Page:Natalie Curtis - Songs of Ancient America.djvu/11

 prescribed harmonic progressions. My one desire has been to let the Indian songs be heard as the Indians themselves sing them. Let the hearer imagine that he stands in some odd corner of the Indian village, beneath the dazzling sky, with the silence of the desert about him. Suddenly, from the upper story of some terraced house, comes the sound of a clear voice yodeling in graceful melody. It is accompanied by the high, scraping noise of the grinding-stone with its ceaseless monotony of rhythm. Out on the thin, clear atmosphere float the strange sounds—out into the desert stillness.

And the hearer loses all memory of the art of the European. These songs are unlike the music of other nations. They are born of the tinted wastes of sand, the turquoise heavens, the long horizon-lines of the southwest. In them we hear the voice of ancient America, of a race whose song rose on this continent for untold centuries before the coming of the white man. These are folk-songs of our own land, and, like all folk-music, they are the expression of the soul of a people.

NATALIE CURTIS