Music Section 3

Native Americans in the Natural World

More than 550 Native American tribes (First Nations) across what is now the USA.
One common theme among most tribal groups is their belief in the interconnectedness of human beings with the world around us
Alice Cunningham Fletcher published the first significant English-language monograph in 1893, titled A Study of Omaha Indian Music.
Frances Densmore was sponsored for fifty years by the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, during which time she gathered more than 2,000 recordings in her efforts to collect examples from every region of the United States.
Most Native American languages do not have a word for “music”
Many ethnomusicologists now group the music-making of our country’s tribes into seven broad areas:
1. Plains
2. Eastern U.S.
3. Yuman (Southwestern U.S. and parts of
  Southern California)
4. Athabascan (Navajo/Apache; also
  Southwestern U.S.)
5. Pueblo (Papago; Southwestern U.S.)
6. Great Basin (Nevada/Utah)
7. Northwestern Coast (Oregon, Washington, and also some tribes in Alaska)
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is a collective term for six Eastern Woodlands nations.
Haudenosaunee means “people who build a house”
The Haudenosaunee name for themselves is “Ohgwehonwe” meaning “real people.”
The Haudenosaunee confederacy formed sometime between 1100 and 1660
The Nations joined together under the “Great Law of Peace,” a constitution crafted by the Peacemaker and Hiawatha
Haudenosaunee Confederacy: Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Mohawks
Confederacy’s tenets were recorded on a wampum belt
Wampum belts are a record-keeping system that weaves together white and purple beads made from clam and whelk shells.
They extinguished the council fire in 1777 because consensus could not be reached on the Rev. War.
many Haudenosaunee suffered from alcoholism and diseases introduced by the colonists.
In 1799, a Seneca prophet, Handsome Lake, revitalized the confederacy by introducing a code of living comprised of “self-sufficiency, sobriety, and adherence to traditional lifeways.”
“Code of Handsome Lake,” also called the “Longhouse Religion,” renewed the principles of the Great Law.
The structure of the United States government was modeled in several respects on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Ben Franklin’s plan of union for the 1754 Congress of Albany is modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.
1776, Franklin invited members of the Iroquois Great Council to give an address at the Continental Congress.
The Iroquois have two branches of legislature and procedures for passing laws
U.S. Senate approved a resolution in 1987 that formally acknowledges the influence that the Great Law of Peace had on the United States Constitution.
For the tribes of the Eastern Woodlands, there are seven typical features:
1. Generally relaxed (open-throat) voices in
  medium and high range
2. Vocal shake or pulsing at the ends of phrases in particular
3. Frequent use of call and response
4. Agricultural themes, such as hunting and
  raising crops
5. Some use of song cycles [sets of songs that share some sort of theme]
6. Great variety of rhythmic accompaniments
  on drums, syncopation
7. Instruments [such as] small hand drums (some with water inside for increased resonance) and rattles made of turtle shells or cow horn
A water drum is usually hollowed out from a short piece of wood (five to seven inches in diameter) and is blocked with wood on the bottom.
Longhouses still serve as community centers today
Within a rectangular longhouse, there is at least one fireplace or stove, with two rows of benches running down the longest walls
Some of the largest Sings involve as many as five hundred people, and the gatherings strengthen community solidarity.
Virtually no notated examples of eighteenth-century Native American music exist
Longhouse songs can be grouped into three categories: social dance songs, ceremonial songs, and songs for curing.
The social dance is an activity in which non-Iroquois people sometimes participate.
For the Iroquois, “the world is sustained by a continuous renewal of cycles” that maintain a “balance of life’s positive and negative energies.”
Social dances honor this worldview with their circular motion which normally travels in a counter-clockwise direction in the longhouse
The Haudenosaunee believe that a good feeling should be sustained during longhouse ceremonies.
One social dance song by Sadie Buck has titled “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” with a twist in the final line: “It followed her to school one day and got better marks than her.”
Some scholars list nineteen, while other historians identify more than thirty types of social dance.
The customary opening pair of dances are the Standing Quiver dance and then the Moccasin dance.
Women’s Shuffle Dance is called the eskanye
Each Singing Society usually performs a set of seven eskanye.
In the eskanye dance itself, the feet stay close to the ground
An eskanye is accompanied by a water drum (played by the person who leads the singing) and cow-horn rattles (shaken by the other singers).
Ethnographers wonder if the contemporary use of cow horn is a replacement for a horn from the wood bison that used to inhabit southern Ontario.
“Ho Way Hey Yo,” is only about thirty years old

Ho Way Hey Yo by Betsy Buck Listening Companion

Sadie Buck is the leader of the Six Nations Women Singers
Sadie Buck is from a Seneca family
Hubert Buck, Sr., was a confederacy chief, and a composer and instrument maker.
Hubert Buck, Jr., co-founded the Old Mush Singers.
Betsy Buck is sister to Sadie Buck and is also a composer
Betsy Buck was moved to create “Ho Way Hey Yo” after the deaths of her father and her sister-in-law in 1993.
When the soloist starts off, she uses a full-throated, relaxed sound.
The other singers “respond” to her opening syllables, which are vocables
without meaning.
When the full group’s A section is ending, the drum switches to a pulse that is half the speed of the preceding tempo, signaling the approach of the concluding phrase, “Gai na wi ya he ya.”
“Gai na wi ya he ya,” ends the B phrase as well, since it is actually a standard conclusion to sections in all eskanye songs.
The “Gai na wi ya he ya” is also distinctive because it uses a grouping of six pulses instead of the four-beat pulse that is customary in the rest of the song.
“Ho Way Hey Yo” has an A AB AB form

Music for Music’s Sake

Francis Hopkinson’s small stature as an adult seems to have prevented him from joining the Continental Army.
Hopkinson attended the Second Continental Congress as a delegate from New Jersey.
Two years before Hopkinson’s death, George Washington appointed him a judge for the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania.
“Ode to Music” was included in the American Magazine in October of 1757.
Hopkinson wrote “Ode to Music” when he was 17.
Hopkinson was hired by the Dutch Reformed Church of New York to create a new set of metrical psalms in English to fit the melodies of the Dutch Psalter in the 1760s.
Art Music—works that require some musical training to compose and often some musical sophistication to appreciate.
Some people call “Art Music” “Concert Music.”
On November 20, 1788, Hopkinson published Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano, which he dedicated to George Washington.
There are eight songs in “Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano”
He was the first United States citizen to produce secular music.

“My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free” by Francis Hopkinson

It was written on two staves, treble, and bass
Lyrics from Poems on Several Occasions by the English poet Thomas Parnell
It is in binary form
In the B section, the singer is happy
Hopkinson set only the first two of Parnell’s verses to music
Parnell is alluding to his lady-love, Miss Anne Minchin (nicknamed “Nancy”) in the third stanza.
The song used melismas
Surrounding the vocal phrases are a keyboard introduction, interludes, and a coda, and only instrumental music is heard during those portions of the art song.
The singer also performs trills during the repetition of the A section, on the word “blest”

More Music for Music’s Sake

The Washingtons hired the best music tutors to give harpsichord lessons to young “Nelly” (Eleanor Parke) Custis
Martha made Nelly practice four or five hours every day
Charleston’s subscription concerts, which began in 1762, were managed by the St. Cecilia Society
Concerts organized by Hopkinson were patronized only by about seventy subscribers.
Chamber music is for small groupings of players
A symphony is a stand-alone composition for an orchestra.
A concerto featured one or more soloists in addition to an orchestra.
“Collegium Musicum” means “people united as musical colleagues.”
By 1773, Peter was running weekly Collegium rehearsals and giving periodic “concerts of secular music” with a fifteen-member orchestra.
Moravians were not full-time performers.
Moravian congregations chose “to pay heavy, sometimes crippling fines to buy exemptions from military service for their members so that they could remain true to their faith.”
The Moravians had to turn over the Single Brother’s house to the Continental Army
Moravians helped to nurse the sick and wounded, which led to deaths among the brethren as well as in the town
The first state to recognize the 4th of July officially was Massachusetts, in 1781
The governor of North Carolina, Alexander Martin issued a proclamation on June 18, 1783, calling for July 4th to be recognized as a day of solemn thanksgiving.
The town of Old Salem still claims to have hosted the first public celebration of Independence Day.
Johann Friedrich Peter hurriedly produced a Psalm of Joy, requiring the performing forces of the congregation, two choruses, strings, brass, and organ.
Te Deum, is an afternoon psalm of thanksgiving
Johann Friedrich Peter wrote a Lebenslauf, which was a type of “spiritual” autobiography.
John Antes composed three string trios between 1779 and 1781, which would make them the first chamber music by an American.
The trios were written in Cairo, after Antes had been sent to Egypt as a missionary
In correspondence with Benjamin Franklin in 1779, Antes indicated that he had also written six string quartets, but no trace of them survives.
Peter applied himself to building up the Collegium’s repertory

Quintet No. 6 in E-Flat Major, Mvt. 3 “Prestissimo” by Johann Friedrich Peter

Five of the six quintets have three movements each, using contrasting tempos of fast, slow, and fast.
The exception is Quintet No. 3, which inserts a dance movement—a minuet—before the concluding fast movement.
Quintet No. 6 in E-flat Major, concludes with a movement marked “Prestissimo,” meaning “very, very quick,”
Prestissimo is the fastest tempo that Peter calls for in the entire set of six pieces.
This finale is in compound duple meter and opens with a bouncy, disjunct motif
These characteristics resemble the English “jig” dance
The rising series of notes in the first violin’s disjunct a motif can also be described as arpeggios
Arpeggios: playing the notes of a chord successively rather than simultaneously.
Violin I part, with the three pitches of the E-flat triad (E♭–G–B♭) being played four times in rapid succession, but in varying order (E♭–B♭–G; then G– E♭–B♭; then B♭–G–E♭; and finally E♭–B♭–G again).
This arpeggiated, upward-moving motif reinforces the E-flat home key of the movement.
“Prestissimo” has a b motif, with a series of very conjunct repeating notes.
Followed by the c motif, filled with several paired “neighbor” notes of rising or falling seconds.
The d motif mimics the call-and-response technique
The first time it occurs, it starts in the violas and is answered by the first violin.
The Cello reiterates the tonic chord’s dominant pitch of B♭
A long-held or repeated low pitch of this sort can be called a pedal point, since it resembles the deep sustained notes that can be achieved by holding down the pedals of an organ.
The fifth motif, e, introduces a pair of rapidly cascading downward scales, again in the key of E-flat major.
Peter introduces a rhythmic twist called hemiola for motif f.
during the f motif, Peter shifts the groupings of eighth notes into pairs rather than groups of three.
It makes it sound as if the “Prestissimo” has shifted briefly into # meter rather than P.
Rounded binary form
Rounded binary form, can be diagrammed as ||: A :||: B A’ :||
In Peter’s quintet, the B section opens with yet another motif, g, that undulates up and down in a flowing fashion.
After the B segment, a version of the A material returns to “round off” the second section.
A’ concludes in the tonic key of E-flat major, whereas the first A had cadenced in the dominant key of B-flat major.
H. Wiley Hitchcock and Hans T. David regard Johann Friedrich Peter as “the most gifted” among the American Moravians
\