Traditional Hopi Songs - online book

Native American Songs With Sheet Music, Notation & Commentary

Share page

Visit Us On FB

	12                                          HOPI SONGS The minor thesis of the " Zuiii Melodies " — that " in this archaic stage of the art scales are not formed but forming"—is rather weakened than corroborated by a closer study of Pueblo music. Its bent toward change inspires a doubt whether, unless by outward compulsion, it would ever submit to the trammels of a system. It appears an unhistoric rather than a prehistoric art. Although the voice provides the raw material for scale building, through its tendency toward intervals of simplest ratio, this might apparently remain unused unless in the construction of composite instruments. The process called tuning any instrument giving a number of fixed notes consists in adjusting these notes to certain standard pitches, which might be either absolute or determined by cer­tain music, and in either case would embody a definite interval-order. Music played on such an instrument could also be played on any other embodying the same interval-order, though at a different pitch ; and the order might thus obtain a separate existence. Its steps would be recognized and the notes of music viewed as their embodiment. A musical system would have arisen. The five and seven step octave scales of the Eurasian continent, East and West, have their legendary origin in such composite sources of tone, groups of pipes and of strings respectively; and the frequent diatonic sequences of the present songs indicate how these may have received their form from the voice. In particular, a movement dividing a fourth by thirds, as in Snake Song No. 3, (^oyohim-katcina, Anonymous II, Sumyacoli or Mana, shifted through a fourth, as in Snake Song No. 6, Malo-katcina, or Haikaya, and repeated in a lower octave like the shadow dance to which the lowest notes of these songs often seem the invitation, tends to result in either a five step or the seven step diatonic order. Carried out in all possible ways, the process gives fifteen orders, three being the diatonic seven step octave division, two the five step division formed therefrom by the elimination of its tritonus, " Si contra Fa," two a nine step octave admitting three