Many of the present author's music analyses have been largely inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez: from early examples, such as what claimed to be the first Schenkerian “projection of the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic axis”; to more recent semantic studies of vocality which claim to “keep clearly in mind … the ‘tripartition.’” For many scholars, however, the lure of music semiology has stemmed as much from its epistemological clarity as from the windows it opens into interpretation, and this study will focus on the former, though not without implications for the latter. A fact of human life that semiology seems to be particularly good at exposing is how special the musical mind is, compared with the mind when verbalizing, cogitating, or doing anything other than being musical. One might have expected music psychology to have embraced music semiology. Nattiez, however, has emphasized that music semiology is not a science of communication. He has long objected to conventional notions of “communication” as a model of musical purpose and effect. Nevertheless, it has always been integral to Nattiez's mode of thought that music semiology is certainly the “science” of something. The forensic qualities of his epistemology and argumentation may not always have been embraced explicitly by anglophone musicology, but musicology has often resonated unwittingly with the aims of music semiology, hence the profound influence of Nattiez's research, often where it may not be specifically acknowledged or even recognized. In music psychology or music cognition—and the perception of music is central to Nattiez's whole endeavor while working, as it were, outside the mainstream of those disciplines—it is not so easy to discern the imprint of semiology. This gives pause for thought.

Just what a “science” is in the first place is a question almost too obvious and complex to be asked, but it must be a matter of continual fascination that we humans, knowing nothing other than our own minds (in Cartesian terms, at least), are perpetually driven to believe that there is a world outside ourselves. Since we think we are observing and experiencing something, not merely creating it in our individual imaginations, it is, as everyone knows, music above all the arts which in its essentially fugitive nature can touch us most deeply.

Introduction

The activity of music has always played a crucial role in my life as a teacher, scholar, musician, and human being. While changes in the technologies used to listen to music are often phrased in terms of “replacing” what came before for the sake of convenience, superior sound quality, or some other benefit, I find that my music collection at home still contains fairly equal parts vinyl, cassette, compact disc, and mp3. As a professional musician and scholar of American Indian musics, I have found that no single recording medium can serve all my needs. This is especially visible and audible when I look and listen to my collection of powwow music, in which homemade and commercially produced cassettes outnumber other formats.

This paper will reflect upon my lived experiences using both analog and digital recording technologies as a means to learn, archive, and disseminate powwow music. In this way the present work is broadly inspired by my correspondence with Professor David McAllester, in in which Professor McAllester once remarked that “much of the future of American Indian ethnomusicology will be ‘homework’ rather than ‘fieldwork’ and in the hands of Native musicologists.” As an urban Native (ethno)musicologist of Mescalero Apache, Irish, German, and Chicano descent, my homework for this chapter begins by situating myself more specifically in relation to relevant studies in ethnomusicology and American Indian Studies. I then discuss my formative period utilizing analog technology to learn Northern Plains powwow singing under the tutelage of Dr. Bernard Hoehner (Lakhǒta) as an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the mid-1990s. I then turn to my experiences utilizing analog and digital technologies while co-leading the Sweetwater Singers and teaching American Indian music at universities in the San Francisco Bay Area from the early 2000s to the present.

In the context of this volume, the practices and experiences discussed in this chapter address “the ways in which Indigenous people have utilized digital technologies to revive … and transmit musical traditions in complex articulations of Indigeneity.”

From the point of view of the listener, musical structures are objects distinguishable from other structures; from the point of view of the composer, they are the product of previous generations’ reflections on music, a link that makes comprehension between generations possible and that allows the expansion through time, place and genre of what is perceived as an element of a particular tradition. If a musical structure typical of a repertoire that is remote in space and time is utilized in a different context, its presence can achieve different results, since in the field of aesthetic perception and assessment the subjective parameters of the receivers—not only as single individuals but also as a group participating in a cultural area—are a non-negligible part of the communicative power of a cultural product. Moreover, every new composition is based on structures, that is to say musical forms, that emerge from previous generations. A new piece of music is like a constructive game in which tried and tested “forms” and practices are combined with newly invented ones, and in which composers’ creativity is expressed by their talent for combination much more than by their capacity to create completely new forms.

When hearing a piece for the first time, the listener likes both to feel at home—that is, able to recognize the forms and the ways they are combined— and to be surprised to encounter unexpected forms or new combinatory solutions. The composer—who is well aware of these communication mechanisms— sometimes uses structures with particular cultural connotations, associated with faraway eras or traditions, in this combinatorial game. Such objets trouvés are rarely quoted in the exact form they take in their original context; more often they are only hinted at, or more or less precisely imitated, so that the perception of their “alien” character in the new context, and the significance of their “alienation” can be very different. Moreover, some objets trouvés can adopt the grammatical rules of a particular style, that is, the rules necessary to give a particular form to a sequence without precisely coopting the object itself.

I am a composer, a producer, and a traditional Lil'wat singer. My education has encompassed numerous disciplines, including performing arts, information technology, creative writing, and ethnomusicology. I compose soundtracks for film, television, and theater productions; I produce my own CDs, which have been nominated for awards in Canada and the United States; and I have been composer in residence for the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Currently, I teach at the Native Education College, Capilano University, and the Vancity Office of Community Engagement at Simon Fraser University. This interview arose out of an invitation by Thomas Hilder, whom I met at the ICTM Colloquium “Indigenous Music and Dance as Cultural Property: Global Perspectives” in Toronto, May 2008. The questions, developed by Thomas, inquire specifically about issues of Indigenous music and digital media. My responses reveal my own personal experiences with musical media throughout my career and my views on pertinent issues of Indigennous musical transmission, production, composition, as well broader political concerns. The interview was conducted via e-mail over the course of numerous months and is thus the result of an extended digital dialogue between colleagues and friends.

Describe briefly your education and current work with music as a singer, composer, producer, and pedagogue.

Most of my knowledge comes from my mother, Flora Wallace, who was a traditional singer from the St'at'imc Nation (which is part of the Salish linguistic group). These teachings have helped me form my own views of music and philosophically inform my compositions. I grew up in Vancouver in the Mount Pleasant area, which back in those days was a diverse working-class neighborhood. I was exposed to a variety of songs from different musical cultures. I also started in radio at a young age (through the high school I was attending), which further broadened my musical exposure.

When I speak of my education, many things have contributed to it that were not necessarily academic. I started at a community radio station called Vancouver CO-OP Radio and that had many music programs that specialized in many music forms (electro-acoustic, experimental, reggae, punk, and many other forms).

If the Enlightenment is understood as an event in the history of mediation— as Clifford Siskin, William Warner, and others have productively suggested— then printed music made a considerable contribution to that event. The pages of music scores formed an important part of both public and private life in the eighteenth century, and new forms of publication allowed consumers increased access to them. This century saw the growth of music engraving, the invention of lithography, and a huge increase in the sheer number and variety of music printers and publishers. These developments took place within a rapidly evolving world of print culture more generally, as the proliferation of journals changed the quotidian relationships between print materials and their consumers while also affording new opportunities to advertise commercial print goods. Scholarship on book history and on music printing and publishing has begun to draw attention to the important role printed artifacts played in the history of thought and in everyday life.

Still, not all of the Enlightenment's printed objects were either books or scores; some were a bit of both. Put another way, a huge quantity of printed music is often ignored or forgotten in discussions of eighteenth-century book history: the musical examples included in books about music. Apart from simply falling between the typical scholarly divisions, musical examples present interesting challenges to the history of mediation. Hidden from direct view within the pages of words that enclose them, they are nodes of connection between media that allow us to ask questions about the uses and conceptualizations of print material. They are integrated into the text that surrounds them—and most often dependent upon it for complete comprehensibility— but they cannot be read in the same way as that text, and they do not have the same function.

One particular type of example, focused on meter and affect, dramatizes the disparity between media that are mixed on the page. Eighteenth-century books on music often contained lengthy taxonomies of meter in the form of omnibus musical examples. These taxonomies were intended to demonstrate the uses and varieties of meters and were also meant to build and reaffirm the sensibilities that allowed musicians to gauge the correct tempi and affects for pieces of music.

In Vienna around the turn of the nineteenth century, sales of various forms of print media—sheet music, engravings, books, and maps—were prominent and closely interconnected features of the commercial landscape. The relationship between media was easily articulated in the use of the word Kunsthandlung to describe many of the shops that printed and sold music. The literal translation “art shop” hardly conveys the broader meaning that would have been understood at the time, encompassing not only art but also everything regarded as “cultural,” including books, maps, music, and scientific gadgets like telescopes and geometric instruments. Thus the contemporary chronicler of Viennese life, Johann Pezzl (1756–1823), identifies fifteen Kunsthändler active in the city in 1822, selling “prints, drawings, maps, music, mathematical and optical instruments, colored inks, drawing materials, stitch and knitting patterns, visiting cards, games, books concerned primarily with prints, as well as paintings and busts.” In this way, one might say that the Kunsthändler sought to provide nourishment for the enlightened sensibility, in which the cultivation of music was but one strand in a portfolio of interests that also encompassed the desire to decorate one's home with engravings and curiosities and to view the world through both maps and topographical landscapes.

To what extent did this intermingling of the arts and sciences have an impact on the production, marketing, and sale of printed music? Were the different trades pursued entirely separately within each shop, or were they integrated to some degree? How did the Kunsthändler manage competing priorities and engage with different constituencies of consumers associated with different media? These questions have not been addressed in histories of music publishing or indeed in discussions of the art, book, and cartographic trades, which have largely pursued independent narratives without considering influences or dependencies in the wider commercial sphere. In part, this is a result of deficiencies in the evidential record: very few such establishments continued to trade beyond the nineteenth century, and in most cases their archives have simply not survived. Thus it is rarely possible to step beyond the threshold to explore the inner workings of a particular shop or to engage more deeply with the mechanics of the trade, beyond enumerating the items that were produced and sold.

Introduction

Methodological Considerations

Between March 1958 and October 1960, no fewer than six major works by prominent European avant-garde composers for multiple spatially distributed orchestral groups (with or without electronic sounds) received their first performances: Boulez's Doubles (which would later be expanded into Figures doubles prismes) and Poésie pour pouvoir; Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré ; and Henri Pousseur's Rimes pour multiples sources sonores were sometimes premiered days apart, in key musical centers such as Paris, Cologne, and Donaueschingen. It is instructive to regard these key postwar modernist works as owing their existence in part to the specific characteristics of the historical era into which they were launched. One of the important developments of this era concerns music recording and sound reproduction, specifically the commercial introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology into homes throughout the Western world, including the introduction of commercially available stereo long-playing records in 1958. Stereo radio transmission also started to come of age over the course of the decade beginning in that year, and multichannel cinema sound systems were already commonplace in major urban centers around the world. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of the aforementioned spatialized works informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? To what extent did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? The answers to these seemingly naive questions will require evaluating the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony may have been inscribed into these works. This inscription might include both ways in which audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and ways in which composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations. Answering these questions also requires, on the poietic side of things, an evaluation of these composers’ constantly evolving discourses on their works’ relationship with technology (in order to reveal the ways in which they aim to position themselves strategically with respect to technological innovations of their time). On the esthesic flank, it requires an analysis of the extent to which the experience of two-channel stereophony lay at the horizon of contemporary listeners’ expectations.

Some years ago I worked as a music teacher at a wealthy school in Lima. Most of my students lived in gated neighborhoods far from Lima's center and were driven to school by the family chauffeur instead of using public transportation. Their friends mainly lived in the same four exclusive districts, and therefore they did not need to go to other parts of Lima. Teaching a lesson to a fourth grade (nine-year-olds) on contemporary Andean music, I asked the students to name their favorite singer. They all started to laugh, watching each other and looking at me as if I were mad. Nobody said anything, but then one little blonde girl stood up and told me, blushing and looking at the floor, that she liked Dina Paucar. A bunch of girls whispered “chola” and laughed behind her back. I asked how many of them had maids—everyone had one, “of course”— so the immediate assignment was to interview their maids about contemporary Andean singers in Lima. There was an awkward silence. Another girl stood up saying: “Miss, my father will kill me if I talk to my maid.” Others saw it as a radically different music assignment (they were accustomed to receiving Western art music lessons), so they did not complain. I was expecting letters from angry parents and even being fired for this. But the girls amazed me with interesting interviews, posters, CDs (or VCDs borrowed from their maids), and some were quite moved by sharing something with their maids again: “Maria was like my mother, she raised me, I don't know why I stopped talking to her.”

Similar experiences motivated me to explore the Lima upper-class relationship with Andean music (be this traditional, contemporary, or fusion), their ideas of the Andean person (el Andino) and the articulation of people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds through music. I am aware that, strictly speaking, nearly all music is likely to be a fusion of previous genres. However, in Lima, only a limited range of music is considered as such by the public, or even by musicians.

Although several of the case stswudies in this book feature indigenous people based in countries with strong economies, it is important to stress that a disproportionate number of the world's indigenous people live in poverty. A particularly notable aspect of the so-called digital revolution is the way it has provided low-income consumers and creators with access to cheap audio-visual technologies. Massive reductions in prices alongside exponential growth in unlicensed copying (so-called media piracy) have given rise to an abundance of new media consumers and producers among the world's poorer populations, especially in parts of the global south. In such regions, the Internet is often available only in larger towns and cities, primarily accessed in public Internet cafes. In these rapidly transforming technological environments, the number of home computers has risen exponentially, but a large proportion of them remain offline. Meanwhile, in smaller towns and rural areas, television reception is often poor; thus, where electricity is available, audiovisual entertainment often takes the form of videos.

Arguably, the most ubiquitous form of digital hardware in low-income homes of the global south—especially during the first decade of the twentyfirst century—was the VCD (Video Compact Disc) player. Such machines were usually found alongside a stack of (mostly “pirated”) VCD discs of films and music videos. The VCD format, which is almost unknown in the global north and a kind of low-tech version of the DVD, enables video to be copied onto CD discs and played, on low-cost players, through a television. Originally launched in China, this technology rapidly spread to many areas of the global south, escalating both the creation of massive new markets for audiovisual entertainment among low-income groups and rampant “media piracy.” It also motivated indigenous musicians—often with negligible technical training or financial resources—to grasp the entrepreneurial opportunities offered by this cheap audiovisual technology to create music videos for these new low-income local and regional markets. Here we might make a distinction between outwardly orientated indigenous media created for a global stage or international indigenous community—as featured in certain chapters of this book—and media created with more local or regional audiences in mind—the primary focus here.