source file: mills3.txt
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 17:37:05 +0100

Subject: Re:Native Indian Music

From: gagaku@cats.ucsc.edu (Fred Lieberman)

Kaig Grady states:

>The only extenive collections of Native American music was done by
>Francis Densmore. These collections were done from the turn of the
>century to the 40's.

While Densmore's collection is extensive and important, reflecting a
lifetime of work, she was well known for what we would now consider poor
fieldwork technique. She was procrustean in method, reputedly arbitrary in
not recording singers she considered "inauthentic" or "out of tune."  And
so on.

There are many other smaller but excellent collections out there--both from
the early days of cylinders and shortly thereafter, that, when taken
together, provide valuable perspective on Densmore's work.

Some examples:

Ida Halpern's work in British Columbia during the 40's is particularly
valuable and superb fieldwork; her albums, with =extensive= notes, remain
available on Folkways/Smithsonian. Halpern, trained by leading European
ethnomusicologists was a sensititive fieldworker, who almost
single-handedly preserved a remarkable tradition that was at the time
outlawed by the Canadian government, so her recordings had to be made in
secret. She included on the recordings many interview segments, and was
particularly aware of the tonal shifts (there's a microtonal rise between
verses in much NW Coast Indian music), polyphony, and non-mensural
rhythms--fortunately she wrote about these elements not only in the record
notes but in some major articles. In the late 1970's, at her request, my
graduate students and I (at the U. of Washington) carried out some lab
analyses of scale and rhythm, which appear in the notes to some of her last
albums, and in late articles.

Earlier, Alice Fletcher made a remarkable series of cylinders in the
Midwest, and with her adopted Indian son wrote monographs on the material.
(See Joan Marks's excellent biography of Fletcher, =A Stranger in Her
Native Land=.)

Willard Rhodes recorded a systematic survey somewhat later, commissioned
and published by the Library of Congress, of all major Native American
traditions.

The Federal Cylinder Project of the Library of Congress is a superb
discography of all known cylinder recordings held in any Federal facility
(they're scattered rather widely--from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the
LOC to the Smithsonian, and even further afield).

These and other early collections by Laura Boulton, Walter Fewkes, George
Herzog, Helen Roberts and many more await modern analysis. All are
accessible at the LOC, Indiana U., the Bishop Museum (Honolulu), and UCLA,
the main repositories of the original collections or tape copies thereof.