24 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
routes, helping to carry the fl ag of the French king into the heart of North
America. And the sacred music they brought, by adding to the Roman Catholic
Church’s authority, proved useful in the settlement of New France.EUROPEAN DESCRIPTIONS OF
AMERICAN INDIAN MUSICEuropean explorers, settlers, and missionaries in the New World left behind
written descriptions that offer a glimpse of American Indian music making.
Those descriptions can be understood only by keeping in mind the misconcep-
tions that are likely to arise when members of separate cultures come into con-
tact on a massive scale. Only with phonograph recordings and the fi rst systematic
attempts to notate their music (as described in chapter 9) did it become possible
to begin to draw a more detailed picture of American Indian music history.
When Europeans encountered the people they hoped to displace, they were
struck fi rst by the differences between their own customs, dress, and behavior and
those of American Indians. Measured against European values, the Indians were
found wanting, an attitude that bred contempt and gave settlers an excuse to cheat,
brutalize, and kill the peoples who were there before them. But the settlers also saw
similarities, especially in the Indians’ capacity for virtue (as the settlers defi ned it), a
perception that led efforts to educate them in order to civilize them, and to convert
them to Christianity in order to save their souls. It is in this context of “good
Indians and bad Indians” (i.e., those similar to or different from their European
observers) that historians have learned to read the fi rst descriptions of Indian
music making.
As early as the 1530s, a group of Spaniards traveling near what today is Big
Spring, Texas, was greeted by “all the people... with such yells as were terrifi c,
striking the palms of their hands violently against their thighs.” They presented
their visitors with “gourds bored with holes and having pebbles in them, an
instrument for the most important occasions produced only at the dance or to
effect cures, and which none dare touch but those who own them. They say there
is virtue in them, and because they do not grow in that country, they come from
heaven.” Continuing west, the Spaniards met Indians in New Mexico who gave
them a “jingle bell of copper” and two medicine rattles.
Another account from New Mexico in 1540 confi rms the Indi-
ans’ use of musical sound for specifi c functions, such as the cer-
emonial grinding of corn: “Three [Zuni] women come in, each
going to her stone. One crushes the maize, the next grinds it, and
the third grinds it fi ner. Before they come inside the door they
remove their shoes, tie up their hair and cover it, and shake their
clothes. While they are grinding, a man sits at the door playing a
fl ageolet [an end-blown fl ute], and the women move their stones,
keeping time with the music, and all three sing together.”
These reports from the Southwest, written less than half a cen-
tury after Columbus reached the Western Hemisphere, are some
of the fi rst evidence of American Indian instruments and uses of
music. Although they say nothing about its sound, they give some
idea of how music functioned in American Indian societies.K This French engraving
of American Indian
farmers, appearing in
Alain Manesson Mallet’s
Description de l’Univers
(1683), refl ects the “good
Indian” image.172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 24 23/01/13 9:50 AM