ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, after having studied ethnomusicologists’ descriptions of their own singing and drumming traditions, two keepers of Cree Indigenous First Nation traditional knowledge offered some basic principles for observing natural systems that they thought might be useful in ethnomusicological observation and practice. They began by pointing out the phenomenological unity of spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional experience in order to demonstrate how it is that sound is embodied. Then, rather than focusing initially on musical elements or structure, they discussed the observation of cycles in nature and then the dynamics of maintaining relationships among those cycles, not in equilibrium but in continuous processes of balancing. Taking those principles as observational a priori, focusing on interrelationships among simultaneous cycles, involves considering the dynamics of entrainment. Looking at music that way leads to a reconceptualization of rhythm to include timbre. One example of the importance of timbre is a Cree conceptualization of how relationships among permutations of vowel sounds inform a syllabic writing system that references a complex system of ontology and ethics. The concept of the dynamics of balance in fields of related cycles helps us locate individual agency in making music as an instantiation of environmental and individual well-being.
