Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/368

 fllimore] HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF INDIAN MUSIC 317

intensity with a lowering of pitch, seemingly without the Indian being aware of it. When I have asked Indians to sing louder into a graphophone, they have invariably raised the pitch. Songs which remain of the same intensity throughout I can easily play with them on a piano. Songs which vary greatly in intensity, such as love-songs, do not go well with piano accompaniment, because they vary not only the power but the pitch with every variation of intensity. Yet they will not tolerate these variations when they hear them from an instrument. Clearly they intend plain harmonic or diatonic intervals, and are not aware that they vary from them.

The same is true as regards the matter of sliding from one tone to another instead of making the outlines of pitch definite. The practice of Indians in this respect can be matched in any camp- meeting of negroes or uneducated whites in the United States. There is really nothing unusual about it. And as for the Indians appreciating smaller intervals than we do, there is simply nothing of the kind. The Indian ear is not more but less discriminating than our own in the matter of musical intervals; this is to be expected, since he has had no training whatsoever. When he intones an interval a quarter tone off pitch, it is not because he intends to do so, but because he is groping more or less blindly after an interval imperfectly conceived. The instant he hears it correctly given, he perceives that it is what he was trying for and immediately conforms his intonation to ours. That has been my experience over and over and over.

Further, it has been my experience many times repeated that the Indian prefers the harmonized to the unharmonized version of his songs when they are played on the piano — that is, of course, when the chords used are the ones naturally implied or embodied in the melodies. All the Coahuia songs, all the Tigua songs, all the Omaha songs, and many of the others, have been played over and over again for Indians, as many as could be reached at different times, both with and without harmony, and

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