1 THE STUDY OF FORMAL DESIGN IN NATIVE AMERICAN MUSIC: OBSERVATIONS, AND SOME SPECULATIONS ON HISTORY Bruno Nettl Examples accompanying CD: 1) Mohave; 2) Blackfoot War Dance; 3) Peyote song; 4) Ishi; 5) Ghost Dance I'd like to bring together, briefly and informally, three topics involving the history of form in Native American music north of Mexico: 1) some observations on the study of Native American forms in early ethnomusicology; 2) notes on the way form types are distributed in repertories; and 3) some speculations about the history of Native American music. This paper is inspired by some collaborative work that I had the privilege of doing with my old friend and colleague Dr. Victoria Levine, resulting in a paper on asymmetrical repetition forms that appeared in Tenzer and Roeder, "Analytical and Cross Cultural Studies in World Music." I'm trying to take some of the suggestions of this paper a bit further or perhaps further back in time; and I want to acknowledge with thanks Dr. Levine's contribution to the background of what I'll say. 1) FORM IN THE HISTORY OF EARLT AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC RESEARCH General Statements by Early Scholars (Stumpf, Hornbostel, Fillmore) One question with which I'm concerned: Can we say anything, in the most general way, about the nature of forms in Native American songs at large? Interestingly, the earliest scholars did not generalize continentally on this issue, in contrast to what they usually said about scales, but at most spoke to it in discussion of tribal repertories. One early classic, Carl Stumpf's 1886 study of the Bela Coola songs, says a lot about scales and meters, but virtually nothing about the way songs are put together from phrases, lines, or motifs. Hornbostel's article of transcriptions and analyses of Franz Boas's recordings of Thompson River Indian songs, published in 1906, also discusses scales and intervals at length, but about "Aufbau " construction it says only this: "The songs may be regarded as primitive in the sense that nowhere is there a complex periodic structure. The songs consist of a short unit repeated and varied." A good deal more could have been said.
2 There's a statement of considerable sophistication in the analysis of Omaha songs by John Comfort Fillmore, part of Alice Fletcher's "Study of Omaha Indian Music" (1893) perhaps a bit surprising, considering that it's by a musician who idiosyncratically insisted on harmonizing his transcriptions of Native American music: "That larger phase of rhythm which is called phrasing, the grouping of measures into phrases and clauses, and the correlating of them into periods, is represented in these songs in quite as rich variety as is that of grouping if pulses into measures." And later, Fillmore wrote: "Nature seem to have taught these people precisely what our professors of composition teach their pupils, and with marked success." Scholars Of The 1930s To 1960s (Roberts, Herzog, Merriam) a) On the Continent By the 1930s, attitudes of comparative musicologists had changed, as major scholars were sometimes willing to characterize song structure of Native American music as a whole, and of individual repertories. First, for the world context: Helen Roberts, in her 1936 survey of the musical geography of North America, doesn't really specify the distribution of forms in culture areas but, rather, emphasizes that this continent provides a greatly varied group of repertories: "American Aboriginal music is said to be primitive, simple, undeveloped...some of it sounds monotonous and repetitious, and is...other music, upon analysis, reveals almost unbelievable subtleties of form or design...so often have melodies been found to reveal unguessed complexities of structure...failure to perceive fascinating complexities may lie rather in an obtuse and still too orthodox viewpoint." (1936:11). George Herzog, despite his voluminous studies of Native American repertories, was usually inclined to be very cautious and avoided generalization, but the following statement in a paper of 1942 as quite noteworthy: "The more formal aspects of Indian music, too (he's comparing form to scales and rhythm), make for a rather unified general picture." And later, "As in most primitive music, the form is small, built up of a few phrases which are then repeated as often as may be required by context " It's rather like the music of many indigenous cultures, he is saying. But it's also different and unique: "The miniature form tends to assume in Indian music a more clear cut and architectonic structure, with well established subdivisions, than is the rule in primitive music." Geographically not very differentiated, but perhaps unexpectedly complex, he opines. This statement inspired some of my remarks below. b) On Individual Repertories
3 When it comes to what these scholars of the 1930s had to say about the formal dimension of individual nations and repertories, the work that provides the most detailed analysis is Helen Roberts's 1933 book "Form in Primitive Music," in which she transcribes and analyzes 27 songs of southern California tribes. Roberts emphasizes the diversity of forms found in this repertory, suggesting that the most elaborate forms are those of the oldest songs. At the same time, perhaps in contradiction, she also associates the diversity with later development, suggesting that as a society diversifies its contacts with others, its music will become more diverse. In any event, the repertory examined by Helen Roberts is not one in which composers stuck to one or a few established patterns. George Herzog, in his various studies of individual Native American repertories, pays considerable attention to the interrelationship of sections in a song. His first important work, "The Yuman Musical Style," discovers and gives great emphasis to a form that he calls the "rise," in which a phrase or line repeated a few or sometimes many times alternates with a somewhat higherpitched section presented only once or twice at a time. He suggests that among the Yuman tribes, this was once the normal or perhaps only form type, and that other forms, when found, may have intruded through contact with Pueblo and other peoples. Herzog here suggests that homogeneity was the norm for a traditional repertory until it was disturbed by outside contact. EXMPLE 1: MOHAVE SONG But he provided a contrastive interpretation in his dissertation, "A Comparison of Pueblo and Pima Musical Styles." Describing Pima forms, he first presents three principles of interrelationship of lines in a song iterative, progressive, and reverting and then goes on to show that all are used by Pima composers, each giving rise to a variety of actual manifestations, such as ab, abcd, and aabb, aabcbc, abbc, and finally, abcb and abac. Just to give a very general comparative perspective, this diversity of forms seems to me considerably greater than what is usually found in a traditional European folk song repertory Providing a typology for Pima songs, Herzog proposes groups distinguished by complexity and diversity, believing that the simplest songs are the most archaic, and that diversity is the result of relatively recent intercultural contact. I confess that this rather traditional view may not holdup. c) Merriam on the Flathead
4 Let me comment briefly on one author of the next generation of scholars, Alan Merriam, and his study of the Flathead. which includes a very detailed formal analysis of his sample of 131 songs, which he maintains are essentially in the Plains Indian style, despite the fact that the Flathead were culturally not usually classed as "Plains Indians.". In certain respects, such as singing style and general melodic contour, and in the relationship of drum and vocal rhythmic structure, he is surely correct, but my own experience with Blackfoot songs, the northernmost group in the Plains culture area, suggests that the Flathead have a much greater variety of forms than the Blackfoot. The vast majority of Blackfoot songs use what has been called asymmetrical or incomplete repetition. I'll call it "shortened repetition." EXAMPLE 2: BLACKFOOT WAR DANCE The only significant exceptions I have found in this huge and widely recorded repertory of Blackfoot music are old recordings of quite short ceremonial songs, which often have progressive forms such as ABC, and gambling game songs, which are largely iterative, repeating and maybe varying one or a pair of short phrases. Merriam's relatively small sample of Flathead songs actually exhibits a great variety of forms. Looking for an explanation, he suggests that songs with different functions or associations have different forms; but even within some of these "functional" groups, he presents astonishing variety. Thus a group of ten "Jumpin' Dance" songs includes the forms AB CC DD, AAB A BBB, ABCDEF CDE ABCDEF, and the simpler ABB, AB, and A A' A' A', and more. Looking at forms in various Native American song repertories, we see that some peoples largely followed a single pattern while others made use of a variety of principles. There are surely a number of reasons text setting, social function, ideas about the origin of songs, and more for this variety, but the entire picture conforms to a generalization made by Herzog in 1942. Native American musical forms, he said, provide "a more clear cut and architectonic structure, with wellestablished subdivisions, than is the rule in primitive music." By "primitive," I think he meant the musics of societies that we today often call "indigenous." 2) THE FORM TYPES OF SOME TRIBAL (OR NATIONAL) REPERTORIES
5 I promised to try to comment on what one might conceivably conclude about history from the picture provided by musical forms, and so I take the liberty of presentation a number of speculations. Taking as a point of departure what I just said about the Flathead and Blackfoot repertories, music of neighboring peoples, I am intrigued by the fact that the Blackfoot songs are formally less varied than those of the Flathead, while perhaps paradoxically, the Blackfoot repertory seems I say this on the basis of long ago discussions with Merriam to be much larger. One might guess that the Blackfoot did more song making, and more rapidly, and that conceivably this led to greater standardization of forms. This may have something to do with the Blackfoot concept of composition in visions. Or, alternatively, is it possible that most of the Blackfoot songs are of recent origin, while the Flathead songs examined by Merriam were older or exhibited older configurations of traits? Does this now suggest that many or some repertories were more varied in the past, while composing songs according to fewer patterns later became the norm? Might this be a general tendency in the recent history of Native American music? S hortened Repetition Another speculation: There have been several attempts, including by myself, over the last 100 years, to define musical styles by geographic or culture areas. Based on inadequate samples and insufficient attention to the movement of Indian peoples, and on perhaps mistaken assumptions about locations of peoples, these areas don't hold much water any more. But they are still minimally useful. Thus, while each area may be characterized by the prevalence of a particular formal design, there is perhaps no form type in Native American music that is not found at least sporadically in each of these musical areas excepting I think the Inuit. The most characteristic example is the shortened repetition, discussed in the article by Victoria Levine and myself where it's called "asymmetrical repetition," the form type found in virtually all Plains social dance songs; in a good many Pueblo songs; in virtually all Peyote songs of the many nations who adopted the Peyote, religion, but greatly varied in its application; in a few songs of peoples who once lived in the Southeastern US; and also, surprisingly, in a few songs of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, in California. In respects other than formal organization, these songs sound very different. My guess is that the distribution of this form type may be a key to aspects of Native American music history. EXAMPLE 3:PEYOTE SONG
6 Ishi's Songs If my speculation that Indian repertories were once formally varied and, even when they didn't shrink in size, became more homogenous after the onset of contact with whites, if that speculation holds water, it might be supported by the unique repertory of Ishi, a member of the Yahi tribe, the man once known as the last wild Indian, a man from Northern California whose interesting but tragic background I don't have time to explain here. He recorded songs in 1911, but they must reflect, because of his people maintained themselves in isolation in order to survive, 19th century practices. Having lived in a culture whose population and customs had been decimated for decades, he nevertheless was able to sing a repertory of ca. 60 songs, which have what would conventionally called an extremely simple style a stanza of four to five seconds, repeated many times; two or three note values; two, three, and rarely four distinct pitches. But formally, the songs consist of two, three or four phrases which are interrelated in a considerable number of ways. We find lot of A(1)A(2) or ABA, also AAB, A(1)A(2)B, ABB, ABA, AB(a)C(a) (a) means related to but not a variant of A. And there are also the formal schemes AABB, A(1)A(2)B(1)B(2), A(1)A(2)A(2)B, ABAC, and more. Some of the songs exhibit miniaturized versions of the "rise" form of the Yumans. Some can be analyzed as miniature versions of the shortened repetition form. Why, I ask myself, would this variety and sophistication of forms go hand in hand with the simplicity of scale and song brevity? One possibility: The variety of forms some of them a version of the shortened repetition results form long time diffusion of songs from many parts of the continent, which were folded into the tribe's determination to maintain scalar and rhythmic simplicity. I'll refrain here from other attempts at explanation. EXAMPLE 4: ISHI Ghost Dance Songs, I've been suggesting, given lots of caveats, that if one distinguishes what appear to be older from more recent repertories, the later ones have greater homogeneity of form. The shortened repetition, in itself perhaps an old compositional practice, has come to dominate the music of the Plains and of powwow music. Peyote songs, a repertory that became intertribal and shows certain musical traits of number of peoples and areas, and that exhibit a lot of interrelationships of phrases, nevertheless almost uniformly use the shortened repetition form as an overall framework. The Ghost Dance songs studied by George Herzog, identified as consisting almost entirely of paired phrases, go back to the Great Basin style in which paired phrases played an important role, but in
7 which other forms were also used. So: an important form of a limited area became the dominant form of an intertribal and widely distributed repertory associated with a socio religious function. EXAMPLE 5: GHOST DANCE SONG 3) PRE CONTACT MUSIC NORTH OF MEXICO: SOME SPECULATIONS Well, looking over these isolated examples and my speculations about them, what might the study Native American music as it now exists contemporary practices and recordings going back ca 120 years, and transcriptions going back a bit further teach us about history farther back? Let me mention two developments for which we have no musical data at all, but which might nevertheless provide helpful hints, to suggest that at one time, Native American musical repertories and styles were a lot more varied and complex than they were when white people first learned about them. Cahokia One is the increasing understanding of the complexity of the culture of cities in aboriginal North America north of Mexico, the most famous of which is Cahokia, now an archeological site that was substantially destroyed by white peoples' development before its significance in Native cultures was understood. In the eleventh century CE there developed, very rapidly, a large city and urban culture near present day St. Louis, remarkable for its size a population upwards of 15,000 and the evident complexity of its culture as determined by archeologists including particularly my colleague at the University of Illinois, Timothy Pauketat. Its influence which can be traced to the East Coast and as far as the Rocky Mountains and perhaps beyond. Developments in economic life, agriculture, a complex hierarchical political structure, religion and dramatic events including human sacrifice, development of visual art are all documented, everything, it would seem, except for music. Well, the safest attitude of ethnomusicologists would be to simply leave this alone; but let me continue my path of speculation. The point is that the city of Cahokia, ca. 1100, was as large as metropolitan areas in Europe and Asia of the time. Considering the importance of music to virtually all Native American cultures in the late 19th and twentieth centuries, it would be strange if the large Cahokia
8 complex had not had an appropriately complex musical culture. Mayan and Aztec cities, from different periods to be sure, evidently had complex musical practices and instruments, mass performances, although we have hardly anything to go on when it comes to musical styles. For Cahokia, to be sure, we haven't found instruments, but the singing of complex forms, perhaps accompanying the complex ceremonies, perhaps to entertain and symbolize the power of the ruling classes the equivalents of the principal European systems of music patronage, church and court could be credibly imagined. The existence of complex song cycles accompanying ceremonies in the Southwest may be a related or parallel case. The culture that was developed in Cahokia strongly influenced the eastern two thirds of North America, but this influence evidently ceased with the as yet imperfectly explained demise of the Cahokia culture ca. 1400. And yet, A.L. Kroeber, in 1953, constructing his plan of culture areas, emphasized the commonality of the cultures of he eastern 2/3 of the continent, and Pauketat suggests that this whole area was influenced by the Cahokia culture to varying degrees. To be sure, as Kroeber said, each culture group developed its distinctiveness in accordance with its environment, but it is possible that the development of music didn't depend on ecology as much and that the peoples who had been influenced by Cahokian music whatever it was like might have maintained its characteristics. Could this conceivably explain the widespread distribution of the shortened repetition form? This gives rise to many questions: What of the supposed complexity of Cahokian musical culture? Did it disappear, or was it ever there, in the area influenced by Cahokia? Is the musical picture as we found it in the course of the twentieth century a direct remnant of what I'll call for better or worse Cahokian influenced? Did the outskirts provide and preserve simplified versions of what had been developed in the urban center? If there was a complex musical culture in, and emanating from, Cahokia, what happened to it? Have we in the late 19th and 20th centuries, simply been provided with the result of the destruction of Cahokia? The Coming of Europeans and the Epidemics Well, of course, there was a second much more serious period of destruction of Native American cultures, and it came rather on the heels of the demise of Cahokia. I'm talking about something comparable to or exceeding the 20th century Holocaust the sudden decline in population resulting from the coming of Europeans in the 16th century, in good measure the result of wars and massacres, but even more, of epidemics that seem to have wiped out the majority of many Indian nations before they ever actually set eyes on white people. Attitudes of prehistorians
9 have changed greatly: When I was a student, the conventional wisdom was that there had never been more than about one or two million Native Americans north of Mexico. By now, it seems likely that there were anywhere from twenty to fifty million inhabitants of this area, and that much of the continent was agriculturally cultivated; but that it took very little time, once populations had been decimated, for the land to revert to wilderness. And what about music? One possibility and this is really a speculation: The decline in population was accompanied by a simplification of musical styles; or rather, by the disappearance of the music that required large forces and had some kind of patronage, required a good deal of learned skill, so that one was left with a remnant of simpler materials that were easier to maintain. Indeed, there are reasons for believing that what Native American music, as experienced by whites even a few centuries ago, was an impoverished remnant of a more complex set of styles extant earlier. But still, certain element of a more complex music remained, do remain, and I believe that these are found in the considerable complexity and variety of musical forms. These may be what George Herzog was talking about when he said, "The miniature form tends to assume in Indian music a more clear cut and architectonic structure, with well established subdivisions, than is the rule in primitive music."