Today we are going to tell you a little bit about the music that the native americans used to play and which were the instruments. We hope you like it!
Generally, native american music was choral, although we can also find some tribes where it was usual to find solo singing and the main purposes were ceremonies, recreation, expression, and healing. Some of the instruments would be flutes and drums, which represent the sound as the heartbeat of the earth and, the most important, voices. If we move into the Great Plains we can find other instruments such as rattles and whistles. For example:
Moving to the Nothern Plains we find the flute, a very common instrument in this culture. It is said that it was played by men and the main point of it was to attract the women’s attention but over the years we can also find that it was played by both men and women. The most important was the courting flute. It was a solo instrument and it is considered as the third oldest known musical instrument in the world, with bone flutes dating back over 60,000 years. Drums were discovered first, and then various rattles were made, followed by bone whistles. Eventually, more holes were added and they were made larger:
There were two types of music in the Norther Plains: secular and sacred.
The secular music can be represented in many different ways but the most common is to thank for everyday. The sacred music, as the word indicates, were used for personal spiritual practice. Depending on the number of people who participated in it, the number and size of the instruments could vary. For example, drums could be larger or smaller.
Different tribes have different traditions about the drum and how to play it, but the basic construction is very similar in most tribes: a wooden frame or a carved and hollowed-out log, with finely tanned buckskin or elkskin stretched taut across the opening by sinew thongs.
Here you can see some of them:
Many people think that Native American music is one of the most complex ever performed. The releasing of the vocals combined with the different drum beats makes it a very intricate form of music. Another interesting item of note is that every region of the country where the Native Americans had settled produced extremely varying forms and sounds of music, so the music produced is always unique to its specific group.
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