Hunting and Pastoral Songs
In societies without mechanical time keeping, songs of mobilisation, calling members of a community together for a collective task, were extremely important. Both hunting and the keeping of livestock tended to involve small groups or individuals, usually boys and young men, away from the centres of settlement and with long hours to pass. As a result it had been noted that tended to produce long narrative songs, often sung individually, which might dwell on the themes of pastoral activity or animals, designed to pass the time in the tedium of work. Hunting songs, like those of the Mbuti of the Congo, often incorporated distinctive whistles and yodels so that hunters could identity each other's locations and those of their prey.
Read more about this topic: Work Song
Famous quotes containing the words hunting, pastoral and/or songs:
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,
Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness
With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,
On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world
And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)