User:Nposs/Music 250/Suyá music EDIT

This article is about the music of the Suyá people.

Suyá music is derived from the Suyá people of Brazil. The Suyá indians are a group of about 150 individuals who live on the Suyá-Miçu River and are native to Mato Grosso, Brazil. Their village houses are set up in a circle format around the square where the majority of the ceremonies take place. Other buildings include a men's meeting house that almost always includes singing. Speech and hearing are highly valued in the social behavior of the tribe. The Suyá Indians symbolize this importance with body decorations that include ear and lip disks (also known as lip plates). In 1980 Anthony Seeger interpreted this body ornamentation as an emphasis in orality and listening as a principal means of perception, transmission, comprehension, and expression of fundamental values.

Music is a very important part of every day life for the Suyá people. Their songs stem from ancient ceremonial songs derrived from myths, songs learned from outsiders, and songs taught to the community by "men without spirits". Men without spirits are men or women who have lost their spirits but can hear songs from animals, plants, and insects. They are the ones who bring new songs to the community. Most of the Suyá music is vocal, although rattles and flutes are known to be part of their music. The reason for the focus on mainly vocals is because their music is passed down orally. The Suyá people use music in myth telling, speech making, and singing. For example, in the initiation ceremony the Suyá people of Brazil teach boys how to sing certain songs as part of their initiation; the boys learn and practice songs under adult supervision in a special forest camp a short distance from their village. Although music is used by all members of the tribe, some forms are only used by adults, and even further some are only used by political and ceremonial leaders.

The Suyá people have only recently come into the light of ethnomusicology which is attributed to Anthony Seeger who has collected the most amount of written knowledge of the Suyá Indians.

Performance Context and History

For the Suyá Indians some of their singing occurs in the men's house. Like most Ge-Speaking Indians the Suyá music is vocal and they sometimes accompany their singing with rattles, but very rarely. Throughout the Suyá Indians history singing and vocal music is one part of a larger oral tradition and oral expression. Originally the songs of the Suyá were learned by a few special men and women based on age, sex, and whichever group they belong to. The form of these oral expression are usually on the more masculine oratory sound. Also the Suyá have many different genres that are differentiated by four nouns, speech, instruction, song, and invocation. The first type of song instruction would be used to retell how to do something like maybe cooking something and the grammar is that of everyday speech. The Suyá people decorate the earlobes and lower lips with heavy disks and this is believed to signify the importance of vocalization and listening.

Suyá Myths

The Suyá Indians unlike some other tribes they did not have to have a set way of telling a myth, narrative, or story. An example is the story of the origin of corn which is related to the mouse ceremony myth where the Suyá learn to use garden crop as food.

For the Suyá there was no one way to tell a myth, unlike the Xokleng Indians their myth of creation was memorized. For the Suyá their story of the origin of corn could be told anywhere by anyone. The Suyá learned invocations mostly likely from the Upper Xingu Indians . This most likely occured when the western and eastern Suyá groups began living together, the western group adopted the style. These invocations were used to help heal the body and to the Suyá these invocations were more important than herbal medicine. Any specific invocation had a special attribute of either an animal, plant, or another natural object. The Suyas' invocations were based on metaphors of an animal for example the invocation for an easy birth was named small fish because of how the fish can slip out of ones hands very easily.

Also in the genre of instruction there are different genres of instruction like recitatives. Next is speech and it refers to all the kinds of speech that are used by the Suyá people. Invocation is a private verbal form and meant to heard by only a few people. Last is song which refers to music, specifically songs. For the Suyá they were willing to use and obtain song from outsiders that they would bring to the village to teach the village a myth or a song from their own tribe.

Suyá history claims that the Suyá obtained many important things like fire throughout their history. These group members of the Suyá that performed the traditional styles and stories also performed the new songs from the outsiders. The last style of the type of songs from the Suyá is the songs from men without sprits which they claim that they can hear through the animals in the wild new songs. Also the Suyá music is ceremonial, the tribe has two groups withing the tribe based on name, kinship, and political association.

Cultural History

The Suyá people migrated to the Xingu region around 1840, where they met with a number of groups with whom they obtained womem, children, and exchanged items. From the Xingu they adopted many aspects of their culture such as; canoes, hammocks, and ceremonies. They also adapted food preparation techniques and body ornamentation.

The Suyá community greatly believes in the collective good, and shares everything from fire, food, land, songs, performances, shelter, clothes, and children. They also believe that a person’s name is central to the definition of who a person is and the groups to which he or she belongs. Today the Suyá live in a single village of about two hundred inhabitants on the banks of the Suiá-Miçu River. They speak a language belonging the northern branch of the Gê language family. They hunt, fish, gather supplies, and trade with frontier settlements to get their basic needs. They are protected from frontier violence and the national market economy by a reservation system that intermittently provides health care and material goods and involves them in a new multiethnic social system.

Musical Structure

Vocal music is highly valued in Suyá culture because it is a form of oral expression. For the Suyá people, the ability to hear and speak well are very important social behaviors. Instruments play a very small role in Suyá music. Although, sometimes rattles or alto Xingu flutes are incorporated and are used to accompany vocal music.

In song, and any other form, Suyá speech is organized in many ways and has many very distinct structures. However, most of these forms are restricted to use by Suyá men as political and ceremonial leaders.

There is a word for Suyá people, ngére, which designates "music," "ceremony," and a specific genre of songs. Therefore, all Suyá music (specifically vocal music)is ceremonial and serves a specific purpose in the community. There are no work songs, love songs, etc. The songs that the Suyá people sing are all confined to certain rituals in the community. A good example of this are the initiation ceremonies of young men where they mark their passage into adulthood with the piercing of their lips and ears.

Though they are the same structurally, there are two distinct genres in Suyá music. These genres known are called akia (shouted song) and ngére. Akia are masculine songs which are shouted in a high register. When sung by a group of men, heterophonic textures are often created as different songs are often performed at once with different melodies or tempos. New songs often come from the singers themselves. Ngére are not shouted, but sung in a lower register than akia, in unison and during Suyá ceremonies.

Both akia and ngére are seperated into parts. The first half is called kradi, the second half is called sindaw and both halves are split further into four more sections which are the same in both the kradi and the sindaw. These parts are kwd kaikaw (song syllables), sinti sülü (approaching the name), sinti iarén (telling the name), and kuré (coda). These are musical sections, not simply different parts of the text. However, melodies in akia seem to change more through these sections than in ngére. --E.Loomis (talk) 23:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Instruments used in Suya Music

Musical performances by the Suyá people are mainly done vocally. Musical instruments play a very small role in Suyá culture, however they are sometimes used . The most frequently used are idiophones which accompany singing and dancing. The first is a rattle, hwin krā, which is made of individual piqui pits that are strung with hand-spun cotton or sometimes burity-palm fiber to a central string. This is sometimes held with the hands or tied to the knees so that the rattle makes a sounds with each step. Some of these rattles can also be made from deer, tapir, or wild-pig hoofs. A gourd rattle is also played in certain ceremonies. This rattle is made from a gourd partly filled with seeds with a wooden shaft going through the middle of it, decorated with a band of young feathers (macaw) around the middle and a few parrot-wing feathers hanging from a string attached to the tip of the staff.

In one ceremony, certain social groups carry red gourd rattles, other groups carry black rattle s, and a third social group concludes the ceremony by chasing the singer-dancers and breaking their rattles.Suya ceremonies were long (a ceremonial period often lasted several months) and organized around rites of passage—especially the initiation of boys into the men's house. Even though the Suyá were aware of and even knew how to make a variety of Upper Xingu woodwind instruments, they did not seriously make and play them, though they did seriously perform Upper Xingu sung ceremonies.