Music and Ethnic Diversity

Practice and Culture of Early Native American Musical Performance

Evidence for pre-Columbian music practices in America was gathered by early European travelers, whose ethnographies documented Native American social and ceremonial music practices associated with indigenous theologies and religious practices. Musicologist Olivia Bloechl argues that despite being damned as mere savage superstition by European Protestant colonists, Native American music influenced European music and constituted an ontology of sacred song, a way of understanding songs as an expression of being, or what is in the world or beyond it. Native American song was thus understood as a culturally embedded fabric of social reality, a distillation of natural and theological worldviews.

European explorers and settlers described practices of ceremonial chanting, rattling, drumming, and shouting. Shouting was taken as a musical manifestation of fear and trembling at the power of the divine, and a renunciation, as a vocal cleansing or purgation of the soul and spirit. However, Native American music should not be taken merely as metaphysics in a Western sense of transcendence of nature. Music, by its aesthetic nature, already integrates physical movements and affects with higher formal categories of understanding in beauty and powerful ideas of reason in the sublime. Native American animism or natural spirituality crosses the boundaries between metaphysical transcendence of nature and physical reality, for nature is animated by spirits in many Native American religions.

Music and African American History

Music has been integral to African American experience for 350 years. African slaves brought with them to America the amazingly complex musical culture of West Africa, which included [Page 1517]not only the elements of most contemporary popular music, from blues and jazz to rock and roll, but also a system of drum-based communication that remained the world's swiftest form of longdistance communication prior to the telegraph. African American music historian Burton Perretti has documented that as early as 1740, in a period of slave revolts, South Carolina legislative officials banned musical instruments among African American slaves in fear of rebellion. In the first Great Awakening, a precursor to the American Revolution, many African American slaves were converted to Christianity, and formal hymns emerged in the south by 1761. In 1801, a former slave, Richard Allen, later the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published a book of spirituals and hymns.

Forms of African American performance culture began to emerge some 20 years later, when African Americans started to perform in venues in New York City and elsewhere. The publication of African American songs followed soon after, concentrating at first on the songs of sorrow and despair of African American slaves. The cultural significance of these songs is found in their depictions by Frederick Douglass in 1845 and by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. One sorrow song, quoted by Du Bois, reads as

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