Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/357

 306

��AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

��[n. s., i, 1899

��No. 7. KWAKIUTL.

���22:

��3=

���PPP^I

��� ��The song is plainly in the key of D major, and every phase of it implies harmony as clearly as does any civilized music. It is built on the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords ; its tonal- ity is strongly marked, and it ends with the plagal cadence which I have so often found in Omaha and other music.

The next song is clearly in the scale of E minor, with the fourth, sixth, and seventh omitted, and implies the tonic and dominant chords.

��No. a KWAKIUTL.

��. *

��\\

��; \

��1 ■



t ■

��■i I

I:

1

���The next is a song of the Yaqui tribe of Sonora, Mexico. Seftor Arturo Bandini, of Pasadena, California, who owns a large ranch on the Mexican border and is intimately acquainted with the Yaqui Indians, assures me that this song belongs to a very ancient religious ceremony. It consists of the tones of a minor chord with one bye-tone near the end, implying the dominant chord. It is the only example I have yet found among our American aborigines of any attempt at part-singing. When it is repeated, the women sing the fifth of the tonic chord to a single syllable at the interval of a twelfth above.

��quently, the question of the scale on which any given song is built is a wholly subordinate matter, and really resolves itself into the question of what is the natural harmony implied or embodied in the song." — A . C. F.

�� �