American culture

Blackfoot

1. Blackfoot music

Blackfoot music, the music of the Blackfoot tribes, (best translated in the Blackfoot language as nitsínixki - "I sing", from nínixksini - "song") is primarily a vocal kind of music, using few instruments (called ninixkiátsis, derived from the word for song and associated primarily with European-American instruments), only percussion and voice, and few words.

By far the most important percussion instruments are drums (istókimatsis), with rattles (auaná) and bells often being associated with the objects, such as sticks or dancers legs, they are attached to rather than as instruments of their own. The basic musical unit is the song, and musicians, people who sing and drum, are called singers or drummers with both words being equivalent and referring to both activities (p.49).

Women, though increasingly equal participants, are not called singers or drummers and it is considered somewhat inappropriate for women to sing loudly or alone. Páskani - "dance" or "ceremony" - often implicitly includes music and is often applied to ceremonies with little dancing and much singing. (Nettl, 1989)

Bruno Nettl (1989, p. 162-163) proposes that Blackfoot music is an "emblem of the heroic and the difficult in Blackfoot life." This is evidenced by:

" the separation of music from the rest of life through aspects of performance practice, a sharp distinction between singing and speaking, the absence of words in many songs, and the use of song texts to impart major points in myth in a condensed and concentrated form all relate music to the heroic aspect of life. There is a close association of music to [sic] warfare and the fact that most singing was done by men and the musical role, even today, of community leaders and principal carriers of tradition. The acquisition of songs as associated with difficult feats--learned in visions brought about through self-denial and torture, required to be learned quickly, sung with the expenditure of great energy, sung in a difficult vocal style--all of this puts songs in the category of the heroic and the difficult. "

2. Musical thought

Blackfoot musical thought is also more enumerative than European influenced musical thought which tends to be more hierarchical. Songs are differentiated primarily by use: in ceremonies, often associated with specific objects (especially in medicine bundles), concepts, dances, or actions, or during gambling (hand game), or other uses. Songs are differentiated secondarily by association with a person, and thirdly and less commonly by association with a story or event. There are no types of music which are considered more less music or musical, such as in Iranian musical thought. (Nettl, 1989)

Music, singing, is not thought to be like speech, or any other sound at all. There are no spoken introductions or conclusions and no "intermediary forms" between speech and singing.

Rehearsing happens increasingly, likely because of the influence of European influenced concepts of performance, song origin or composition, and a change in the purpose of music: from communication with the supernatural to communication with other humans.

3. Singing

Singing consists mostly of vocables, though recordings and reports from the early 1900s and prior indicate there were a great deal more lyrics or vocal texts. Blackfoot people see the profusion of words in European American music and African American music as lessening the importance and meaning of both words and music; and the same for the manner of listening to such music, that is, for entertainment or enjoyment, often while doing other things: if someone needed to say so many words, why didn't they just talk (p.69).

Blackfoot music is not based on instruments or texts, and singing is not supposed to sound like talking (or imitate any other sound). Typically, songs which contain texts are short and not repetitive, such as: "It's a bad thing to be an old man," (Nettl, 1989, p.73, 1951 recording of a Crazy Dog Society song) or the relatively lengthy, "Yonder woman, you must take me. I am powerful. Yonder woman, you must take me, you must hear me. Where I sit is powerful." (Nettl, 1989, p.73, Wissler and Duvall 1909:85 sung by a rock to a woman in the buffalo-rock myth).

Often when the text takes up most of the melody with fewer vocables the melodies are short. The vocables used, as in Plains Indian singing, are the consonants h, y, w, and vowels. They avoid n, c (ts) and other consonants. i and e tend slightly to be higher in pitch, a, o, and u lower (p.71). (Nettl, 1989)

Solo singing may have been more prominent, or the norm, in the past, but group singing has increased in prominence, with singing/drumming groups called "drums". Vocal blending is not required in ensemble singing. The leader may begin the head motive or phrase of a song, and then be repeated or "raised" by another singer, possibly the second singer (p.149). In pan-Indian powwow terminology, stanzas to a song are often called push-ups (p.150). (Nettl, 1989)

4. Vocal style

The vocal style is similar to other Plains Indians with: "high-pitched beginnings, pulsations, vocal narrowness. [and] nasality." (p.67) "Pulsations on longer tones, the audible effects of tension, nasality, substantial rasp, and some ornamentation are characteristic." (p. 43) Though this may have become "exaggerated" through influence from Plains Indian music and pan-Indian music, Blackfoot singing is "more intense and uses a higher tessitura," than most Plains Indian music.

From comparison of recordings one would agree with older consultants in the latter 1900s: "These younger fellows, they sing higher and louder than we used to." (pg.67) Expirementation with European influenced instrumentation and harmony happen but are rare, and the vocal style is the element least tampered with it being considered essential to "sound like Indian songs" (p.68).

Though the European influenced concept of meter may be inapplicable to Blackfoot music as it is characterised by the relationships between phrases usually of irregular length, the beat level generally equals the rate at which vocal pulsations occur (p.44). (Nettl, 1989)

5. Drumming

Singing without drums is extremely rare and considered inappropriate. (Nettl, 1989) The drum accompaniment to songs is rhythmically independent to the singing but in perfect unison, "slightly off the beat", and "often related roughly by the proportion of 2:3," to the vocal pulse or beat level (though see Pantaleoni, 1987).

Another change in Blackfoot music is increased relatedness of the drum part to the song now than in the past. Often drumming over repeated sections that comprise a song begins with players softly striking the rim of the bass drum. The tempo increases as the drumming moves further to the center of the drum skin. At some point "hard beats", loud strokes off the rhythm by an individual, sometimes the leader, and beats may be omitted.

Drumming may pause for a phrase or two in the last stanza of the last repetition and finish loudly. When playing the stick game, players drum upon a plank, and the drumming is more likely to coincide with vocal beats, but less accurate unison playing. Rattles are no longer used. (Nettl, 1989, p.157)

Drumming has increased in prominence since 1900, now being virtually required, possibly because of the influence of pan-tribal culture, the decreased use of rattles and other percussion, or the decrease in frequency of songs texts. The use of the term "drumming" for musician/singer also increased between the 1960s and the 1980s. (Nettl, 1989)

6. Song composition

Traditionally, songs are considered to be given, completed, to individual Blackfoot people in visions or dreams. Though it is now accepted that music, especially white music, may be composed in the European influenced sense, the traditional view still greatly affects how songs and their creation or origin are considered.

Songs are considered somewhat like objects, in that they may be created of components, but once finished become a unity. They may also be "given" or even sold. Some songs belong to everyone, some songs to just one person but may be sung by others, and some songs individuals save until times of great need. Two songs which may be aurally identical may considered different songs if they have different origins, i.e., came from different visions. (Nettl, 1989)

Most songs, except gambling songs with simply repeat "litany-like" one or two phrases, are characterized by an "incomplete repetition" formal pattern, "many of them can ultimately be reduced to a binary form in which the section section is a variation and/or reduction of the first." (p.43)

However, there was more formal variation in the past (p.100). Songs sung with medicine basket openings and gamblings songs often use isometric and isorhythmic rhythmic structures or lesser note-length values (p.44). Typically songs begin in falsetto before singers move to their head voices. Octave equivalence appears to be used, as transposition down by an octave of subsequent repetitions of a section is common, though may also occur down a perfect fourth or perfect fifth (p.43).

Songs begin with a "head motif" repeated by the second singer and then used to "generate" the rest of the song in ways which are fairly predictable to Blackfoot listeners, which facilitates accomplishing the ideal of learning songs in one hearing (p.100-101).

7. Blackfoot mythology

7.1 Cosmology

In Blackfoot mythology there is also a supernatural world, dominated above the natural world by the sun, and below by the beaver. The sun is sometimes personified by the part human Napi, or Old Man. The area in which the Blackfoot lived was created by Old Man exploring the area on his way north. (Nettl, 1989)

The numbers four, the cardinal directs, and seven, the six principle points and center, are important in Blackfoot mythology. Communication occurs between the supernatural world and Blackfoot through visions of guardian spirits, during which useful songs and ceremonies may be imparted, such as that of medicine bundles.

Ceremonies include the Sun Dance, called Medicine Lodge by the Blackfoot in English. Napi also gave the Blackfoot visions, and by implication Blackfoot music:

"Now, if you are overcome, you may go and sleep, and get power. Something will come to you in your dream, that will help you. Whatever these animals tell you to do, you must obey them....Whatever animal answers your prayer, you must listen to him." (Nettl, 1989)

7.2 The Buffalo Dance

One of the primary sources of food and other needs was the American Bison. The typical hunting method was drive a herd off a cliff and butcher them after they died at the bottom of the cliff. Similar methods were used in ancient Europe.

The night before, the shaman ceremonially smokes tobacco and prays to the sun. His wives are not allowed to leave their home, nor even look outside, until he returns; they were to pray to the sun and continually burn sweet grass. Fasting and dressed in a bison headdress, the shaman led a group of people at the head of a V formation. He attracted the herd's attention and brought them near the cliff; they were then scared by other men hiding behind them, who waved their robes and shouted. The bison ran off the cliff and died at the rocks below.

According to legend, at one point the bison refused to go over the cliff. A woman walking underneath the cliff saw a herd right on the edge and pledged to marry one which jumped down. One did so and survived, turning into many dead buffalo at the bottom of the cliff. The woman's people ate the meat and the young woman left with the buffalo. Her father went in search of her.

When he stopped to rest, he told a magpie to search for his daughter and tell her where he was. The magpie found the woman and told her where her father was located. The woman met her father but refused to go home, frightened that the bison would kill her and her father; she said to wait until they were all asleep and would not miss her for some time. When she returned to the bison, her husband smelled another person and, gathering his herd, found the father and trampled him to death. The woman cried and her husband said that if she could bring her father back to life, they could both return to their tribe.

The woman asked the magpie to find a piece of her father's body; he found a piece of his spine. The woman covered the bone with her robe and sang a song. She was successful and her father was reincarnated. Impressed, the woman's husband taught them a dance which would attract the bison and ensure success in the hunt and which would restore the dead bison to life, just as the woman had restored her father to life. The father and daughter returned to their tribe and taught a small group of men, eventually known as I-kun-uh'-kah-tsi ("all compatriots"), the dances.

The Blackfoot also dance the Grass Dance, which they absorbed from the Assiniboin in the 1890s. (Nettl, 1989, p.106)