George Herzog’s Transcriptions of Mohave Birdsongs

what Happened to the Dance?

Abstract

In 1927, George Herzog (1901-1983), an early ethnomusicologist, conducted a field trip to some of the tribes located along the Colorado River and also within Southern California. Based on the fieldnotes and the musical transcriptions that he made of Birdsongs, one of the genres of music that local singers perform today, I will be examining one of his Birdsong transcriptions. In the process, I will be asking and attempting to answer questions centered around why Herzog seemed to limit his musical explorations and did not, for instance, embrace both music and dance in his consideration of Birdsongs? I hope to show that part of the answer lies in the particular types of training that Herzog received as he studied piano, counterpoint, some of the folk music of Europe, and also music from non-European cultures. This training, I will be arguing, had not trained him to embrace both music and dance, when making musical transcriptions of Birdsongs, for instance. At the same time, I will be arguing that such an approach is necessary because of the close relationship between music and dance that is so much a part of Birdsongs.