Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains

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Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Northern Plains Powwow Culture
1. Powwow Practices: Competition and the Discourse of Tradition 27
2. Powwow Songs: Aesthetics and Performance Practice 63
3. Drum Groups and Singers 112
Part II. The Mediation of Powwows
4. The Powwow Recording Industry in Western Canada: Race, Culture, and Commerce 143
5. Powwow Music in the Studio: Mediation and Musical Fields 187
6. Producing Powwow Music: The Aesthetics of Liveness 212
7. Powwows "Live" and "Mediated" 241
Coda. Recording Culture in the Twenty-First Century 268
Appendix: Notes on the CD Tracks 282
Notes 289
References 311
Index 323
A photo gallery appears after page 140.

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Recording is central to the musical lives of contemporary powwow singers yet, until now, their aesthetic practices when recording have been virtually ignored in the study of Native American expressive cultures. Recording Culture is an exploration of the Aboriginal music industry and the powwow social world that supports it. For twelve years, Christopher A. Scales attended powwows—large intertribal gatherings of Native American singer-drummers, dancers, and spectators—across the northern Plains. For part of that time, he worked as a sound engineer for Arbor Records, a large Aboriginal music label based in Winnipeg, Canada. Drawing on his ethnographic research at powwow grounds and in recording studios, Scales examines the ways that powwow drum groups have utilized recording technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unique aesthetic principles of recorded powwow music, and the relationships between drum groups and the Native music labels and recording studios. Turning to "competition powwows," popular weekend-long singing and dancing contests, Scales analyzes their role in shaping the repertoire and aesthetics of drum groups in and out of the recording studio. He argues that the rise of competition powwows has been critical to the development of the powwow recording industry. Recording Culture includes a CD featuring powwow music composed by Gabriel Desrosiers and performed by the Northern Wind Singers.

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