![]() ![]() The pleasant cultural exchange proved to be a two-way street when Cook’s crew reciprocated for their hosts: This account was the first to reveal the remarkable mutual curiosity these strangers evinced when suddenly exposed to their counterpart's extremely exotic and alien cultures. made us all laugh, & he finding that we were not ill pleased repeated his song several times” (Langlois). ![]() A young man with a remarkable soft effeminate voice after ward sung by himself, but he ended so suddenly & unexpectedly, which. repeated a few words in tune, & regulated the meaning by beating against the Canoe sides, after which they all joined in a song, that was by no means unpleasant to the ear. James King wrote how the two groups of strangers shared music with each other. In March 1778, British Captain James Cook sailed into Nootka Sound where, he noted in his journal, the Nuu-chah-nulth villagers (on today’s Vancouver Island) greeted them with songs “in which all joined with a very agreeable harmony” (Langlois). ![]() Two centuries later, in July 1774, Juan Perez’s Spanish expedition arrived in the Northwest and was met by a number of Haida people who paddled their canoes out while chanting “a welcome accompanied by a kind of tambourine instrument” (Langlois). In July 1579 coastal villagers spotted the British expedition led by Francis Drake sail into their small bay (probably today’s Whale Cove, Oregon) and greeted their strange sea-faring visitors with gifts, songs, and a dance. On numerous historic occasions music was employed as a welcoming gesture between the indigenous tribes and their visitors. But the first songs outsiders ever heard were songs of greeting. Written records on the earliest expressions of Northwest music trace back to the first European explorers who set foot here, and they contain information about the exotic song forms, vocal stylings, musical instruments, and various ceremonial (or other purposeful) uses of music - including those of hunting, sea-calming, courting, wedding, gambling, child rearing, doctoring, war-making, enemy-taunting, and mourning - by local indigenous peoples. But the documentation of these tunes - whether via the literary descriptions of early explorers and settlers or via written transcriptions and audio recordings made by ethnomusicologists and anthropologists - provides a unique angle from which to consider this history.Įven though the written opinions on tribal cultures left to us by some early observers occasionally display obvious biases, it is due to their efforts that contemporary eyewitness reports - and even a significant portion of the Northwest Natives’ song traditions - survive today. Much of this age-old music has survived by being passed down through oral tradition. Music played a deeply spiritual role in the lives of the Pacific Northwest’s First Peoples for eons prior to the beginning of recorded time. ![]()
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