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MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. |
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the labourers regulated their work to the rhythm of the music, thereby ensuring a pleasant excitement and a stimulant in their occupation, like soldiers regulating their steps to the music of the military band. These hymns pleased the Spanish invaders so greatly that they not only adopted several of them but also composed some in a similar form and style. This appears, however, to have been the case rather with the poetry than with the music.
The name of the Peruvian elegiac songs was haravi. Some tunes of these songs, pronounced to be genuine specimens, have been published in recent works; but their genuineness is questionable. At all events they must have been much tampered with, as they exhibit exactly the form of the Spanish bolero. Even allowing that the melodies of these compositions have been derived from Peruvian harivaris, it is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty how much in them has been retained of the original tunes, and how much has been supplied besides the harmony, which is entirely an addition of the European arranger. The Peruvians had minstrels, called haravecs {i.e., " inventors "), whose occupation it was to compose and to recite the haravis.
The Mexicans possessed a class of songs which served as a record of historical events. Furthermore they had war-songs, love-songs, and other secular vocal compositions, as well as sacred chants, in the practice of which boys were instructed by the priests in order that they might assist in the musical performances of the temple. It appertained to the office of the priests to burn incense, and to perform music in the temple at stated times of the day. The commencement of the religious observances which took place regularly at sunrise, at mid-day, at sunset, and at midnight, was announced by signals blown on trumpets and pipes. Persons of high position retained in their service professional musicians whose duty it was to compose ballads, and to perform vocal music with instrumental accom- |
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