Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents

The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.

Share page

Visit Us On FB

	THE AMERICAN INDIANS 159
	example 8-2. Paiute Indian song, from George Herzog, "Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music," American Anthropologist XXXVII (1935), 419. ture, in which meter is rather well established but change of meter is frequent and sudden. The note values in each song are few, usually just two—quarters and eighths—and it seems likely that the style of Peyote music, as described for the Arapaho above, is in this respect based on the music of the Apache, from whom the use of Peyote for ceremonies had spread to the other tribes. Example 8-3 is a Navaho song. 5) The Plains-Pueblo area takes in two of the most important cultural groups, the Plains Indians (Blackfoot, Crow, Dakota, Co­manche, Kiowa, etc.) and the Pueblo Indians. The most recent ab­original form of living of the Plains Indians was nomadic; their economy was based on the buffalo. Their loose political and ceremo­nial structure contrasts with the elaborate organization of life and religion among the Pueblo Indians (Hopi, Zuni, Taos, etc.), and there has in recent centuries been only slight contact among these two groups. Yet their music shares some important characteristics, particularly the great amount of tension in the singing and the two-part song form, which was described above for the Arapaho. The use of terrace-like melodic contour, gradually descending and level­ing off on a long, low tone, is also typical (although the Pueblo songs often precede this form with a low-pitched introduction). The area directly east of the Plains, including such tribes as the Pawnee