Listening To Our Ancestors
This morning, before Manny and I visited the National Museum of the American Indian’s exhibit on North Pacific tribes, it occurred to me that while some music we hate and some we love, there’s also music we need. At least, there’s music I need. It informs most of my day, every day. For the last ten or fifteen years, my playlist has revolved around several staple CDs mixed with a few new ones and, if Manny’s setting it up, a forgotten favorite or two.
Lo and behold, the museum was featuring an exhibit called Listening to Our Ancestors. The American and Canadian Indians of the Pacific Northwest, it turns out, also rely on music. It may even affect their individual heart-beat and brain waves the way Miles and Mingus and Coltrane do mine. Their music shapes their culture and informs their every day life. It heals and protects them. Sacred rhythms marry the spiritual with the material. (A museum plaque informed me that these tribes use the present tense exclusively, to prevent anything from falling into the past where they might lose it.)
The exhibit displayed carved power sticks and beautiful rattles. Shamans clap the power sticks together in special rhythms to entice the spirits. They heal the sick with a series of beats using grizzly bear claws and beaver teeth. A separate rattling song reveals the weather. Spiritually gifted men and women clap masks open and shut over their faces, using the sound to make the Unseen Manifest [their capitalization]. Villagers play ancestral beats to the children and others rhythms to soothe or exhilarate the tribe as it might need.
The exhibit included special sticks that set the pace for different gambling games. The games, too, were on display in wooden boxes the size of a backgammon set. Apparently, each type of gambling requires its traditional theme song.
The communal story/history songs, two of which we heard performed by visiting singers and dancers, originate from a supernatural exchange with birds. The songs we heard are sacred. One, the narrator explained, tells about a drowning mother and children, who just as they go under, discover they can walk on water. The real miracle becomes manifest when the mother realizes a killer whale is lying on its side to lift them up. As a rescue canoe arrives, the whale slowly sinks and swims away.
- We Need to Hit and Shake to Play the Music
- Instruments "A la Cart"
- Learn the rhythm, Feel the rhythm, Be the rhythm!
Add New Comment
Viewing 10 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
You can't go back though, not really, and so we find our own music, as best we can.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I think our equivalent is jazz (and not just for us Mahers). Maybe it's not ancient, but it is a true American art form, and I think we both know about the healing power.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Oliver Sacks has a new book due next month on the brain and music. You might want to survey the pop sci lit.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.