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180 HOPI SONGS
retracing the boundaries of the song within its two outlying intervals. It opens the second strophe upon f — instead of f+, the note having already touched the lower level at the end of B1, and continuing to oscillate between the two to the end of the song, where it drops a T^ tone further. Notwithstanding this difference of about a f tone in the start of B1 and B2 (fg+and f-), the homologous notes in the first movements of the two are almost precisely the same in pitch, and in the movements before the climax the central notes are identical. In the descent from the climax the notes of the approximate semitone f'-e' take the inverse order of their homologues in B1, suggesting a trick of memory like that which has brought the English " through " out of the Anglo-Saxon " thurh." A similar inversion, and perhaps of like origin, occurs at the end of 6l in the next song. In C2 the singer finally dismounts the initial sixth piece by piece, as he had built it up, at a semitone higher level, in A.
Vagrant as this melody seems, the identical pitches attained in the course of the B's and in opening the C's give proof of no little virtuosity. To repeat without accompaniment a complicated chromatic sequence—for instance, the second part of the Pilgrims' Chorus in " Tannhaeuser "—and give any of the notes at all just the pitch of their first performance is a commendable feat for a European singer. Its accomplishment by this Pueblo musician with his hyperchromatic melody evidences the power of habit when undisturbed by a scale-consciousness; but it also implies great delicacy of auditory and muscular endowment. Such refinement of execution by an artist of an unhis-toric race is in no way unexampled. The early vestiges of civilization are full of evidences of acuteness of sense and command of muscle rarely paralleled in later times. |
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