Theories of Ethnomusicology and the North American Indian: Retrospective and Critique

Wickwire, Wendy

doi:10.7202/1014036ar

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

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“…Computational ethnomusicology refers to the development and exploitation of technological tools and computational methods for accessing, analysing and documenting world musics [1]. Early, pre-digital, approaches were largely championed by anthropologists and musicologists, including pioneering applications to Native American language and music such as the possibly earliest adoption of the phonograph [2], phonophotographic analysis of recorded songs [3] and quantitative studies of song corpora [4]. During recent decades, the field has often been dominated by technological and computational perspectives, applications have been seen as lacking a clear musicological motivation and results have been described as "solutions in search of a problem" ( [1], p. 12).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

Neubarth

Conklin

2019

Applied Sciences

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This paper presents a method for outlier detection in structured music corpora. Given a music collection organised into groups of songs, the method discovers contrast patterns which are significantly infrequent in a group. Discovered patterns identify and describe outlier songs exhibiting unusual properties in the context of their group. Applied to the collection of Native American music collated by Frances Densmore (1867–1957) during fieldwork among several North American tribes, and employing Densmore’s music content descriptors, the proposed method successfully discovers a concise set of patterns and outliers, many of which correspond closely to observations about tribal repertoires and songs presented by Densmore.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

Neubarth

Conklin

2019

Applied Sciences

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‘As long as we Dance and Sing we Will Stay Alive.’: Indigenous North American Resistance against Assimilation through Song and Dance

Reuther¹

2021

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

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Land of Shadows

Andrews¹

2000

L & L

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PreludeWhen I decided to pursue a teaching career, I undertook teacher training in Western Canada. During the course of my studies, many hours were spent in discussions with colleagues on the issues and concerns of First Nations peoples within educational institutions. What particularly struck me were the good intentions and intense frustrations of these teachers and administrators, many from the northern areas of the prairie provinces, who were attempting to improve the conditions of children on the reserves. What I personally witnessed was considerable poverty and deprivation, and a clash of oral and literate cultural perspectives that manifested itself throughout most of my career as a music teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher.In the field of music education, traditional instruction emphasizes individual competition, ensemble discipline, music literacy, architectonic forms and singular idioms such as the concert band, choir or string orchestra. This approach is appropriate for those Canadians of English, French and later European backgrounds who are socialized into Western cultural patterns. However, for Aboriginal peoples or those recent Canadians of Asian or African ethnicity, concert bands and choirs are foreign entities. Their music emphasizes individual participation, group co-operation, oral transmission, improvisation and multi-levelled communication. Many times I experienced tension in my classroom when the culture-specific practices of oral and literate forms clashed in my classroom; for example, when my students preferred rap, reggae, drum or throat music, and I required them to learn a march, suite, overture or symphony.Conflicting patterns of oral and literate socialization are intensified by the effects of the modern media--the radio, telephone, television, computer and fax machine. The electronic field replays many of the traits of oral cultures, such as immediacy, spontaneity, a high level of participation, and visual imagery. Rock music, for example, is topical, improvisatory, group-composed and highly visual, and it is predominantly transmitted by oral means. Moreover, as both speech and tone are created simultaneously, the music is inseparable from the words. In literate societies, words and notes are conceived as objective things separate from their performance. In oral cultures, there is no such split of thought and action so that performer, composer and listener are combined in one entity. Where literate societies preserve their music in writing, oral cultures store theirs through the physical assimilation of movement; that is, the person is the tradition.

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Theories of Ethnomusicology and the North American Indian: Retrospective and Critique

Cited by 3 publications

References 24 publications

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

‘As long as we Dance and Sing we Will Stay Alive.’: Indigenous North American Resistance against Assimilation through Song and Dance

Land of Shadows

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