Among the Indian tribes of North and South America a number of vital musical tradition exists today. From the point of view of the arts, humanities and social sciences this music is important because of its own intrinsic beauty and also because it embodies many of the unique artistic, religious and philosophic values of the cultures in which it is found.

In a discussion of the music of the Apache, Navaho and Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, some generalizations can be made that will apply to most North American Indian music as well. A striking feature is that it is almost entirely vocal. Except for a few flutes, and whistles, the musical instruments are largely for the purpose of accompanying the voice and consist of a wide variety of drums, rasps and rattles. Only a few instances have been noted of Indian groups using some form of part-singing; unison is almost the universal rule. In the rare instances when men and women sing together it is usually in parallel octaves.

The songs are characteristically performed in a vigorous, emphatic manner. Though pitches range from a deep bass to a piercing falsetto, the overall impression is of a high, tense quality in which emphases are sometimes marked with sharp yells. Occasional bird or animal calls may be introduced as part of the song. Fine voices do not go unnoticed, but there is little effort to cultivate a "pleasing" voice for its own sake. People come to hear famous songs rather than famous singers. A good memory is more important than a pleasing voice even though different areas have distinct vocal techniques which most singers follow.

The melody most frequently starts high and, in the course of the song, moved down over an octave or more until comes to rest on a base note which we call the tonic in our tradition. Often a song contains a number of such figures with the later beginnings lower than the earlier ones and all coming to rest on the base note. The result is a "collapsing" melodic line in which the tonic is given a very great solidity and all movement seems drawn to it as though to a magnet.

The meter tends to be regular throughout, most often in duple time. However it has the flexibility to be expected in melodic (as contrasted with harmonic) music; measures or phrases of uneven length frequently occur to accommodate differences of text in succeeding verses, or for other reasons.

The texts very often contain long sections of vocables or nonsense syllables such as he-ne-ne-ya or heyo-heyo-ho-ho-wa, which may outweigh the meaningful words in the song by as much as three or four to one. Often entire songs may consist of vocables only, yet they are fixed for a particular song and the types of vocables used vary consistently from tribe to tribe. Though there are song series with meaningful texts of epic dimensions and high literary quality, the short rhapsodic text surrounded by vocables is prevalent enough to be called the usual mode. This Apache song is a good example:

Heyoneya, heyoneya,
' A way no yo 'awe heyo, ne yanga
' A way he yo 'awahey ya neya,
Heyoneya, heyoneya,
The girls of Deshiko go downstream two by two,
Heyoneya, hehoney, etc.

American Indian singing is group singing for the most part. There are leaders who introduce songs, singing the first few notes solo, or who by themselves carry one part of an antiphonal piece, but even the ceremonial practitioner who is master of a large complex chant is usually the center of a chorus made up of anyone who wants to hum along with him or knows even a few phrases of the work in hand. Though there are certain songs, such as lullabies or corn-grinding songs, that are specifically for women, one is struck by the absence of women's voices in North American Indian music as a whole.

Most of the music is religious. This is a corollary of the integrated quality of American Indian life in which art, theater, medicine, and religion are not separated into different categories but overlap each other to such an extend that there are often no separate terms for them in the native languages. Religion pervades the daily life with an immediate practical force rare in our own culture. It has little theology, not being concerned with the questions of belief, but functions largely to maintain the order of the universe and to get necessary things done. Women have clearly delineated role and generally this does not include leadership in ritual. Many Indian cultures are matrilineal; women may own most of the property and home and give their family name to their children, but ceremony tends to be in the hands of the men.

Music of the Pueblos

The tightly organized theocratic towns know collectively as the "Pueblos" (Spanish: "towns") of Arizona and New Mexico had their beginnings in wandering bands of people living in brush shelters or simple pit-houses and gathering wild foods in the desert. By about 200 A.D. they had obtained corn from peoples to the south, and were creating farm communities and making pottery. By 900 A.D. the pattern of Pueblo culture was clearly set and adobe villages were established near good farm land in peaceful regions or in fortified caves, as a Mesa Verde, when the people were under attack. For various reasons, which certainly included a long drought, the inhabitants of the agricultural towns moved south to the Rio Grande where their descendants live today, and further west, established the desert Pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, and the Hopi. Though there are some twenty towns and four quite separate languages among them, there is a striking similarity of the culture.

The calendrical round of ceremonies is oriented toward bringing rain and ensuring good crops. The most common family organization is matrilineal–a man is at home in his mother's house. His important role is as a farmer and a keeper of ceremonies: his membership in religious societies is the dominant aspect of his life. In his hands is the curing of the sick and the turning of the seasons.

Song and dance are an inseparable part of the religious ritual. There is much emphasis on preparation and training in the underground chambers (kivas) where the religious societies meet. As a result the ceremonies are are highly polished performances: the deep pulsing choruses, chanting the long periods of sacred formulae, sing as one man. The costumes are beautifully refurbished for every ceremony and the dancers move with clarity and precision. The cooperation and organization evident in the music and other aspects of ritual are reflected in many phases of Pueblo life.

As might be expected of the sophisticated town dwellers of the Southwest, Pueblo music has great variety. The music of the great rituals is performed in the plazas before audiences of all ages. The singers, costumed, painted and often masked, represent deities related to rain, crops and the changing seasons. They dance as they sing. The movement is in contained formal figures, highly repetitive, and the songs too are repetitive and chant like. Part of the dance is often mimetic gesture, emphasizing and clarifying the lesson to be imparted. Corn, Butterfly, Kachina, Snake and Buffalo Dances invoke the help of deities, celebrate the beauty of clouds and rain and of creatures associated with rain, and instruct the people concerning these sources of life and happiness. Here is an example from Acoma:

There in the west is the home of the raingods,
There in the west is their water pool,
In the middle of the water pool is the spruce tree that they use as a ladder,
Up from the water the raingods draw the crops which give us life,
East from there, on the place where we dance, they lay the crops,
Then up from that place the people receive crops and life.

Other dances have a secular as well as a sacred context. Comanche, Fourty-nine, and Squaw Dances are examples which not only bring rain but are also considered to be recreational or social dances. The accompanying songs are likely to have texts entirely of vocables or largely of vocables with brief jocular phrases added such as:

Weya he yahey yaheye yaheyo ha he yo,
Weya he yaheye yaheye yaheyo ha he yo,
Weya he yaheye yaheye yaheyo haheyoho ya weya heyo weya.
Oh yes I love you Sweetheart,
I don't care if you marry sixteen times,
I'll get you yet oweya yaya.
Weya hayo weya hayo hayo.

There are also many kinds of songs not necessarily associated with dances. The corn grinding songs mentioned above are examples. There are animal or bird songs with stories, and game songs that accompany various forms of gambling. Lullabies are widely known in the Pueblos and may describe creatures such as owls and deer by their appearance and actions, or compare the baby to a beetle, puppy or rabbit.

Pueblo culture has been unusually resistant to influences from outside. The native religion and many other traditions have bee jealously preserved by a strong priesthood even in towns that have been nominally Roman Catholic since the Spanish Conquest four hundred years ago. In the face of such conservatism it comes as a surprise to find the Pueblos quite distinctly cosmopolitan in some aspects of their musical live.

Though the Pueblos are reticent about the more deeply sacred music, they are often willing to record the public recreational songs, and they borrow very readily from the music of other cultures at this level. Navaho "Yeibichai" songs and dances are used at the end of the great midwinter Shalako festival at Zuni: corngrinding songs are freely traded from Pueblo to Pueblo and also borrowed from the Navahos. Many "Comanche Dance" songs are Plains Indian melodies made over in a Pueblo mold. "Forty-nine" songs are picked up from recordings or are learned at Indian shows or Indian schools where members of different tribes come together.

A certain high point in cosmopolitanism is shown at Zuni where a song recording a conversation between a Navaho man and a Hopi girl is entirely in those two languages and where at least one veteran of overseas action can sing "Auld Lang Syne," in Korean. An imitation Indian song has been recorded at Zuni in which an intelligent Indian woman follows exactly the style demanded by non-Indian Americans when they want to hear "Indian" music.

The composition of new songs is a constant process in Pueblo music. Songs are created for the sacred ceremonies as well as for social dances by singers noted for their invention. These are learned, rehearsed and used for a season or two after which they may be replaced by still newer songs. Some of these compositions become so well-liked that they may be used longer than usual. Some sacred songs have passed into the popular repertory for this reason after their ritual services was accomplished.

The Apaches and Navahos

The Apaches and Navahos are closely related Athabascan speaking migrants who began filtering into the Southwest in small groups around the turn of the first millenium A.D. Armed with powerful sinew-backed bows, they lived as hunters and marauders organized in self-sufficient bands under strong leadership. It seems likely that it was these invaders who forced the Pueblo Indians to retreat into their fortified villages and cliff dwellings in the 12th and 13th centuries. It also seems clear that it was was the Pueblo revolt against Spanish dominion in 1680 that led to the differentiation of the Navaho from Apache culture. For many years whole villages of Pueblo peoples, fearing reprisals by the Spanish, hid away in the back country in close contact with the Athabascan hunters and taught them gardening, sheepheerding and weaving. The two groups intermarried and began to spread over the countryside in agricultural family settlements. To the east and west of this zone of mixed culture the other Athabascans continued in their small tightly organized hunting and raiding bands and became the Eastern and Western Apaches. Meanwhile, in northwestern New Mexico, the hunters-turned-farmers prospered greatly, spread westward into Arizona and became the Navahos, the largest tribe in the United States. Today their population is approaching 100,000, while the nine divisions of the Eastern and Western Apache together total hardly a tenth of that number.

Music of the Apaches

"Apache" the world over is a synonym for daring and relentless warefare. Sometimes a mere handful of these warriors was enough to engage the full operations of the U.S. Army for months on end: for decades their economic base consisted of booty from raids and tribute from terrified Mexican towns. Today cattle ranching on beautiful upland range in the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico and tribal income from timber and mineral resources, provide for several of the bands, notably the White Mountain and San Carlos of the Western Apache and the Mescalero and Jicarilla of the Easter group. Though there is a variety of detail in the cultures of the various bands, certain features distinguish them all as part of a single tradition.

Much interest in Apache life is focused on the puberty ceremony for young girls. This is a time of celebration and blessing for the whole community. The girl dances for hours and observes ritual tabus that indicate the sacred forces now inherent in her body: for example she must drink though a tube because the touch of her lips would have a powerful effect on all water and make it unsafe for others to drink. Gifts and food are exchanged, symbolic of the wealth and happiness implied by the fertility celebrated in the ceremony The girl runs in the four directions as an earnest of her future energy and physical well-being, and a beautiful woman molds her body to ensure symmetry and perfection.

Other rituals are similarly centered on the individual, particularly in case of sickness which is considered a disruption of harmony between man and the forces of nature. Deities such as White Shell Woman, Monster Slayer, Child of the Water, White God, Black God, Bear, Snake and Mountain Gods, are invoked in the night-long chants to aid the sick person. Some of these beings are depicted in colored sands in dry-paintings laid out on the floor in the ceremonial shelter. The design serves as an altar and is dismantled immediately after it has been used. Small dry-paintings are sometimes made with pollen on buckskin and the power of the beings represented is transferred to the sick person by application.

Beneficent Mountain Gods are represented by kilted dancers in black masks crowned with carved and painted wooden slats. By their presence at puberty rites or curing ceremonials these deities bring sacred power and help to the people. Their spectacular dance, commonly called Crown Dance or Devil Dance, with its dramatic angular movement and the comical, befuddled clown, is much admired in the Southwest: some outstanding dance teams give public performances at "pow-wows" and Indian shows.

Apache music sounds very different from the measure choruses of the Pueblos. A tense, strongly nasal voice production is used and there is a technique, uniquely Apache, of suddenly releasing this tension and almost "swallowing" the voice. Songs begin high, often very high in a powerful falsetto, and descend to the tonic where several phrases may be repeated on that one tone alone. The songs begin with a chorus, very often built solely on the open triad (do-mi-sol-do), and usually with a vocable text. Then comes the meaningful text, usually changed on one or two tones with the jerky, swallowing technique mentioned above. Songs often contain two balancing verses with the chorus at the beginning and end and also between the verses. The first verse usually refers to the male deities and attributes and second verse to female. The balance between male and female appears in many aspects of the ritual and mythology.

The individualism of Apache culture is apparent in their music. Though nearly all formal singing is choral, personal variations are pronounced; it is a group of individuals singing rather than a choir in which all voices are merged in one effect.

Besides strictly ritual music the Apaches have social dance songs, often associated with ceremonies; moccasin game songs; songs of famous warriors; and social songs that may accompany the convivial drinking of tulpai, a native beverage made from fermented corn. In all these songs the vocal technique and formal structure is very much the same as in the ceremonial music described above.

The Lipan, Carrizo and Mescalero Apaches are early links in the movement of the Peyote religion from Mexico to the Plains tribes of the United States. This pan-tribal sect which has long been organized as the Native American Church has a considerable body of sacred music. The Eastern Apaches, who have practiced the religion since well before white contact, may have contributed much to its style as it is sung today from Mexico to Canada and all through the Western and Middle-wester states. Long introductory and codential phrases on the tonic, the prevailingly downward melodic movement, a prevalence of the open triad, the consistent use of a separate note for every syllable of text and the restriction of time values of these notes to only two, a long and a short, are all features of Apache music and are characteristic of Peyote style. The water drum used to accompany Peyote music may also be a development from the Apache water drum described below.

The Apache fiddle, almost the only stringed instrument of native make found anywhere among North American Indians is small, rarely more than two feet long, made on a hollowed out mescal stalk. It has a bow, strung with rosined horsehair, and one or two horsehair or gut strings which emit a faint squeaky sound when bowed. Brief melodies based on favorite tulpai songs constitute the repertory. It is a chamber instrument, played at home to oneself or a small group.

The Apaches also make a whistle flute of river cane with three stops which usually produce notes approximating do-mi-fa-sol of the European scale. Brief melodies on these notes are repeated over and over with a breathy quavering technique. Flutes and flute-playing are associated with love and love magic. The characteristic Apache drum is a water drum made on a large iron pot. The buckskin drumhead is stretched over the opening and bound in place with buckskin thongs or narrow strips of inner tubing. The rasp, a notched stick held on a gourd or basket resonator and rubbed with a bone or another stick, is used in some rituals. For example, a rasp made of manzanita wood was used in a curing ceremony involving the sacred power of mountains and bears since bears like to eat manzanita berries.

Music of the Navahos

In many ways, Navaho culture seems to be an elaboration on the basic Southern Athabascan pattern still shown by their cousins the Apaches. Their greatest fame, of course, rests in their fine tapestry-weave rugs and their silvercraft. These arts, learned from the Pueblos and the Mexicans, respectively, epitomize the Navajo flair for developing ideas and techniques and making them into something Navaho. The same thing has happened with their ritual. Quite possibly it was their long contact with the Pueblo refugees and the related leisure of agricultural life that helped to create a loosening of tradition and willingness to invent new forms. Whatever the causes, they now possess and integrated series of some thirty or forty ceremonials ranging up to nine nights in length and endowed with a tremendous richness of symbolic detail.

As with the Apaches, the purpose is to restore and maintain harmony with the forces of nature and is focused on an individual in need of this effect. The major chants have as many as two or three dozen dry-paintings associated with them. The sick person the "one sung over," and his familuy choose from among these posibilities for the particular performance in mind, according to their budget and their specific needs. The larger dry-paintings may be ten or twelve fee square and in their creation may require several hours of intensive work by the ceremonial pratitioner and a half dozen assistants.Among the Indian tribes of North and South America a number of vital musical tradition exists today. From the point of view of the arts, humanities and social sciences this music is important because of its own intrinsic beauty and also because it embodies many of the unique artistic, religious and philosophic values of the cultures in which it is found.

In a discussion of the music of the Apache, Navaho and Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, some generalizations can be made that will apply to most North American Indian music as well. A striking feature is that it is almost entirely vocal. Except for a few flutes, and whistles, the musical instruments are largely for the purpose of accompanying the voice and consist of a wide variety of drums, rasps and rattles. Only a few instances have been noted of Indian groups using some form of part-singing; unison is almost the universal rule. In the rare instances when men and women sing together it is usually in parallel octaves.

The songs are characteristically performed in a vigorous, emphatic manner. Though pitches range from a deep bass to a piercing falsetto, the overall impression is of a high, tense quality in which emphases are sometimes marked with sharp yells. Occasional bird or animal calls may be introduced as part of the song. Fine voices do not go unnoticed, but there is little effort to cultivate a "pleasing" voice for its own sake. People come to hear famous songs rather than famous singers. A good memory is more important than a pleasing voice even though different areas have distinct vocal techniques which most singers follow.

The melody most frequently starts high and, in the course of the song, moved down over an octave or more until comes to rest on a base note which we call the tonic in our tradition. Often a song contains a number of such figures with the later beginnings lower than the earlier ones and all coming to rest on the base note. The result is a "collapsing" melodic line in which the tonic is given a very great solidity and all movement seems drawn to it as though to a magnet.

The meter tends to be regular throughout, most often in duple time. However it has the flexibility to be expected in melodic (as contrasted with harmonic) music; measures or phrases of uneven length frequently occur to accommodate differences of text in succeeding verses, or for other reasons.

The texts very often contain long sections of vocables or nonsense syllables such as he-ne-ne-ya or heyo-heyo-ho-ho-wa, which may outweigh the meaningful words in the song by as much as three or four to one. Often entire songs may consist of vocables only, yet they are fixed for a particular song and the types of vocables used vary consistently from tribe to tribe. Though there are song series with meaningful texts of epic dimensions and high literary quality, the short rhapsodic text surrounded by vocables is prevalent enough to be called the usual mode. This Apache song is a good example:

Heyoneya, heyoneya,
' A way no yo 'awe heyo, ne yanga
' A way he yo 'awahey ya neya,
Heyoneya, heyoneya,
The girls of Deshiko go downstream two by two,
Heyoneya, hehoney, etc.

American Indian singing is group singing for the most part. There are leaders who introduce songs, singing the first few notes solo, or who by themselves carry one part of an antiphonal piece, but even the ceremonial practitioner who is master of a large complex chant is usually the center of a chorus made up of anyone who wants to hum along with him or knows even a few phrases of the work in hand. Though there are certain songs, such as lullabies or corn-grinding songs, that are specifically for women, one is struck by the absence of women's voices in North American Indian music as a whole.

Most of the music is religious. This is a corollary of the integrated quality of American Indian life in which art, theater, medicine, and religion are not separated into different categories but overlap each other to such an extend that there are often no separate terms for them in the native languages. Religion pervades the daily life with an immediate practical force rare in our own culture. It has little theology, not being concerned with the questions of belief, but functions largely to maintain the order of the universe and to get necessary things done. Women have clearly delineated role and generally this does not include leadership in ritual. Many Indian cultures are matrilineal; women may own most of the property and home and give their family name to their children, but ceremony tends to be in the hands of the men.

Music of the Pueblos

The tightly organized theocratic towns know collectively as the "Pueblos" (Spanish: "towns") of Arizona and New Mexico had their beginnings in wandering bands of people living in brush shelters or simple pit-houses and gathering wild foods in the desert. By about 200 A.D. they had obtained corn from peoples to the south, and were creating farm communities and making pottery. By 900 A.D. the pattern of Pueblo culture was clearly set and adobe villages were established near good farm land in peaceful regions or in fortified caves, as a Mesa Verde, when the people were under attack. For various reasons, which certainly included a long drought, the inhabitants of the agricultural towns moved south to the Rio Grande where their descendants live today, and further west, established the desert Pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, and the Hopi. Though there are some twenty towns and four quite separate languages among them, there is a striking similarity of the culture.

The calendrical round of ceremonies is oriented toward bringing rain and ensuring good crops. The most common family organization is matrilineal–a man is at home in his mother's house. His important role is as a farmer and a keeper of ceremonies: his membership in religious societies is the dominant aspect of his life. In his hands is the curing of the sick and the turning of the seasons.

Song and dance are an inseparable part of the religious ritual. There is much emphasis on preparation and training in the underground chambers (kivas) where the religious societies meet. As a result the ceremonies are are highly polished performances: the deep pulsing choruses, chanting the long periods of sacred formulae, sing as one man. The costumes are beautifully refurbished for every ceremony and the dancers move with clarity and precision. The cooperation and organization evident in the music and other aspects of ritual are reflected in many phases of Pueblo life.

As might be expected of the sophisticated town dwellers of the Southwest, Pueblo music has great variety. The music of the great rituals is performed in the plazas before audiences of all ages. The singers, costumed, painted and often masked, represent deities related to rain, crops and the changing seasons. They dance as they sing. The movement is in contained formal figures, highly repetitive, and the songs too are repetitive and chant like. Part of the dance is often mimetic gesture, emphasizing and clarifying the lesson to be imparted. Corn, Butterfly, Kachina, Snake and Buffalo Dances invoke the help of deities, celebrate the beauty of clouds and rain and of creatures associated with rain, and instruct the people concerning these sources of life and happiness. Here is an example from Acoma:

There in the west is the home of the raingods,
There in the west is their water pool,
In the middle of the water pool is the spruce tree that they use as a ladder,
Up from the water the raingods draw the crops which give us life,
East from there, on the place where we dance, they lay the crops,
Then up from that place the people receive crops and life.

Other dances have a secular as well as a sacred context. Comanche, Fourty-nine, and Squaw Dances are examples which not only bring rain but are also considered to be recreational or social dances. The accompanying songs are likely to have texts entirely of vocables or largely of vocables with brief jocular phrases added such as:

Weya he yahey yaheye yaheyo ha he yo,
Weya he yaheye yaheye yaheyo ha he yo,
Weya he yaheye yaheye yaheyo haheyoho ya weya heyo weya.
Oh yes I love you Sweetheart,
I don't care if you marry sixteen times,
I'll get you yet oweya yaya.
Weya hayo weya hayo hayo.

There are also many kinds of songs not necessarily associated with dances. The corn grinding songs mentioned above are examples. There are animal or bird songs with stories, and game songs that accompany various forms of gambling. Lullabies are widely known in the Pueblos and may describe creatures such as owls and deer by their appearance and actions, or compare the baby to a beetle, puppy or rabbit.

Pueblo culture has been unusually resistant to influences from outside. The native religion and many other traditions have bee jealously preserved by a strong priesthood even in towns that have been nominally Roman Catholic since the Spanish Conquest four hundred years ago. In the face of such conservatism it comes as a surprise to find the Pueblos quite distinctly cosmopolitan in some aspects of their musical live.

Though the Pueblos are reticent about the more deeply sacred music, they are often willing to record the public recreational songs, and they borrow very readily from the music of other cultures at this level. Navaho "Yeibichai" songs and dances are used at the end of the great midwinter Shalako festival at Zuni: corngrinding songs are freely traded from Pueblo to Pueblo and also borrowed from the Navahos. Many "Comanche Dance" songs are Plains Indian melodies made over in a Pueblo mold. "Forty-nine" songs are picked up from recordings or are learned at Indian shows or Indian schools where members of different tribes come together.

A certain high point in cosmopolitanism is shown at Zuni where a song recording a conversation between a Navaho man and a Hopi girl is entirely in those two languages and where at least one veteran of overseas action can sing "Auld Lang Syne," in Korean. An imitation Indian song has been recorded at Zuni in which an intelligent Indian woman follows exactly the style demanded by non-Indian Americans when they want to hear "Indian" music.

The composition of new songs is a constant process in Pueblo music. Songs are created for the sacred ceremonies as well as for social dances by singers noted for their invention. These are learned, rehearsed and used for a season or two after which they may be replaced by still newer songs. Some of these compositions become so well-liked that they may be used longer than usual. Some sacred songs have passed into the popular repertory for this reason after their ritual services was accomplished.

The Apaches and Navahos

The Apaches and Navahos are closely related Athabascan speaking migrants who began filtering into the Southwest in small groups around the turn of the first millenium A.D. Armed with powerful sinew-backed bows, they lived as hunters and marauders organized in self-sufficient bands under strong leadership. It seems likely that it was these invaders who forced the Pueblo Indians to retreat into their fortified villages and cliff dwellings in the 12th and 13th centuries. It also seems clear that it was was the Pueblo revolt against Spanish dominion in 1680 that led to the differentiation of the Navaho from Apache culture. For many years whole villages of Pueblo peoples, fearing reprisals by the Spanish, hid away in the back country in close contact with the Athabascan hunters and taught them gardening, sheepheerding and weaving. The two groups intermarried and began to spread over the countryside in agricultural family settlements. To the east and west of this zone of mixed culture the other Athabascans continued in their small tightly organized hunting and raiding bands and became the Eastern and Western Apaches. Meanwhile, in northwestern New Mexico, the hunters-turned-farmers prospered greatly, spread westward into Arizona and became the Navahos, the largest tribe in the United States. Today their population is approaching 100,000, while the nine divisions of the Eastern and Western Apache together total hardly a tenth of that number.

Music of the Apaches

"Apache" the world over is a synonym for daring and relentless warefare. Sometimes a mere handful of these warriors was enough to engage the full operations of the U.S. Army for months on end: for decades their economic base consisted of booty from raids and tribute from terrified Mexican towns. Today cattle ranching on beautiful upland range in the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico and tribal income from timber and mineral resources, provide for several of the bands, notably the White Mountain and San Carlos of the Western Apache and the Mescalero and Jicarilla of the Easter group. Though there is a variety of detail in the cultures of the various bands, certain features distinguish them all as part of a single tradition.

Much interest in Apache life is focused on the puberty ceremony for young girls. This is a time of celebration and blessing for the whole community. The girl dances for hours and observes ritual tabus that indicate the sacred forces now inherent in her body: for example she must drink though a tube because the touch of her lips would have a powerful effect on all water and make it unsafe for others to drink. Gifts and food are exchanged, symbolic of the wealth and happiness implied by the fertility celebrated in the ceremony The girl runs in the four directions as an earnest of her future energy and physical well-being, and a beautiful woman molds her body to ensure symmetry and perfection.

Other rituals are similarly centered on the individual, particularly in case of sickness which is considered a disruption of harmony between man and the forces of nature. Deities such as White Shell Woman, Monster Slayer, Child of the Water, White God, Black God, Bear, Snake and Mountain Gods, are invoked in the night-long chants to aid the sick person. Some of these beings are depicted in colored sands in dry-paintings laid out on the floor in the ceremonial shelter. The design serves as an altar and is dismantled immediately after it has been used. Small dry-paintings are sometimes made with pollen on buckskin and the power of the beings represented is transferred to the sick person by application.

Beneficent Mountain Gods are represented by kilted dancers in black masks crowned with carved and painted wooden slats. By their presence at puberty rites or curing ceremonials these deities bring sacred power and help to the people. Their spectacular dance, commonly called Crown Dance or Devil Dance, with its dramatic angular movement and the comical, befuddled clown, is much admired in the Southwest: some outstanding dance teams give public performances at "pow-wows" and Indian shows.

Apache music sounds very different from the measure choruses of the Pueblos. A tense, strongly nasal voice production is used and there is a technique, uniquely Apache, of suddenly releasing this tension and almost "swallowing" the voice. Songs begin high, often very high in a powerful falsetto, and descend to the tonic where several phrases may be repeated on that one tone alone. The songs begin with a chorus, very often built solely on the open triad (do-mi-sol-do), and usually with a vocable text. Then comes the meaningful text, usually changed on one or two tones with the jerky, swallowing technique mentioned above. Songs often contain two balancing verses with the chorus at the beginning and end and also between the verses. The first verse usually refers to the male deities and attributes and second verse to female. The balance between male and female appears in many aspects of the ritual and mythology.

The individualism of Apache culture is apparent in their music. Though nearly all formal singing is choral, personal variations are pronounced; it is a group of individuals singing rather than a choir in which all voices are merged in one effect.

Besides strictly ritual music the Apaches have social dance songs, often associated with ceremonies; moccasin game songs; songs of famous warriors; and social songs that may accompany the convivial drinking of tulpai, a native beverage made from fermented corn. In all these songs the vocal technique and formal structure is very much the same as in the ceremonial music described above.

The Lipan, Carrizo and Mescalero Apaches are early links in the movement of the Peyote religion from Mexico to the Plains tribes of the United States. This pan-tribal sect which has long been organized as the Native American Church has a considerable body of sacred music. The Eastern Apaches, who have practiced the religion since well before white contact, may have contributed much to its style as it is sung today from Mexico to Canada and all through the Western and Middle-wester states. Long introductory and codential phrases on the tonic, the prevailingly downward melodic movement, a prevalence of the open triad, the consistent use of a separate note for every syllable of text and the restriction of time values of these notes to only two, a long and a short, are all features of Apache music and are characteristic of Peyote style. The water drum used to accompany Peyote music may also be a development from the Apache water drum described below.

The Apache fiddle, almost the only stringed instrument of native make found anywhere among North American Indians is small, rarely more than two feet long, made on a hollowed out mescal stalk. It has a bow, strung with rosined horsehair, and one or two horsehair or gut strings which emit a faint squeaky sound when bowed. Brief melodies based on favorite tulpai songs constitute the repertory. It is a chamber instrument, played at home to oneself or a small group.

The Apaches also make a whistle flute of river cane with three stops which usually produce notes approximating do-mi-fa-sol of the European scale. Brief melodies on these notes are repeated over and over with a breathy quavering technique. Flutes and flute-playing are associated with love and love magic. The characteristic Apache drum is a water drum made on a large iron pot. The buckskin drumhead is stretched over the opening and bound in place with buckskin thongs or narrow strips of inner tubing. The rasp, a notched stick held on a gourd or basket resonator and rubbed with a bone or another stick, is used in some rituals. For example, a rasp made of manzanita wood was used in a curing ceremony involving the sacred power of mountains and bears since bears like to eat manzanita berries.

Music of the Navahos

In many ways, Navaho culture seems to be an elaboration on the basic Southern Athabascan pattern still shown by their cousins the Apaches. Their greatest fame, of course, rests in their fine tapestry-weave rugs and their silvercraft. These arts, learned from the Pueblos and the Mexicans, respectively, epitomize the Navajo flair for developing ideas and techniques and making them into something Navaho. The same thing has happened with their ritual. Quite possibly it was their long contact with the Pueblo refugees and the related leisure of agricultural life that helped to create a loosening of tradition and willingness to invent new forms. Whatever the causes, they now possess and integrated series of some thirty or forty ceremonials ranging up to nine nights in length and endowed with a tremendous richness of symbolic detail.

As with the Apache, the purpose is to restore and maintain harmony with the forces of nature and is focused on an individual in need of this effect. The major chants have as many as two or three dozen dry-paintings associated with them. The sick person, the "one sung over," and his family choose from among these possibilities for the particular performance in mind, according to their budget and specific needs. The larger dry-paintings may be ten or twelve feet square and in their creation may require several hours of intensive work by the ceremonial practitioner and a half dozen assistants.

Quite typically the ritual program consists of several days of exorcism during which all danger and evil are banished from the individual and from his family and all others who are present. Then follows a period of invocation of blessing and help is sought from the deities appropriate to the illness of the "one sung over." In essence the performance is the retelling or re-enactment of parts of the creation myth. For example, where someone is suffering from shock or apprehension after having been bitten or frightened by a snake, the Shootingway may be performed. The episode of a hero living with the Snake People and obtaining their power is re-enacted in the songs, in the scenes depicted in the dry-paintings and in the formal ritual procedure of the singer. In the ceremony, the one sung over is the protagonist in a drama which vividly portrays his attainment of kinship with, and power over snakes:

He is gliding along, head lifted, he is gliding along, head lifted,
He is gliding along, head lifted, he is gliding along, head lifted,

Now Holy Young Man is gliding like a snake, head lifted,
Now the Great Dark Snake is gliding along, head lifted,
He is traveling in the dust, head lifted,
He is traveling in the dew, head lifted,
He is full of menace, gliding along, head lifted,
He trembles at the danger, gliding along, head lifted,
Life forever, harmony everywhere, he is gliding along, head lifted.

She is gliding along, head lifted, etc.
(second verse is the same except that is refers to
Holy Young Woman and the Great White Snake.)

The two most common Navaho ceremonials, on which are concentrated much of the interest and zest in the daily life of the culture, are Enemyway and Blessingway. The former is a war ceremonial to protect Navahos from the ghosts of alien peoples. Its private ritual contains formidable ghost-killing magic and its public aspect includes the Navahos' only social dancing and a tremendous body of popular songs.

Blessingway is the best loved of the ceremonies and involves only the invocation of good. Its songs are "songs of good hope." It is frequently performed for a pregnant woman shortly before the child is expected or for someone about to undertake a long journey. It is the shortest and simplest of the ceremonies and the most sacred. It is described by the Navahos as the "root" or the "backbone" of their religion. Parts or all of it are incorporated into most of the larger ceremonies. The purificatory bathing and drying of the protagonist is the climax of this rite and is a re-enactment of the bathing and drying of Changing Woman, the principal Navaho deity. The cornmeal powder with which she was dried, mixed with the loose skin fro her body, is the substance from which man was created.

A great variety of shorter or longer, or combined forms of the chants may be performed, again according to the particular needs of the individual for who sake all this complex of ritual, dance, drama and music is set in motion.

The music is much like that of the Apache ceremonials: chorus-verse-chorus, with the greater melodic movement on the choruses and a considerable use of the open triad. Even the sacred texts have the same or very similar phrases that constantly reappear in both cultures. Navaho vocal style is also nasal and individualistic but less markedly so than that of the Apaches. In the verses of the former the melody is less restricted in range and smoother in delivery than in the latter. But in music, as in other things, the Navahos show their interest in new forms. In the Popular public music of the Enemyway, for instance (the "Squaw Dance" songs), there are several different kinds of songs such as Circle Dance, Skip Dance, and Sway songs, which do not follow the pattern described above but are highly melodic throughout and in which the texts are largely vocable with only a few meaningful phrases. Some Skip Dance songs are being composed today using material borrowed from Rock'n'Roll and other popular music that is heard on the radio and then made over according to Navaho patterns of music.

The dance songs of the Nightway are another case in point. Masked dancers, impersonating male and female gods (Yeibichai), perform with a clown much like the one that accompanies the Apache Mountain Gods, and sing striking songs which start with the cry of the gods and then soar into falsetto cadences very unlike the chant style.

Along with the Navahos' freedom in the elaboration of ritual and the invention of new forms in religion, art and music, there is a sense of secrecy of esoteric ritual and knowledge which is more reminiscent of the Pueblos than of the Apaches. Apache women sometimes join the sacred chanting and are likely to link arms and dance forward and back in graceful lines wherever there is music: Navaho women seem more excluded from religious participation, rarely sing at all, and dance only in "Squaw Dances." Indeed, even at Squaw Dances there are nights when only a few girls come out to dance, and that only briefly, or when no dancing occurs at all. Convivial drinking is part of the ritual at Apache ceremonies, at least nominally. Parts of Navaho rituals are private; strangers, especially non Navahos, are not welcome. Even as regards other Navahos, there is a belief that it is unsafe for those not initiated in certain kinds of ritual to be present. Some forms of Navaho music, such as flute playing and corn-grinding songs, have become virtually extinct, very likely because of increasing restrictions surrounding their performance.

Navaho musical instruments consist of a small water drum made of a tall gray pot often only five or six inches in diameter at the opening, the bull-roarer, ritual whistles some of which are played with the distal end in a cup of water to give a burgling sound in imitation of songbirds, rawhide and gourd rattles and a basket turned over and thumped with a drumstick made of yucca leaves. All of these are specific to certain ceremonies and are never used out of their religious context.

In the last twenty years many hundreds of Navahos have joined the Native American Church. They seem to have taken the peyote songs and instruments from their neighbors the Utes, or from Plains sources with little or no modification. Some students of Navaho culture have predicted that in time the Navahos will turn the peyote ritual into another Navaho chant. It remains to be seen whether their genius for absorption can prevail over the fixed forms of this strongly identified sect.