2 Singing

Singing consists mostly of vocableA vocable is a word used without meaning. They are used in Blackfoot music and other American Indian music and other music such as Pygmy music and the music of the Maldives. The Blackfoot, like other Plains Indians, use consonants h y w and vowels. They as, though recordings and reports from the early 1900sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s Years: 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 Events and Trends Technology Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first doc and prior indicate there were a great deal more lyricA Lyric (from the Greek) is a song sung with a lyre. Now, it is commonly used to mean a song of no defined length or structure. A lyric poem is one that expresses a subjective, personal point of view. I would be the Lyric Ever on the lip, Rather than thes or vocal texts. Blackfoot people see the profusion of words in European American music and African American musicAfrican Americans black music formerly known as race music have long constituted a large minority of the population of the United States. They were originally brought to North America to work as slaves in cotton plantations, bringing with them typically p 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 entertainmentEntertainment Entertainment is an amusement or diversion intended to hold the attention of an audience or its participants. Examples of entertainment include: Animation (primarily traditional, computer, and stop-motion) Betting Chat Circus Dance Film Drin 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 consonantA consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word consonant comes from Latin meaning "sounding with" or "sounding together", the idea being that consonants dos h, y, w, and vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word vos. 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)

3 Scales and intervals

Musical scales tend to be fairly equally spaced tetratonic , pentatonic, or rarely hexatonic or heptatonic scales with occasional major seconds and rare minor seconds. (Nettl, 1989, p. 43)

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 Misc

Children do not have their own song or game song repertoire, except for Mice Songs associated with a game (p.85), and songs usually called lullabies sung to them by their mothers. Women used to have their own small repertoire of lullabies, laments, and other songs, but these have been largely lost. Two-Spirit "manly-hearted women" (Lewis, 1941) who act in much of the social roles of men, were in the past also willing to sing alone and use a men's singing style. (Nettl, 1989, p.84, 125).

8 Current traditional musical groups include

• Black Lodge Singers
• Heart Butte Singers
• Young Grey Horse Society
• Two Medicine Lake Singers

9 Source

• Nettl, Bruno (1989). Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives. Ohio: The Kent State University Press. BooksEnthsiast.com.

10 External link

• http://www.angelfire.com/ar/waakomimm/midi.html

Blackfoot culture American Indian music

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