Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanSept.self storage 27--As Tony Chavarria, the curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, surveyed objects to be installed in the museum's latest exhibition, one sensed that although he was seeing artifacts, he was hearing music in his mind. "In Native culture in the Southwest," he said, "music is entwined with daily life. You could classify music in different ways -- some is secular, some plays a religious role -- but in a larger sense it is all entwined as a civic activity." That it pulses at the core of traditional communities is reflected in the title of the show, which opens on Sunday, Sept. 29 -- Heartbeat: Music of the Native Southwest.At the heart of Heartbeat are 100 items that suggest essential facets of music-making in the region. Many are musical instruments drawn from the museum's collection, but the displays also embrace aspects of dance, which in Southwestern culture is closely interrelated with music. The show focuses on "the Native Southwest." "Anthropologists have a handy definition of what constitutes the Southwest: from Durango, Colorado, in the north to Durango, Mexico, in the south, from Las Vegas, Nevada, in the west to Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the east," Chavarria said. "Within that area, there are maybe 40 to 50 distinct cultural groups, factoring in that some tribes may themselves embrace multiple groups." That being the case, the exhibition cannot be comprehensive. Instead, "the idea is to whet the viewer's appetite."It would seem fundamentally wrongheaded to put together a show about music that invites people to look but not listen. Chavarria has therefore included a multimedia component that not only brings alive the sound of music but also makes the exhibition more kinetic, demonstrating that music-making is a physical activity infused with movement and that in traditional Native cultures it is an active rather than a passive occupation. "This was a challenge in designing the exhibit," Chavarria said, "because we wanted to have the music represented and yet not allow any particular performance to overwhelm the exhibit." At two listening stations, visitors can hear the sounds of the instruments privately. In a few cases, the recordings feature the very instruments on display, although that's the exception rather than the rule, due to the age and condition of some of the instruments. More often, visitors will hear modern approximations of how the older instruments would ideally sound. Elsewhere in the show, video projections offer historical and modern footage of singing, instrument-playing, and dancing.An important part of the experience is the Heartbeat Recording Studio. "People get two minutes in which to create their own performance of anything musical," Chavarria explained. "They might sing, they might do hand-clapping, they might just speak some poetry. We'll have a selection of instruments available, or people are invited to bring their own instruments to play." Their two-minute pieces will be recorded and then uploaded to SoundCloud.The instruments most immediately identified with Native American music -- certainly in the Southwest -- are drums. The exhibition includes two cases of drums that (like all the instruments in the show) were selected both for their inherent beauty as objects and to suggest a breadth of types, regions, and time periods. Although Chavarria's academic specialty is pottery, he speaks about the drums with a familiarity born of long exposure. He pointed to one that leapt out from the crowd because of its vividly painted decorations. "That is a very characteristic Pueblo piece: a cylindrical double drum, painted on its side, black around the top, the two drumheads made of stretched animal skin. A drum like this would likely be from Cochiti." The drum sitting next to it looked altogether more earthy, less flamboyant in its embellishment, with much more lacing zigzagged along the instrument's sides to connect the drumheads. "That's how they make them in Taos or Picuris." One of the most intriguing drums is fashioned out of a metal lard can. The can was painted over, but enough stenciled printing creeps through to reveal that the drum is an example of everyday materials recycled for musical use.Other percussion instruments also get a strong representation in the show, thanks to a selection of rattles and ramini storageps. Visitors get an up-close look at a rattle made from moth cocoons. Dozens of these cocoons were sliced open, filled with seeds, and closed up again before being assembled into a long strand to be wrapped around a dancer's leg for Yaqui deer dances. The rasps -- sticks carved with ridges that emit a froggy croak when scraped by another stick -- include a colorful example from Ohkay Owingeh shaped and painted to depict a woman grinding corn. Another, from Taos, is so unassuming that it would be easy to overlook. How often, one wonders, was this inconspicuous twig kicked away or entirely ignored before someone spotted its potential as a rasp and noticed that its curvature begged to be whittled into a tiny but exquisite horse head?"Flutes are defining instruments," Chavarria said. "They are widely viewed as being the most connected to emotional expression. Certain flute pieces are felt to resound especially with males and others with females. The flute is largely a more individualistic instrument. Drums are played more in groups, but flutes tend to be played by individuals, say for courtship. Ed Kabotie is a flute player of mixed Hopi and Santa Clara heritage who plays some of the examples in our listening stations, and he maintains that Southwestern music is, at heart, rain-courting music." The array of flutes includes minuscule whistles made of bird bones, thought by some scholars to have been intended as game calls. "Modern instruments are normally made of wood or cane," Chavarria observed, "but those materials disintegrate over time, so the older ones are mostly made of bone."An Apache fiddle looks a little lonely in this lineup. "That's the only string instrument in the Southwest," Chavarria said. "It's not a string culture. It used to be thought that there weren't any really traditional American string instruments at all, but then they discovered a Bonampak mural in southern Mexico [Bonampak is a Maya site thought to have been active from roughly 600 to 900 A.D.]. It includes the image of a person dressed in a jaguar costume, playing some string instrument. Ethnomusicologists constructed a working instrument based on that image, and it turns out that when it's played, it sounds like the growl of a jaguar."The oldest piece in the show is a Hohokam pot from about 950 that shows a flute player being supported by a second figure, a motif repeated several times on the pot. Its meaning is ambiguous. Several bone flutes seem to date from around 1350 to 1400, and a few pieces are very recent, but most of the artifacts date from the period 1880 to 1960, which Chavarria described as "the strength of our collection"Dances, like music, have a way of migrating among discrete Southwest cultures. Chavarria, who comes from Santa Clara, recalls witnessing a dance associated with his pueblo surprisingly showing up in San Felipe, with the song attached to it intact but sung in Keresan rather than in Santa Clara's Tewa. "There is always cross-pollination going on. There's a saying among anthropologists: The constant thing about tradition is that it always changes." Among the dance-related artifacts are eight "little people" made by the late Lucy Yepa Lowden of Jemez Pueblo, foot-tall doll-like figurines wearing detailed outfits -- costumes, headgear, jewelry -- appropriate for specific celebrations. Several full-size dance costumes are also on display, and they created a curatorial challenge. Since some are regularly used in ceremonies, their owners lent them with the proviso that the museum would de-install them, return them briefly for use at the relevant feast, and then reinstall them in the exhibition. This will arise repeatedly, since the show is scheduled to remain in place for two years. The occasions when dance-related items go missing will help make the point that these artifacts are very much part of a living tradition.details--Heartbeat: Music of the Native Southwest--Opens Sunday, Sept. 29 (opening-day festivities, performances, & demonstrations 1 to 4 p.m.); through Sept. 8, 2015--Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo on Museum Hill--By museum admission (free on Sundays to N.M. residents); 505-476-1250Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉
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