Music History Of The United States During The Colonial Era
Native Americans had no indigenous traditions of classical music, nor a secular song tradition. Their music was spiritual in nature, performed usually in groups in a ritual setting important to their religion; for some groups, music was the primary means of worship, and song was regarded as a direct link to the divine. Though many Native Americans claim their songs are unchanged since ancient times, there is no proof of this (due to a lack of written records). Many songs were improvised.
For a long time, and continuing into the present, many American beginner's guides to learning the piano contain a song purported to be Native American in origin. In reality, these songs have little or no relationship to actual Native American styles, and are merely a vehicle to introduce left-handed repeated harmonic fifths or the minor mode in the melody.
It was not until the 1890s that Native American music began to enter the American establishment. At the time, the first pan-tribal cultural elements, such as powwows, were being established, and composers like Edward MacDowell and Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert used Native themes in their compositions. It was not until the much later work of Arthur Farwell, however, that an informed representation of Native music was brought into the American classical scene.
Read more about Music History Of The United States During The Colonial Era: Appalachian Folk Music, New England Colonial Music, European Professionals, Gentleman Amateur Composers, Rural Pennsylvanian Music, African Americans, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words music, history, united, states, colonial and/or era:
“Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them, was superfluous—entirely superfluous.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has had less authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)