Songprints
About the Book
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.
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 and Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context.Reviews
"An unusual contribution to the large body of literature dealing with Native American music and its cultural context. . . . It is interestingly written, includes considerable verbatim materials from interviews, and is readily accessible to the educated general reader."—Bruno Nettl, Choice
"Filled with information and insights that rarely surface in standard academic writing. . . . Destined to serve as a model of future investigations and will become a classic in the field."
—William K. Powers, Journal of American Folklore
"Vander makes significant contributions to many areas, including ethnomusicology, women's studies, Native American studies, and cultural anthropology."
—Charlotte J. Frisbie, author of Navajo Medicine Bundles or Jish: Acquisition, Transmission, and Disposition in the Past and Present
Blurbs
"This volume presents both musically and in cultural context the largest and finest corpus of Shoshone music on record. A second contribution is the abundant material on Shoshone women's culture in a changing, contemporary context. These materials are unique and have very few analogues in the entire literature on American Indians."--Demitri B. Shimkin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Vander makes significant contributions to many areas, including ethnomusicology, women's studies, Native American studies, and cultural anthropology. While choosing a format which puts major emphasis on the five women speaking for themselves, she sensitively balances their self-presentations with analytical comments, summaries, and comparisons designed for non-Shoshone, 'outsider' readers. Vander is to be congratulated not just for successful long-term fieldwork and involving her Shoshone collaborators in the end product, but also for sharing both them and what she has learned from them with the rest of us in such a refreshing way."--Charlotte J. Frisbie, author of Navajo Medicine Bundles or Jish: Acquisition, Transmission, and Disposition in the Past and Present
Awards
• Runner-up, Pauline Alderman Prize, 1996• Winner, ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, 1989
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