non-Western, or world music, which is the subject of this anthology, is currently one of the hottest areas in music education * Covers key historical, methodological, and theoretical topics from the early part of the century to the mid-1980s, providing a scholarly overview to research topics. * Collects in a single volume articles that come from a wide variety of sources. Suitable for Courses in Ethnomusicology/Multiculturalism in Music, Introduction to Music, Music History, World Music, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Folk Music, and Folklore and Myth.