American Indian flute music
American Indian flute music is mysterious and haunting, easily accessible for the listener, always beautiful.
Most traditional native American music uses five notes, but other music is played using the seven notes of the major scale.
Some native American flute music is found notated by images of what holes should be covered by the fingers and not written in standard music notation.
See examples of this music here...
Free American Indian sheet music.
Listen to some clips of MP3 downloads of native American flute music available from Amazon.com...
A system called "Nakai Tablature" has been developed to both read Indian songs from a printed page as well as learn what fingers to use for the desired pitches. Tablature is a means of designating pitch.
This can seem a bit complicated for a person trained in classical Western music. I've never understood why it seems so difficult to read music--it's a very straightforward system.
However, there is a learning curve to everything and people feel comfortable with what they are most familiar. Thus, the tablature system is an important part of native American flute playing.
| There are many books covering the Nakai tablature, but this is one of the best → → If you want to learn how to play the instrument yourself or just study the history of flutes and music notation, it's a fascinating read. |
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 | ← ← An easy book for getting started with the native American flute... |
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