Indigenous music of North America

Traditional music usually begins with slow and steady beats that grow gradually faster and more emphatic, while various flourishes like drum and rattle tremolos, shouts and accented patterns add variety and signal changes in performance for singers and dancers.

The voice can range from a tense, nasal, or relaxed sound, and consist of higher timbres specifically for male vocalists where falsetto is common.

Hiding-game songs, such as those associated with "moccasin, hand and hiding-stick or hiding-bones games," were found with a significantly low average duration and small pitch range and variety.

Tribal flag songs and national anthems are also a major part of the Native American musical corpus, and are a frequent starter to public ceremonies, especially powwows.

[5] Native American music plays a vital role in history and education, with ceremonies and stories orally passing on ancestral customs to new generations.

However, their historical authenticity cannot be verified; aside from supposition and some archaeological evidence, the earliest documentation of Native American music came with the arrival of European explorers.

A style featuring relaxed vocal technique and the rise may have originated in Mesoamerican Mexico and spread northward, particularly into the California-Yuman and Eastern music areas.

According to Nettl, these styles also feature "relative" rhythmic simplicity in drumming and percussion, with isometric material and pentatonic scales in the singing, and motives created from shorter sections into longer ones.

[16] While this process occurred, three Asian styles may have influenced North American music across the Bering Strait, all featuring pulsating vocal technique and possibly evident in recent Paleo-Siberian tribes such as Chuckchee, Yukaghir, Koryak.

In this study of the American sound, he wrote:[citation needed] The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds.

Before the symphony's performance, he made it clear the fact that 'the work was written under the direct influence of a serious study of the national music of North American Indians.'

As a child, Densmore gained an appreciation for indigenous music by listening to the Dakota peoples, and throughout her life was able to record over a thousand songs performed by Native Americans in fifty plus years, beginning in 1907.

One distinction that makes her work so valuable, is that many of her recordings were conducted with more elderly individuals with little influence from Western musical tradition, and involve an impressively large range in geographical origin.

[20] Native Americans of the Southwestern United States were limited to idiophones and aerophones as mediums to sound production beginning date in the seventh century.

The Southern Athabaskan Navajo and Apache tribes sing in Plains-style nasal vocals with unblended monophony, while the Pueblos emphasize a relaxed, low range and highly blended monophonic style.

[23] He describes Southern Athabascan music, that of the Apache and Navajo, as the simplest next to the Great Basin style, featuring strophic form, tense vocals using pulsation and falsetto, tritonic and tetratonic scales in triad formation, simple rhythms and values of limited duration (usually only two per song), arc-type melodic contours, and large melodic intervals with a predominance of major and minor thirds and perfect fourths and fifths with octave leaps not rare.

[23] He describes the structural characteristics of California-Yuman music, including that of Pomo, Miwak, Luiseno, Catalineno, and Gabrielino, and the Yuman tribes, including, Mohave, Yuman, Havasupai, Maricopa, as using the rise in almost all songs, a relaxed nonpulsating vocal technique (like European classical music), a relatively large amount of isorhythmic material, some isorhythmic tendencies, simple rhythms, pentatonic scales without semitones, an average melodic range of an octave, sequence, and syncopated figures such as a sixteenth-note, eight-note, sixteenth-note figure.

[26] Inhabiting a wide swath of the United States and Canada, Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, according to Nettl, can be distinguished by antiphony (call and response style singing), which does not occur in other areas.

Nettl describes the central Plains Indians, from Canada to Texas: Blackfoot, Crow, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche, as the most typical and simple sub-area of the Plains-Pueblo music area.

This area's music is characterized by extreme vocal tension, pulsation, melodic preference for perfect fourths and a range averring a tenth, rhythmic complexity, and increased frequency of tetratonic scales.

Nettl describes the music of the sparsely settled Great Basin, including most of desert Utah and Nevada (Paiute, Ute, Shoshoni) and some of southern Oregon (Modoc and Klamath), as "extremely simple," featuring melodic ranges averaging just over a perfect fifth, many tetratonic scales, and short forms.

Herzog attributes the similarly simple lullabies, song-stories, and gambling songs found all over the continent historically to the music of the Great Basin which was preserved through relative cultural isolation and low population.

By rubbing the pua on the carved shell, a ratchety and rasping sound is elicited and like most percussive instruments, the purpose of the guiro is providing a feeling of beat to the music.

Described by Spanish conquistadors as musical events ranging from rituals, celebrations, work songs, funeral observances, and drunken parties, Areito may have simply meant "group" or "activity" in the native Taíno language.

Reports exist of a Taíno female chief named Anacona, who ruled Xaragua (modern day Port-au-Prince) and led native revolts after the death of her brother at the hands of Spanish colonists.

The late 1960s saw a roots revival centered around the flute, with a new wave of flautists and artisans like Doc Tate Nevaquaya (Comanche) and Carl Running Deer.

[49] Of special importance is R. Carlos Nakai (Changes, 1983), who has achieved Gold record status and mainstream credibility for his mixture of the flute with other contemporary genres.

Historic Native American flutes are generally tuned to a variation of the minor pentatonic scale (such as you would get playing the black keys on a piano), which gives the instrument its distinctive plaintive sound.

For larger dance or powwow type drums, the basic construction is very similar in most tribes: a wooden frame or a carved and hollowed-out log, with rawhide buckskin or elk skin stretched out across the opening by sinew thongs.

The awards were born out of a need for greater recognition for Native American music initiatives and remains the largest professional membership based organization in the world.