518 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
At the conclusion of the chorus, the singers play three emphatic drumbeats,
separated by weaker beats: these honor beats show respect for the dancers or
sometimes memorialize a person mentioned in the song. Then the ensemble
repeats the chorus, bc, completing one full push.
The leader may begin a push just before the previous push has ended. (Like-
wise, in subsequent pushes the lead and second may overlap.) Or the leader may
signal a series of consecutive loud beats (three, fi ve, or seven) at the end of a
push. After the fi nal push, a tail consisting of one last repetition of the chorus
marks the end of the song.
The music is sung in unison at full volume, in the moderately tense, mid-
register vocal style of the Southern Plains. On the second push, a group of women
joins in briefl y with a wailing ululation, adding a new layer to the vocal texture
and raising the pitch for the third and fourth pushes. Heth writes: “The solemn
tone befi ts the ending of this important annual event.”
In the twentieth century the “vanishing Americans” reestablished their
presence on the national scene as a minority within a large population of
other cultures. And as Indians managed to reconstruct a sense of peoplehood,
music helped to provide continuity, especially in the intertribal pow wow, an
amalgam of diverse elements that feels to participants like a cultural whole. The
competing obligations to remain loyal to older ways that society has dismissed,
to keep outraged memor y alive, to adjust to modern life, and to come together in
a celebratory way with other Indians, have marked the consciousness of modern
American Indians with a profound tension that fuels their cultural renewal.NORTEÑO (TEX-MEX)
One type of music cultivated by Tejanos, or Texans
of Mexican descent, is known to Spanish-speakers
as norteño (music from northern Mexico and north
of the Mexican border) and to English-speakers as
Te x-Me x. Drawing on traditional Mexican genres
such as mariachi, rancheras, and corridos, Tejano musi-
cians developed norteño by incorporating the music of
the German, Czech, and Polish immigrants who set-
tled in south Texas and northern Mexico in the nine-
teenth century. Along with banda (played by wind
bands with military-style instrumentation), tejano
(a style closer to mainstream pop, made popular in
the early 1990s especially by the Latina singer Selena),
and more recently nortec (electronic dance music that
samples norteño and banda), norteño is a type of roots
music that has in recent decades increased its audi-
ence to include non-Hispanic listeners.
The most common form of norteño is performed
by a standard ensemble called a conjunto norteño; thus
the music itself is often called conjunto (“g roup”).
The lead instrument, a button accordion, reveals the
music’s German infl uences, while the bajo sexto, a typeK Flaco Jiménez sings and
plays norteño on the button
accordion.172028_21_514-530_r2_mr.indd 518 23/01/13 11:18 AM