Week 8 - Beauty of Music

Alyssa Vang - ASA 189B - Week 8 - Beauty of Traditional Songs

Music has always been part of every culture and can trans form anywhere regardless of what background. A lot of people go to music as a way of peace and unity, and even telling stories and feelings. I’ve only heard indigenous music once in my Native American class but have not really explored it and I’m pretty sure it’s beautiful. In the Hmong culture we ourselves have our of songs and folk songs (posted above) and from these we tell our own stories and expressions. I have never personally tried singing them myself because these songs take great time and practice to say them. When these songs are being sung, most of the time the never generations don’t understand what they’re saying, it’s not just any regular lyrics to songs but it basically has its own language and I think it’s beautiful, it just sucks that I don’t understand the whole song, I might be able to pick up a few words here and there but if you were to ask if what the whole song was about I would be unable to do that.

The article Earth Song as Storywork: Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge  expresses ideas of how their indigenous songs reflect who they are as people and their stories. I love the fact that indigenous women use it as a tool to empower themselves. You’d believe that a regular song that gets sung can be empowering but any song whether it’s traditional or even poetry has a strong atmosphere where it can help the community. Sadly in my culture as the new generations come up we don’t know much about our own cultural songs and folk songs. Most of the time the people I know actually think of it as weird but I think it’s because they don’t understand the words that are being sung and how important these stories are to the older generation. Will traditional songs become unknown and no longer empower the community? Can learning these songs bring everything back to life..