CHAPTER II
The Savage Makes His Music
Fortunately for our story there live groups of people today still in the early stages of civilization who show us the manners and customs of primitive man, because they are primitive men themselves.
We are going to learn how music grew from the American Indian and the African. We are using these two as examples for two reasons: because they are close enough to us to have influenced our own American music, and because all savage music has similar traits. The American Indian and the African show us the steps from the primitive state of music to the beginning of music as an art. In other words, these people are a bridge between prehistoric music and that of the civilized world.
In Chapter I about prehistoric man, we spoke of the two roots of music—movement and sound. Hereafter when we speak of rhythm it will mean movement either in tones or in gestures. Rhythm expressed in tones makes music; rhythm expressed in gestures makes the dance. The reason we like dance music and marches is that we feel the rhythm, the thing that makes us want to mark the beat of the music with our feet, or hands, or with head bobbings. This love of the beat is strong in the savage, and upon this he builds his music.
Our American Jazz is the result of our desire for strong rhythms and shows that we, for all our culture, have something in us of the savage’s feeling for movement.
AMERICAN INDIANS
We have a name for everything, but the American Indian has a name and a song for everything. He has a song for his moccasins, for his head-gear, for his teepee, the fire in it, the forest around him, the lakes and rivers in which he fishes and paddles, for his canoe, for the fish he catches, for his gods, his friends, his family, his enemies, the animal he hunts, the maiden he woos, the stars, the sun, and the moon, in fact for everything imaginable. The following little story will explain the Indians’ idea of the use of their songs:
An American visitor who was making a collection of Indian songs, asked an old Ojibway song-leader to sing a hunting song. The old Indian looked at him in surprise and left him. A little later the son-in-law of the Indian appeared and with apologies told the American that “the old gentleman” could not sing a hunting song because it was not the hunting season.
The next time the old Indian came, the American asked him for a love song, but he politely refused, saying that it was not dignified for a man of his age to sing love songs. However, the old warrior suddenly decided that as he was making a call, it was quite proper for him to sing Visiting Songs, which he did, to his host’s delight.
This old man had been taught to sing when he was a very little boy, as the Indian boy learns the history of his tribe through the songs. He is carefully trained by the old men and women so that no song of the tribe or family should be forgotten. These songs are handed down from one family to another, and no one knows how many hundreds of years old they may be. So, you see, these songs become history and the young Indians learn their history this way, not as we do, from text books.
“What new songs did you learn?” is the question that one Indian will ask of another who has been away on a visit, and like the announcer at the radio broadcasting station, the Indian answers:
“My friends, I will now sing you a song of—” and he fully describes the song. Then he sings it. After he finishes, he says, “My friends, I have sung you the song of—” and repeats the name of the song!
So great a part of an Indian’s life is music, that he has no word meaning poetry in his language. Poetry to the Indian is always song. In fact an Indian puts new words to an old tune and thinks he has invented a new song.
WHAT IS INDIAN MUSIC?
When the Indian sings, he starts on the highest tone he can reach and gradually drops to the lowest, so that many of his songs cover almost two octaves. He does not know that he sings in a scale of five tones. For some reason which we cannot explain, most primitive races have used this same scale. It is like our five black keys on the piano, starting with F sharp. This is called the pentatonic scale, (penta, Greek word for five, tonic meaning tones). This scale is a most amazing traveler, for we meet it in our musical journeys in China, Japan, Arabia, Scotland, Africa, Ireland, ancient Peru and Mexico, Greece and many other places. The reason we find these five tones popular must be because they are natural for the human throat. At any rate we know that it is difficult for the Indian to sing our scale. He does not seem to want the two notes that we use between the two groups of black keys which make our familiar major scale.
It is very difficult to put down an Indian song in our musical writing, because, the Indians sing in a natural scale that has not been changed by centuries of musical learning. They sing in a rhythm that seems complicated to our ears in spite of all our musical knowledge, and this, too, is difficult to write down. Another thing which makes it hard to set down and to imitate Indian music, is that they beat the drum in different time from the song which they sing. They seldom strike the drum and sing a tone at the same time. In fact, the drum and the voice seem to race with each other. At the beginning of a song, for example, the drum beat is slower than the voice. Gradually the drum catches up with the voice and for a few measures they run along together. The drum gains and wins the race, because it is played faster than the voice sings. The curious part of it is, that this is not an accident, but every time they sing the same song, the race is run the same way. We are trained to count the beats and sing beat for beat, measure for measure with the drum. Try to beat on a drum and sing, and see how hard it is not to keep time with it.
The Indian slides from tone to tone; he scoops with his voice, somewhat like the jazz trombone player.
INDIAN INSTRUMENTS
The Indian’s orchestra is made up of the rattle and the drum. The white man cannot understand the Indian’s love of his drum. However, when he lives among them he also learns to love it. When Indians travel, they carry with them a drum which is hidden from the eyes of the strange white man. When night comes, they have song contests accompanied by the drum which is taken out of its hiding place.
These contests are very real to the Indians and they are similar to the tournaments held in Germany in the Middle Ages.
The drummer, who is also the singer, is called the leading voice and is so important that he ranks next to the chief. His rank is high, because through knowing the songs he is the historian of his tribe.
The drum is made of a wooden frame across which is stretched the skin of an animal, usually a deer. Sometimes it is only a few inches across, and sometimes it is two feet in diameter. When it has two surfaces of skins, they are separated four to six inches from each other. It is held in the left hand by a leather strap attached to the drum frame, and beaten with a short stick. (Figure 1.)
The Sioux Indian sets his drum on the ground; it is about the size of a wash tub and has only one surface. Two or more players pound this drum at the same time and the noise is often deafening. The Ojibway drum always has two surfaces and is usually decorated with gay designs in color. (Sioux drum, Figure 2.)
The drum makes a good weather bureau! The Indian often forecasts the weather by the way his drum answers to his pounding. If the sound is dull, he knows there is rain in the air, if it is clear and sharp and the skin is tight, he can have out-door dances without fear of a wetting. You could almost become a weather prophet yourself by watching the strings of your tennis racket, which act very much like the drum skin.
Another instrument beloved of all Indians is the rattle. There are many different sizes and shapes of rattles made of gourds, horns of animals and tiny drums filled with pebbles and shot. Some of them are carved out of wood in the shape of birds and animal heads. (Figure 3.)
The Indians also have the flute, and although there is no special music for it, it is of great importance in their lives. No two flutes are made to play exactly the same tones, that is, they are not drawn to scale. They are like home-whittled whistles made of wood in which holes are burned. (Figure 4.)
The flute is never used in the festivals or in the dance but it is the lover’s instrument. A young man who is too bashful to ask his sweetheart to marry him, hides among the bushes near her teepee, close to the spring where she goes every morning for water. When he sees her, he plays a little tune that he makes up just for her. Being a well brought up little Indian maid, she pretends not to notice it, but very soon tries to find out who played to her. If she likes him, she gives him a sign and he comes out of his hiding place, but if she does not wish to marry him, she lets him go on playing every morning until he gets tired and discouraged and returns no more to the loved spring near her teepee in the early morning.
And this is the reason the Indian love songs so often refer to sunrise, spring and fountains, and why we use the melancholy flute when we write Indian love songs.
Because of the ceaseless beating of the drum, the constant repetition of their scale of five tones, and the rambling effect of the music like unpunctuated sentences, we find the Indian music very monotonous. But they return the compliment and find our music monotonous, probably, because it is too well punctuated. Mr. Frederick Burton in his book on Primitive American Music, tells of having given to two Indian friends tickets for a recital in Carnegie Hall, in New York City, where they heard songs by Schubert and Schumann. When he asked them how they enjoyed the music they politely said, “It is undoubtedly very fine, it was a beautiful hall and the man had a great voice, but it seemed to us as though he sang the song over, over and over again, only sometimes he made it long and sometimes short.”
INDIAN SOCIETIES
The Indian is a great club man; every Indian belongs to some society. The society which he joins is decided by what he dreams. If he dreams of a bear, he joins the Bear Society; if he dreams of a Buffalo, he joins the Buffalo Society. Other names of clubs are: Thunder-bird, Elks and Wolves.
Dreams play a great part in the Indian’s life. If he dreams of a small round stone, a sacred thing to him, he is supposed to have the power to cure sickness, to foretell future events, to tell where objects are which cannot be seen.
Every one of the societies or clubs has its own special songs. The Indians also have songs of games, dances, songs of war and of the hunt, songs celebrating the deeds of chiefs, conquering warriors, war-path and council songs.
In the first chapter we spoke of primitive man imitating animals and here we find that the Indians, in their societies named for animals, imitate the acts of the clubs’ namesakes.
They have a dance called the grass dance, in which they decorate their belts with long tufts of grass, a reminder of the days when they wore scalps on their belts after they had been on the “war-path.” In this dance they imitate the motions of the eagle and other birds. Even the feathers used in their head-dress is a part of their custom of imitating animals and birds. Some of these head-dresses are like the comb, and the Indian who wears this will imitate the cries of the bird to which the comb belongs. His actions always correspond with his costume.
The Indians have lullabies and children’s game-songs,—the moccasin game, in which they search for sticks hidden in a moccasin. Then too, there is the Rain Dance of the Junis and the Snake Dance of the Hopis, in which they carry rattlesnakes, sometimes holding them between the teeth.
Dance often means a ceremony lasting several days. The Indians are worshippers of the Sun, and have a festival, which lasts several days, called the Sun Dance. This festival took place particularly among the Indians of the plains: the Cheyennes, the Chippewas and others. The last Sun Dance took place in 1882. In this the Indian offered to the “Great Spirit” what was strongest in his nature and training,—the ability to stand pain. Self inflicted pain was a part of the ceremony and seemed noble to the Indian, but to the white man it was barbarous and heathenish and he put a stop to it.
THE MEDICINE MAN
Have you ever heard of the medicine man? He is doctor, lawyer, priest, philosopher, botanist, and musician all in one. The society of “Grand Medicine” is the religion of the Chippewas. It teaches that one must be good to live long. The chief aims of the society are to bring good health and long life to its followers, and music is as important in the healing as medicine.
Every member of the society carries a bag of herbs, the use of which he has learned, and if called upon to heal the sick, he works the cure by singing the right song before giving the medicine. The medicine is not usually swallowed in proper fashion as a child takes a dose, but it is carried by the sick person, or is placed among his belongings, or a little wooden figure is carved roughly by the Medicine Man and must be carried around with the herbs to heal the patient. But the song, and it must be the right song for the occasion, counts as much as the medicine. Wouldn’t you like to be an Indian?
Often the Medicine Man is called upon for a love-charm, for which there is a song. There are also songs of cursing which are supposed to work an evil charm when used with a certain kind of cursing herbs.
Both men and women may become members of the Great Medicine Society, and they must go through eight degrees or stages in which they are taught the use of the medicines and the songs. Each member of the society has his own set of songs, some of which he has composed himself and others he has had to buy for large sums of money or goods. No man is allowed to sing another man’s song unless he has bought the right to it. With the sale of a song goes the herb to be used with that particular song. The ceremony is very elaborate. It lasts for several days, and sounds very much like a story book.
The Chippewa Indians have had a written picture language by means of which they read the different songs. These pictures were usually drawn on white birch-bark. Here are a few samples:
[Illustration:
INDIAN SONG PICTURE
In form like a bird it appears. ]
[Illustration:
INDIAN SONG PICTURE
On my arm behold my pan of food. ]
[Illustration:
INDIAN SONG PICTURE
Wavy lines indicate “the song.”
Straight lines indicate “strength.” ]
[Illustration:
INDIAN SONG PICTURE
I have shot straight. ]
[Illustration:
INDIAN SONG PICTURE
The sound of flowing water comes toward my home. ]
When we tell you about American music we will speak again of the Indian and how we have used in our own music what he has given us.
THE NEGRO AND HIS MUSIC
The place of the negro in the world of music has been the cause of many questions:
Is his music that of a primitive man?
Is it American?
Is it American Folk Music?
As we tell you the story of music we shall have to speak of the negro music from all these different sides. But, for you to understand why there is a question about it, we must tell you where the negro came from and what he brought from his primitive home.
When the English first came to Virginia and founded Jamestown in 1607 they started to grow tobacco on great plantations, and for this they needed cheap labor. They tried to use Indians, but as the work killed so many of them, they had negroes sent over from Africa to do it. A year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, negroes were already being sold as slaves in Virginia. Until 1808 these negroes were brought over from Africa; they were not all of one tribe, nor were they of one race. There were Malays from Madagascar, Movis from northern Africa, red skins and yellow skins as well as black.
These people were primitive and they all used song and dance in their religion, their work and their games. They brought from Africa a great love for music and ears that heard and remembered more than many a trained musician. A well-known writer has said that wherever the African negro has gone, he has left traces in the music of that country. The Spanish Habanera, which we have danced by the name of Tango came from Africa; even the name is African, “tangara,” and was a vulgar dance unfit for civilized people. The rhythm of the African dance and of our tango is the same.
Like other savages, the African negro loved rhythm better than melody. His songs were monotonous and were made up of a few tones and short repeated phrases. They used the scale, of five tones (called pentatonic), the same as the Indian’s.
The African negro was a master at drumming. The Indian drumming was regular like the clock or pulse, but the negro played most difficult and complicated rhythms, almost impossible for a trained musician, to imitate. He had drums of all sizes and kinds.
These savages sang groups of tones which we call chords, which were not used by any of the ancient civilized people. By means of different rhythms they had hundreds of ways of combining the three tones of a chord as C-E-G. It is curious that these primitive people should have used methods more like our own than many of the races that had reached a much higher degree of civilization.
The Africans had an original telegraph system in which they did not use the Morse code, but sent their messages by means of drums that were heard many miles away. They had a special drum language which the natives understood; and the American Indians flashed _their_ messages over long distances by means of the reflection of the sun on metal.
It is only a little more than a hundred years ago since we stopped bringing these primitive people into America and making slaves of them. Their children have become thoroughly Americanized now, from having lived alongside of the white people all this time and some have forgotten their African forefathers. But in the same way that the children of Italian, German, French or Russian parents remember the songs of their forefathers and often show traces of these songs in the music they make, so the negro without knowing it has kept some of the primitive traits of African music.
Later, we will tell you how this grew into two kinds of music, the beautiful religious song called the Negro Spiritual, and the dance which has grown into our popular ragtime and jazz.
If we were to study in detail the music of many savage tribes of different periods from prehistoric day to the uncivilized people living today, we should find certain points in common. They all have festival songs, songs for religious ceremonials, for games, work songs, war songs, hunting songs and love songs. In fact it is a beautiful habit for primitive people to put into song everything they do and everything they wish to remember. With them music has not been a frill or a luxury, but a daily need and a natural means for expressing themselves.
Another thing alike among these early peoples, is that all of them had drums and rattles of some kind and a roughly made instrument that resembles our pipes. But they had no stringed instruments and for their beginnings you will have to journey on with us in this,—your book.
Since giving this book to the public, we have come in direct contact with some remarkable songs of the Nootka (Canadian) Indians and of the Eskimos. Juliette Gaultier de la Verendry, a young French Canadian, has sung them in New York in the original dialect. They have been given to her by D. Jenness, an anthropologist who lived among the Eskimos for several years, studying their traits and at the same time he took the opportunity of writing down their songs. They are truly savage music and have the characteristics of which we have spoken in the use of intervals, drums, and in the type of songs, such as weather and healing incantations (medicine songs), work songs, and dances.