I was really fascinated by learning about the Navajo Nation. It made me curious about the some of the other tribes. So I decided to research a little on the second largest tribe of the United State, the Cherokee. The Cherokee have pretty much the same ideals concerning music as the Navajo. They view music as a creation given to them by the spirits.
I found a pretty neat quote that attempts to explain the Cherokee belief on music. "...to dance is to pray, to pray is to heal, to heal is to give, to give is to live, and to live is to dance." (http://www.cherokeediscovery.com/musicart.html) I thought it was a neat quote because the Cherokee share the Navajo belief that life happens in cycles and the quote is circular.
While searching Cherokee flute music (and thinking that I wouldn't ever find anything really cool and unique to post) I luckily ran into this video of a man playing two flutes at once. He first starts a melody with one flute and then plays them at once in a chilling beautiful harmony.
In 1821 Sequoyah founded a written language for the Cherokee. The first book to be printed in Cherokee was a hymnal.
This is an Ewe performer. I thought it was a pretty neat video featuring drums and flute.
Really interesting fluting! It calls to mind two very different things:
ReplyDelete1. When we start in on music of Ancient Greece in the Spring Term we'll see that they had double oboes--two pipes played at once.
2. The conductor of the Yale Glee Club when I was there had a very special talent--he could play the recorder duet from the beginning of "Stairway to Heaven" all by himself. Wow.
I have like one-sixteenth Cherokee blood in me, or one-thirty second or something like that. Anyways, when I was a child my family would visit the Cherokee reservation in NC every few years just for vacation. So it's really cool that you put this on here. I love the quote up top. I might use it sometime.
ReplyDeleteThe flute video is exactly as you say- chilling. That's talent. I wish I could play two instruments at once. But it is beautiful.
The Ewe video is really interesting. The drummers always look so calm and chilled out while they are drumming. They make it look easy, I guess.
Really neat Melissa!