Sunwatch Village Fantasy: A Song History
"Sunwatch Village Fantasy" stands third among the sixteen titles listed for DulciFlute, a Fingers Of Steel collection of duets for mountain dulcimer and Native American flute by John Keane and Karen Keane.[1] According to the listing, all the tunes are originals, with the flute line in standard notation, chords for the dulcimer, and recordings played by the authors, but no composer is named for any individual piece.[1] The Keanes are Shreveport, Louisiana, musicians who both trained as music educators and together count more than seventy years in the classroom; their artist pages credit them with several books and CDs of their own dulcimer-and-flute music.[2][3] The sources consulted here do not say when the tune was written.[1][2][3]
Utagawa Hiroshige, New Year's Sunrise after Snow at Susaki, woodblock print; ink and color on paper, ca. 1831. A sunrise in Japan, shown loosely for the "Sunwatch" of the title; it has no connection to the tune or to SunWatch Village.
The title shares its name with SunWatch Village in Dayton, Ohio, an archaeological site and visitor center run by the Dayton Society of Natural History on the ground of a Fort Ancient culture community.[4] Sources differ slightly on its date: the society describes a twelfth-century village, while a National Park Service nomination places it in the late 1100s and early 1200s and judges that it was probably lived in for no more than 25 years.[4][5] Houses and other features stood in rings around an open plaza inside a stockade, with a large red cedar post at the plaza's center.[5] The nomination observes that around April 29 and August 19 the rising sun lined up the center post with the doorway, an interior post and the hearth of a large building, and it suggests this may have been used to schedule corn planting and Green Corn harvest rituals.[5] J. Heilman directed investigations of SunWatch from 1969 to 1992, and the site was named a National Historic Landmark in 1990.[6] Archaeologists have also reconstructed a number of dwellings at the site and raised crops of the kind its residents grew.[7] The sources consulted here do not say whether the Keanes had SunWatch in mind.[1][2][3]
Sources
- Fingers Of Steel: "John Keane And Karen Keane, DulciFlute".
- DulcimerDownloads: "John Keane".
- DulcimerDownloads: "Karen Keane".
- Dayton Society of Natural History: "SunWatch".
- National Park Service: "National Register of Historic Places Nomination: SunWatch".
- Ohio History Connection: "J. Heilman Wins OAC Board Of Directors Award!".
- Ohio History Connection: "8a.12 Fort Ancient Village".
- Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, New Year's Sunrise after Snow at Susaki, woodblock print; ink and color on paper, ca. 1831. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.