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Show Songs of the Zuni Kachina Society 'once more', a request usually granted. If there are several good songs, then an audience member will come down into the plaza and sprinkle each clown and each kachina dancer with cornmeal while asking them to return the next day. If they decide to honor this request, which they must if it is properly done, then at the C\K\ of the dance, one of the clowns will announce to the audience, "People, we're telling you that in two days we will quit dancing. So friends, we're telling you to be expecting us tomorrow and the next day." CONCLUSIONS Previous writers on the subject of Zuni songs-with the exception of Carlos Troyer, Helen Roberts, and Ruth Bunzel-have ignored or even denied the possibility of native musical theory and technical terminology. Troycr's discussion of Zuni "sound-colors" distorted Zuni aesthetics with a rigid notion of synesthesia or interseuse modality, but the Zuni concept of co7ya, 'beautiful' or 'multicolored', as applied to music, does point to a synesthctic consciousness at Zuni. Roberts' call for a discussion with singers of their ideas ol musical form and her assertion "that they possess such" (1923:184), along with BunzcTs report of''named sections, each with its own characteristic melodic features" (1932b:898), were hints of what a study of Zuni compositional theory and practice could reveal. My work has, I hope, shown that Zunis have a native song clas-sificatory system which involves a full, conscious command of the grammar of song composition and a clear understanding of pitch contour. Secondly, I hope that the idealized notion of totally egalitarian tribal behavior, which pictures everyone as an artist and generates the "group composition" theory of music, can be seriously questioned in the clear light of Zuni. practice, 'there is a group editing process at Zuni, which may result in" the modification of a composer's works by the membership of his own performance group, but that process has obvious analogues in everyday Western practice. What is still lacking at this point is the kind of work that would place Zuni Kachina Society Songs in the broader context of Zuni music as a whole, including closer attention to Medicine Society Songs, and in turn place that whole more securely within a larger 33 |
