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An Inuit woman from the Chukchi territory, just west of the Yukon
and part of the Arctic music area, performs a traditional drum song.
Photo: www.arcticphoto.co.uk. |
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The marrow of music
How geography determined our musical landscape
By Katie Wallace
| Geography, perhaps more than any other single element, determines
the kind of music to come out of a particular region. |
Long before whaling ships began crashing against the rough shores of Canada’s Arctic
islands and making wood available to locals for the first time, drums were built from raw materials ― such
as whalebone and caribou skin ― the rugged landscape provided.
Now, says Dr. Paula Conlon, a Canadian ethnomusicologist who teaches at the University
of Oklahoma, contemporary Inuit have plastic and other man-made materials at their disposal
from which to craft their drums.
This evolution from bone to wood to plastic is a nice illustration of how geography, perhaps
more than any other single element, determines the kind of music to come out of a particular
region. While scholars have identified six
distinctive native North American music areas (Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest,
Great Basin, Northwest Coast, and Arctic), each native group still has its own particular
musical repertoire and traditions that resonate with their own many-layered relationship
to the land.
Instruments, like the Inuit skin-and-bones drums, are a direct derivative of a physical
environment and its particular material offerings. While the conch provided ready-made trumpets
for some coastal groups, the Cree of northern Quebec wrapped caribou antlers with dried gut,
creating a unique stringed instrument. Further east, the Mi’kmaq people took ash wood
from the plentiful forests to craft the distinctive jikmaq’n, a stick split into several
layers at one end that is played percussively by beating it against the hand. In the Plains,
male Siouan dancers drew ceremonial strength from eagle-bone whistles worn around their necks.
“Having a drum was really important to the
community.”
— Dr.
Paula Conlon,
a Canadian ethnomusicologist |
Up in the Arctic, Conlon, who has studied the native music of Baffin Island, says
the treeless landscape played a much larger role in influencing the region’s music than
simply dictating available materials. Because survival depended upon a nomadic lifestyle, following
the seasonal cycles of food, each community was limited to a single collapsible instrument
that could be easily packed and carried.
“You’re only going to have what’s really important to you, and having
a drum was really important to the community,” she says.
Conlon, an expert in native flutes, says the regional availability of different types of
wood is another way the physical landscape imparts its unique mark on an area’s timbre
and tone. But the instrument’s value runs deeper, transcending superficial qualities
and drawing on original stories and myths that imbue the wood with mythical significance.
Take cedar, for instance. Although it makes a very good flute, Conlon says the spiritual
dimensions of the wood, and its association with everlasting life, cannot be ignored. First
Nations used cedar trees in their everyday life, whether it was for their homes, coffins,
canoes or totem poles. They referred to the cedar as the “tree of life.”
Conlon says the Inuit song repertoire provides another window into the group’s relationship
with the environment. The vast majority focuses on hunting, often calling on animals to give
themselves up so the people would have food to survive. “So you have a link with the
animals and the land right inside the song,” she says.
Besides singing about the land, one of Conlon’s former teachers, Dr. Elaine Keillor,
a Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton’s
School for Studies in Art and Culture, thinks some native music actually reflects the very
terrain from which it is derived. Keillor describes this connection between geography and music
as ‘melodic contour,’ which refers to the range a group’s music spans. Keillor
points to the parts of the Pacific Northwest coast, where sedentary villages were tightly pressed
between the looming masses of mountains and vast ocean, which Keillor says is reflected in
the tightly constrained range
of notes from that region’s music.
Music is not an isolable term or concept in native cultures,
just as the relationship with their environment permeates all aspects of life. The
two are virtually inextricable. |
She contrasts this tightness against the music of plains groups, who inhabited wide open
spaces running forever under big skies, and whose melodic contours Keillor describes as
more expansive in range, easily covering over an octave.
While the land may become the melody, the animal inhabitants of a region also make their way
into the music. Besides just singing about animals, Conlon points out many groups actually
made music that mimicked the sound of animals in their environment. The flutes she studies,
for instance, have songs with bird calls embedded in the music.
The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada makes this very point: music is not an isolable
term or concept in native cultures, just as the relationship with their environment permeates
all aspects of life. The two are virtually inextricable. As Conlon puts it, when it comes
to the interplay between native music and geography, “Everything’s reinforcing
everything else.”
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