Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/350

 fillmore] HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF INDIAN MUSIC 299

not merely in power of expression but also in its melodic structure. Many who have heard more or less of Indian music, either directly or in phonographic reproductions, seem to think that Indian melodies are the product of natural laws different from those which determine the structure of our own melodies. They frequently fail to recognize, in the intervals out of which Indian melodies are made, those which characterize our own ; or if they do think they recognize familiar intervals, they also think they discover differences which may be essential, and they fear to class them under our own familiar chord and scale intervals, lest they should, as one scientific investigator once put it to me, " import our Aryan ideas into the music of alien races." In short, there is an impression abroad that Indian music is based on one or more scales different from our own and characterized especially by smaller intervals than any which find place in our civilized music.

In this paper I shall confine myself to an examination of the essential structure of Indian melodies and a careful comparison of them with our own folk-melodies with reference to the intervals of which they are made.

My title to speak on this subject rests on a ten years' study of Indian songs, a study which has been at least honest and careful and as thorough as I have been able to make it. The incitement to it came originally from Miss Alice C. Fletcher, who induced me to study her very large collection of Omaha and other songs. In doing this I had the invaluable assistance of Mr Francis La Flesche, who not only gave me days and weeks of his own time, but accompanied me to the Omaha reservation and obtained for me opportunities not otherwise attainable. This study was afterward supplemented by improving the unusual opportunities afforded by the World's Columbian Exposition, where Dr Franz Boas afforded me the opportunity to study a large number of Kwa- kiutl and other songs of the northwest, and where I also recorded songs of the Navaho, besides making some valuable collections

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