20-4 Traditional Music in Community Life

Traditional Music in Community Life: Aspects of Performance, Recordings, and Preservation

Traditional Music in Community Life: Aspects of Performance, Recordings,. and Preservation How does a community maintain an identity? What motivates its members to work together, to struggle for common goals? How do its members resist forced changes in order to create a future of their own design? Although people who write books tend to attribute most of the significance of social and religious…

Traditional Music in Community Life

To be human is to make music, and the music we make says a great deal about who we are or, at least, who we think we are. That is why music is not just humanity's way of banishing the eternal and terrifying silence of the universe. It is also the way in which each piece of humanity lays claim to its own particular character. Music is thus profoundly ambiguous. It unites all of humankind, for…

The Sound of Music: Suya Song Structure And Experience

The Sound of Music: Suyá Song Structure and Experience. Is there anything about the sounds of a particular community's music that lends its performance a particular significance? Does it matter what kind of music people perform, as long as they perform something? While the obvious answer might be "of course it matters," the evidence isn't plentiful. I argue below that the structure of Suyá…

Surviving through the Dance: Sung Round Dance as the Expression of Defiance and Croatian Pride

Surviving through the Dance: Sung Round Dance as the Expression of. Defiance and Croatian Pride Croatia is small, southeast European country with its coastal shore along the Adriatic sea and the river Danube flowing through the northern inland region. During the last few years, more has been heard about Croatia because of its divisive war, which started at the time of democratization and the…

Songs, Land Rights, and Archives in Australia

For Aboridinal Australians, songs give dynamic proof of land ownership. Richard Moyle encapsulates the connection between the songs and the land in his book, Alyawarra Music (1983). Certain people own songs and the permission to perform them. The owners of the songs also own the ceremonies connected with those songs. The texts of the songs relate to culture heroes from the ancient time before…

Silent Spring in Siberia: The Plight of the Vilyuy Sakha

The Vilyuy River, located in a remote area in the Sakha Republic of eastern Siberia, used to be crystal clear and full of fish. The people used to be strong and healthy, with the third longest life expectancy in the world. The fields and woods used to burst forth in a thick carpet of wild flowers and were filled with an orchestra of bird songs. Now the Vilyuy River waters run red, and fish are…

Returning Music to the Makers: The Library of Congress, American Indians, and the Federal Cylinder Project

Returning Music to the Makers: The Library of Congress, American Indians,. And the Federal Cylinder Project The United States Library of Congress houses the country's largest collection of early recordings of American Indian music, recorded originally on wax cylinders and today also preserved on high quality audio tape. The Archive of Folk Culture now includes approximately 10,000 cylinder…

Kekchi High School Scholarship Project

Indigenous groups in Central America face many problems and challenges due to poverty, environmental destruction, and their lack of a voice in national politics. One of the best tools to face these challenges is education. Without it, most indigenous groups will have to remain dependent on outsiders to make informed choices about their natural resources, legal problems and future economic…

Drumming in the Shadow of a Satellite Dish

Standing on the threshold of a mud house, Kebba Jafouneh lifts a drum above his head and taps out the name of a drummer who is missing from our recording session. We have no other way to call him. We are only a couple hundred feet from the main highway in the Gambia, but we have crossed into a world still without electricity and phones. While we wait for the drummer to arrive, my eyes keep…

Black Snow: Oil and the Khanty of West Siberia

While the West applauds the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the Center as an effective political force in Russia has fostered the rapid development of a freebooting, frontier capitalism in western Siberia, based on oil and gas. While some attention has been paid lately to environmental issues in Russia, especially after the Usinsk oil spill in Komi, the issue has not been…