Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/685

Rh there is little or no instruction given, and the white singer in attempting to learn them will make poor work at their mastery; for how is he, poor fellow, to know that it is bad form not to break every law of musical phrasing and notation? What is there to show him that he must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating; that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called "trimmings," and he must sing tones not found in our scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control? He might be tempted, in the ignorance of his twentieth-century education, to take breath whenever he came to the end of a line or verse! But this he should never do. By some mysterious power, to be learned only from the negro, he should carry over his breath from line to line and from verse to verse, even at the risk of bursting a blood-vessel. He must often drop from a high note to a very low one; he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables, placing a forcible accent on the last one, so that "dead" will be "da—ade," "back" becomes "ba—ack," "chain" becomes "cha—ain."

He must also intersperse his singing with peculiar humming sounds—" hum-m-m-m." He will have to learn that the negro never