MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - online book

The History And Development Of Musical Instruments From The Earliest Times.

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	MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.                      65
	huayra-puhura was made of cane, and also of stone. Sometimes an embroidery of needle-work was attached to it as an ornament. One specimen which has been disinterred is adorned with twelve figures precisely resembling Maltese crosses. The cross is a figure which may readily be supposed to suggest itself very naturally; and it is therefore not so surprising, as it may appear at a first glance, that the American Indians used it not unfrequently in designs and sculptures before they came in contact with Christians. The British museum possesses a huayrapuhura consisting of fourteen reed pipes of a brownish colour, tied together in two rows by means of thread, so as to form a double set of seven reeds. Both sets are almost exactly of the same dimensions and are placed side by side. The shortest of these reeds measure three inches, and the longest six and a half. In one set they are open at the bottom, and in the other they are closed. Con­sequently, octaves are produced. The reader is probably aware that the closing of a pipe at the end raises its pitch an octave. Thus, in our organ, the so-called stopped diapason, a set of closed pipes, requires tubes of only half the length of those which constitute the open diapason, although both these stops produce tones in the same pitch ; the only difference between them being the quality of sound, which in the former is less bright than in the latter. The tones yielded by the huayra-puhura in question are as -0 , ! 'J
	indistinct, owing to some injury done to the shortest tubes; but F

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