Winner of the American Musical Society's Kinkeldey Award Like many other South American Indian communities, the Suy Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, devote a great deal of time and energy to making music, especially singing. In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suy Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suy--and by extension for other groups-- through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in the initiation ceremony. Based on over twenty-four months of field research and years of musical exchange, Seeger analyzes the different verbal arts and then focuses on details of musical performance. He reveals how Suy singing creates euphoria out of silence, a village community out of a collection of houses, a socialized adult out of a boy, and contributes to the formation of ideas about time, space, and social identity. This new paperback edition features an indispensable CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suy in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers.

Table of Contents

The Mouse Ceremony begins; Suya vocal art: From speech to song; The origins of songs; Singing as a creative activity; From lab to field: The mystery of rising pitch in a rainy season song; Leaping, dancing and singing the Mouse's song; Why Suya sing

Prizes

The many roles of song in a native community

Reviews

"Anthony Seeger spins out enough of an integrated theoretical and empirical mediation on why Suya sing to set a good portion of traditional ethnomusicology on its ear." Steven Feld Yearbook for Traditional Music