Introduction
Abstract
In presenting this issue of the Journal devoted to music and the expressive arts in general, we hope to emphasize the role of the arts in American Indian life: past, present, and future. The articles and poems presented here address themselves to important musical events and processes both archaic and ongoing. Although several previous authors have dismissed Indian music from the realm of "art music" because they viewed it primarily as "functional," the authors in this collection present evidence of spiritual, aesthetic, and creative values inherent in the music itself. The music and musicians are honored and esteemed by the Indian people who are both the practitioners and beneficiaries. "The Study of Indian Music" attempts to outline both the advantages and disadvantages of studying one's own culture. Although Indian people are usually better prepared intellectually and physically to research their own people, sometimes social constraints influence their access to information and their subsequent presentation of the results of the study. The conclusion is that Indian people are the appropriate reporters and analyzers of their own cultures. Paul Humphreys' work, "The Tradition of Song Renewal among the Pueblo Indians of North America;' shows the insights that a sensitive composer and performer can bring to the study of Indian music. After Humphreys listened, learned, and sang with several Pueblo composers to learn their ideas and techniques, he composed a song to see what an Indian musician would do with it. This synthetic method produced results that were surprising both to the researcher and to the Pueblo composer, proving once again the unpredictability of true creativity. Richard Keeling's analysis, "The 'Sobbing' Quality in a Hupa Brush Dance Song;' grew out of two years' fieldwork and additional archival research on Hupa music. While he was supported by matching grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA, Keeling compiled a comprehensive collection of Northwest California sound recordings. The systematic comparison of old and new performances along with sound registrations produced graphically by machine indicated a Brush Dance aesthetic far removed from Western musical practice. In fact, the musical and spiritual parameters seemed to coincide. Purification, emotional state, and relation to the universe all combined to produce the vocal technique of 'sobbing.'