Native American Music Research Paper

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Native American Music, is music that is made from all natural elements. More often than not, Native American music is a combination of songs, chants, and dancing to commemorate all aspects of life, whether it be big or small. This kind of music is popular throughout North America and South America, primarily where Native American tribes are located. Native American music, has few similarities to our music culture today, but there is more differences. I believe that this kind of music has greater similarities than other music cultures that we will be learning later on. Within the last few weeks of class, we have been talking about Native American music and hearing what it sounds like. For the most part, there isn’t a lot of similarities between this kind of music and our own culture music. One similarity I guess we could say would be that both kinds of music often commemorate both big and small aspects of life, as stated above. Another similarity is that NA music is very repetitive and in our culture, songs that have choruses are also very repetitive. The last similarity I can think of is that in both music culture, falsetto and portamento is used in all kinds of music. The reason why I say this is because falsetto is singing at the top of a range and portamento is a slide from one…show more content…
The first example would be that the Native American music can have many different reasons behind it. An example would be the Sioux Grass Dance, which is a war chant that serves the purpose of getting warriors excited. Now in our music culture we don’t really see that often. Another example is that there really is no sense of meter in Native American music. The song Folsom Prison Blues is an example because there is a flexible meter throughout the song. In our culture, it is extremely rare to have a song that doesn’t have some type of meter, whether it be a three, four, or five

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