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 THE HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF INDIAN MUSIC

By JOHN COMFORT FILLMORE

—The following paper was prepared for the American Association for the Advancement of Science which met last year in Boston, but it was not presented owing to the sudden death of Professor Fillmore a few days before the meeting. Through the generous kindness of his widow and son, I am now able to offer it for publication, and to supply from his manuscript records the illustrations he had intended to present with it.

Professor Fillmore entered on the study of Indian music at my request in 1888. For several years previously I had been gathering and examining aboriginal songs, and had discerned in them musical problems that required for their solution not only technical skill, but a broad and comprehensive culture. I sought long and widely to find one with the requisite attainments and the requisite courage to enter this unknown field and to grapple with its unknown problems. At last I was directed by some musical scholars to Professor Fillmore, and the result has proven his fitness for the delicate and difficult task he essayed.

His interest in music as a science added zest to his original research. He writes: "These Indian songs have an important bearing on such questions as the origin of scales, the relation of primitive melody to harmony, the naturalness of our major and minor scales, the progressive development of them, and the fundamental question, What is the line of least resistance for the human voice in primitive man making music spontaneously?" All these questions he lived to solve.

Professor Fillmore's use of the term "primitive man" is not to be taken in its technical sense. He says: "We are now forever unable to get at the real primitive man and to observe his processes in the evolution of folk-song. But surely the songs which show us the actual process of transforming excited howling into songs with unmistakably harmonic pitch-relations, take us very far back toward primitive music-making. What we should find if we could get still farther back I do not know; but I cannot resist the conviction that it would not be inconsistent with the evolutionary process already discovered."

The tracing in Indian songs of motivization, of finding them "as 297