ETHNIC MUSIC OF NORTH AMERICA
The festival symbolizes Pittsburgh's ethnicity and not the ethnicity of individual communities. The folk festivals provide one of the most powerful metaphors for the music of ethnic North America.The processes of ethnic transformation are acutely present in the music that we encounter at a folk festival. Music must change to fit the conditions of the festival in the same way that immigrant traditions change to adapt to the conditions of a new nation. This makes the festival itself a context for the making and re-making of traditional music.THE MULTIPLICITY OF MUSICS IN NORTH AMERICAThe Meaning of Ethnicity for Music in North AmericaEthnicity itself is a concept and set of cultural practices spread over many parts of society. Understood from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, ethnicity links music to culture in a multivalent fashion. Therefore, music that is ethnic reflects patterns of organization within the group
Preservation has driven folk music scholars to collect only those pieces that survive and prove that isolation has been good for a community. SOCIAL STRUCTURE/MUSICAL STRUCTURE Music and Religious CommunityReligion reinforces ethnicity while becoming itself the beneficiary of the pasrticulsrizing force of music. Regional music styles form after musical contact between the different groups. Wide distribution notwithstanding, the fiddle is one of the most malleable instruments of ethnic music. The Fiddle and the BanjoFew instruments are as ubiquitous in North American ethnic communities as the fiddle. Instruments in many ensembles result from conditions not unlike those we foundIn the secondhand store. Regionalism is not an idea about music that depends on isolation or preservation. Songs passed from generation to generation and valued not only because they reflect the integrity the family but because they establish a claim for a tenacity of oral tradition. MUSICAL INSTRUMENTSNorth America's Store of Musical InstrumentsA secondhand store just about anywhere in North America provides a fine place to introduce the musical instruments of the continent. Ethnic Music and "Truly American" MusicEthnicity, with its problematic questions of difference and identity, nonetheless plays an indispensable role in determining the most far-reaching yet culturally central ideas about music. The multiethnic cultural environment of North America, therefore, stimulates rather than stems the diversity of musical activity. The old and the new mix, establishing links with both tradition and modernity. The banjo played a role in ascribing ethnicity, in serving as a conscious symbol of some sort of association with another group's differences. RegionalismRegionalism has long shaped North American ideas about music. Shaping each region are the patterns of immigration and settlement specific to it.
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