- AANA: Drumdancers – Includes cultural uses of drumdancing and a photograph.
- CJTM: Charlie Panigoniak: Eskimo Music in Transition – Lynn Whidden examines the influences the music styles of different generations have on each other.
- Drum Dancing – – Account of the tradition, with lyrics.
- Inuit Music – Article covering drum dancing, personal songs, and throat singing.
- Inuit Thoat Singing – Two audio samples.
- Inuit Throat-Singing – Includes an interview with Evie Mark, suggested CDs, and references.
- Inukshuk Productions – Nunavik based record company specializing in contemporary and traditional Inuit music. Includes studio equipment and rates and a CD catalog with artist profiles, audio samples, and ordering. [English/French]
- Siqiniup Qilauta – Ottawa-based performers of traditional throat singing and drum dancing. Offering online biographies, gallery, performance dates, media reprints, related links and a guest book.
- Nunatsiaq News: Kattajjatiit From Generation to Generation – Alison Blackduck’s interview of throat-singers Minnie and Madeleine Allakariallak. (May 18, 2001)
- CBC Musical Memories: Drum Dance of the Copper Inuit – Report on Diamond Jenness’ recording of hundreds of Inuit drum dance songs on wax cylinders. Links. (November 22, 2000)
- Aglukark, Susan – Official site for this recording artist and motivational speaker. Includes biography, tour dates and discography.
- Canoe.ca: Susan Aglukark – Offers a detailed biography and discography.
- First Nation’s Drum: Susan Aglukark – Detailed biography, with a photo.
The Inuit live across the northern sections of Canada, especially in Yukon, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Northwest Territories, as well as in Alaska and Greenland. Traditional Inuit music has been based around drums used in dance music as far back as can be known, and a vocal style called katajjaq has become of interest in Canada and abroad.
In Inuit there is no word for what a European-influenced listener or ethnomusicologist’s understanding of music, «and ethnographic investigation seems to suggest that the concept of music as such is also absent from their culture.» The closest word, nipi, includes music, the sound of speech, and noise. (Nattiez 1990:56)
Native American/First Nation music:
Topics
Chicken scratch Ghost Dance
Hip hop Native American flute
Peyote song Powwow
Tribal sounds
Arapaho Blackfoot
Dene Innu
Inuit Iroquois
Kiowa Navajo
Omaha Kwakiutl
Pueblo (Hopi, Zuni) Seminole
Sioux (Lakota, Dakota) Yuman
Music of the United States – Music of Canada
Until the advent of commercial recording technology, Inuit music was usually used in spiritual ceremonies to ask the spirits (see Inuit mythology) for good luck in hunting or gambling, as well as simple lullabies. Inuit music has long been noted for a stoic lack of work or love songs. These musical beginnings were modified with the arrival of European sailors, especially from Scotland and Ireland. Instruments like the accordion were popularized, and dances like the jig or reel became common. Scotch-Irish derived American country music has been especially popular among Inuits in the 20th century.
Nettl (1956, p.107) list the following characteristics of Inuit music: recitative-like singing, complex rhythmic organization, relatively small melodic range averging about a sixth, prominance of major thirds and minor seconds melodically, with undulating melodic movement.
The Canadian Broadcasting Service has been broadcasting music in Inuit communities since 1961, when a station was opened in Iqaluit, Northwest Territories. Charlie Panigoniak was the best-known of the early Inuit recording stars, and he remains a popular accordion-player. The most famous Inuit performers, however, are Susan Aglukark (b. 1967) and Tanya Tagaq Gillis. In Greenland, there is an Inuit hip hop crew called Nuuk Posse, which formed in 1985 and raps in the Kalaallisut language.[1]
Katajjaq (also pirkusirtuk and nipaquhiit) is a type of traditional competitive song, considered a game, usually held between two women. It is one of the world’s few examples of throat-singing, a unique method of producing sounds that is otherwise best-known in Tuvan throat-singing. When competing, two women stand face-to-face and sing using a complex method of following each other, thus that one voice hits a strong accent while the other hits a weak, melding the two voices into a nearly indistinguishable single sound. They repeat brief motifs at staggered intervals, often imitating the sounds of geese, caribou or other wildlife, until one runs out of breath, trips over her own tongue, or begins laughing, and the contest is then over. «The old woman who teaches the children corrects sloppy intonation of contours, poorly meshed phase displacements, and vague rhythms exactly like a Western vocal coach.» (Nattiez 1990:57)
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