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emgrassoI've got an alternate universe floating around in my head. The landscape is North American but I didn't want to do that thing where the native population is conveniently absent or completely Othered -- it's gotten to be a trope, and a fairly nasty one.
It is a world where the peri-Columbian plagues did not happen, and as it turns out, neither did the Quaternary extinctions.
I've been reading a lot of anthrology and archaeology and 'recent' paleontology. (I would love to find some artists' galleries who do mammoths and things, not just pterodactyls and dinosaurs and their contempararies.)
Fiber and strings are very important in the story. And music is entangled with music just as in the traditions of our world.
Stringed instruments are important in my personal iconography and I realized that, while there are historical stringed instruments from Iberia to the Bering Strait, I had never heard of any pre-Columbian stringed instruments on the Western hemisphere.
No cursed or enchanted harps or fiddles (or harpists of fiddlers). No Trickster gods doing peculiar things with strings and tortoise shells (I have never been sure how that worked....) No corpse instruments fashioned of bone and strung with hair or entrails.
According to Google the only evidence of a stringed instrument that was not imported was in a Mayan temple image, and when archaeologists recreated it, it made a sound like a Jaguar growling, not a musical tone.
The world is a post-contact environment, with Incomers along the coast that are resonances of my own French Canadian ancestors. They would have brought their fiddles with them, into an environment where the magic had resonated to percussions and occasional flutes. That feels important.
It is a world where the peri-Columbian plagues did not happen, and as it turns out, neither did the Quaternary extinctions.
I've been reading a lot of anthrology and archaeology and 'recent' paleontology. (I would love to find some artists' galleries who do mammoths and things, not just pterodactyls and dinosaurs and their contempararies.)
Fiber and strings are very important in the story. And music is entangled with music just as in the traditions of our world.
Stringed instruments are important in my personal iconography and I realized that, while there are historical stringed instruments from Iberia to the Bering Strait, I had never heard of any pre-Columbian stringed instruments on the Western hemisphere.
No cursed or enchanted harps or fiddles (or harpists of fiddlers). No Trickster gods doing peculiar things with strings and tortoise shells (I have never been sure how that worked....) No corpse instruments fashioned of bone and strung with hair or entrails.
According to Google the only evidence of a stringed instrument that was not imported was in a Mayan temple image, and when archaeologists recreated it, it made a sound like a Jaguar growling, not a musical tone.
The world is a post-contact environment, with Incomers along the coast that are resonances of my own French Canadian ancestors. They would have brought their fiddles with them, into an environment where the magic had resonated to percussions and occasional flutes. That feels important.
