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Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements. (Book Reviews: Ethnomusicology).(Book Review)-

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Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements. Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine. (Recent Researches in American Music, 44. Music of the United States of America, 11.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 2002. [xxxviii, 304 p. ISBN 0-895-794949. $125.] Music examples, illustrations and color plates, bibliography, index.

Students of North American Indian music who wish to engage in dialogue with their musicologist colleagues are often stymied by the problems of notation and the apparent lack of historical notations. Researchers into traditions in the American northeast, for example, must comb through the pages of seventeenth-century reports of European explorations into North America for scanty references to singing, dancing, and drumming. There is a widespread perception that since the traditions are oral, meaningful notation does not exist before sound recordings.

Victoria Lindsay Levine argues in the prefatory essay to this valuable collection that not only has notation of native repertories by outsiders (such as European explorers, missionaries, and later anthropologists) been going on since the late sixteenth century, but these notations are a record of the history of cultural interaction between Native Americans and Europeans. The title of her prefatory essay, "Reading American Indian Music as Social History," cogently makes this point in itself. The interaction began with native musicians who consented to assist in documentation of their traditions, and ultimately involved native people using and extending European forms of notation. The European systems of documentation used by outsiders to transcribe songs in their efforts to preserve traditions have, in turn, been used to maintain those traditions within the native communities themselves. Further, some indigenous traditional systems of notating songs, examples of which...

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