Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/362

 fillmore] HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF INDIAN MUSIC 3 1 1

I now offer for comparison a few specimens obtained from the Midway Plaisance at Chicago in the summer of 1893.

The following is a cannibal song which I noted down in the South Sea Island Theater on the evening of September 2d. The rhythm is strongly marked ; the song proceeds on a single tone until the very end, when it changes to a tone which is a compo- nent of the dominant chord, assuming, as we naturally do, that the predominant tone is a tonic. I give it what seems to be its natural harmony. 1 It illustrates steadiness of pitch on a mono-

I have many times heard this choral sung by three hundred or more Omaha men and women during the ceremony to which it belongs. This unison-singing in octaves brought out the harmonics so strongly as to make it difficult at times to realize that I was not listening to part-singing.

It may be well to repeat here that it was due to my discovery, some fifteen years ago, that when an aria was played on a piano the Indian preferred it with a harmonic accompaniment, that Professor Fillmore was induced to search for the reason of this strange preference. He wrote concerning this search and his conclusions :

" The songs submitted to me for scientific study, and also for harmonization to be tested on the Indians, caused this suggestion to ripen in my mind, as well as in Miss Fletcher's, into the conviction that the fact of the Indian's preference for a harmon- ized version of his song when given on a piano, points to a natural and universal law, namely, that all folk-music runs on chord-lines. Study of these Omaha songs, including the harmonizations of them which were submitted to Indian criticism, tended steadily toward the confirmation of this belief, and subsequent study and experience, extend- ing over several years and including a varied observation of the folk-music of differ- ent races, have, as I believe, furnished ample grounds for trustworthy induction.

• * The laws under which folk-music is everywhere produced may thus be formu- lated :

44 1. Primitive men are impelled to sing, as they are impelled to shout and to dance, by emotional excitement.

44 2. All expressions of emotional excitement, whether they be bodily motions or vocal sounds of whatever sort, tend to take on rhythmic forms. Rhythm is the first esthetic element to be developed.

14 3. Rhythmical shouting comes after a while to acquire a certain degree of musical quality by becoming recognizably definite in pitch.

44 4. This increasing definiteness of pitch manifests itself in three ways : (1) By steadiness of pitch on a monotone ; (2) by going, more or less plainly, from one tone to another of a major or minor chord ; (3) by moving along the line of a tonic chord with the addition of tones belonging to chords nearly related to the tonic.

44 . . . The primitive man, when he makes music under the impulse of emo- tional excitement, moves along the line of least resistance ; and if several hundred songs collected from nearly all the races of the earth are sufficient to warrant an induction, that line is always a harmonic lint" — A. C. F.

1 I shall give the accompanying illustrations with Professor Fillmore's harmoniza- tions, as he intended to give them on a piano when reading this paper. — A. C. F.

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