Why Suyá sing : a musical anthropology of an Amazonian people

Bibliographic Information

Why Suyá sing : a musical anthropology of an Amazonian people

Anthony Seeger

University of Illinois Press, c2004

  • : pbk.

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Originally published: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987

Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-156) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Like many other South American Indian communities, the Suya Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, devote a great deal of time and energy to making music, especially singing. In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suya Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suya--and by extension for other groups-- through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in the initiation ceremony. Based on over twenty-four months of field research and years of musical exchange, Seeger analyzes the different verbal arts and then focuses on details of musical performance. He reveals how Suya singing creates euphoria out of silence, a village community out of a collection of houses, a socialized adult out of a boy, and contributes to the formation of ideas about time, space, and social identity. This new paperback edition features an indispensable CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suya in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers.

Table of Contents

  • The Mouse Ceremony begins
  • Suya vocal art: From speech to song
  • The origins of songs
  • Singing as a creative activity
  • From lab to field: The mystery of rising pitch in a rainy season song
  • Leaping, dancing and singing the Mouse's song
  • Why Suya sing

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