Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women (Music in American Life) - Softcover

Vander, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025206545X ISBN 13: 9780252065453

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1995

Synopsis

Perspectives on the twentieth-century lives of Shoshone women musicians

The musical lives of Native American women have experienced a century of cultural change and constancy. Judith Vander takes readers to the Shoshone of Wyoming's Wind River Reservation to meet five generations of Shoshone women. Vander’s conversations with Emily, Angelina, Alberta, Helene, and Lenore capture their distinct personalities as they share their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward their music.

Vander transcribes and analyzes seventy-five songs that the women sing. Each woman possesses a unique songprint-a repertoire distinctive to her culture, age, and personality. As Vander shows, the context of Shoshone social and religious ceremonies offers insights into the rise of the Native American Church, the emergence and popularity of the contemporary powwow, and the changing, enlarging role of women. In addition, two eyewitnesses accounts of Ghost Dance songs and performances elaborate on the function and meaning of the Ghost Dance among the Wind River Shoshones.

2nd Place from the Pauline Alderman Prize for New Scholarship on Women in Music from the International Congress on Women in Music. Winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 1989.

About this title

About the Author

Judith Vander is an independent ethnomusicologist and composer. She is the author of Ghost Dance Songs and Religions of a Wind River Shoshone Woman.

From the Back Cover

'This book makes an unusual contribution to the large body of literature dealing with Native American music and its cultural context. Most important, it reports on the musical life of women in one Indian tribe, helping to balance a body of scholarship that has concentrated largely on men's musical activities.'--Bruno Nettl, Choice

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 025206545X
• ISBN 13: 9780252065453
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376