688 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



It seems impossible to find anything more primitive than such a 

 tone art, which compresses a brief motif into the range of a second 

 repeated untiringly. Yet the songs of the Andamans themselves 

 are rather more music than rhythm, and as such they portray a 

 higher stage of development. As the bull-roarer, the oldest and 

 most sacred instrument, had not yet attained a fii-m, definite, well- 

 bounded tone, so also the oldest, Shamanic-practiced vocal music 

 can have known at first only indefinite melodies. Its curve shows a 

 regularly rising and falling wave line, and not the step form of the 

 later melod}^ It was a gliding of the voice, not a progression by 

 steps. For the magician who exorcises the storm or the hunter 

 who imitates the cry of a beast, the eighth tones of the Andaman 

 music constitute a melody in steps. 



Combining all of the foregoing, we may formulate it briefly some- 

 what as follows: Wherever in the music of primitive peoples large 

 intervals are found, and a melody related to our own, we there have 

 to do with a secondary condition, an element foreign to the oldest 

 of human music. Older than the large intervals are the small ones, 

 which through a well-developed feeling for rhythm were artistically 

 ordered. Still older, however, than the feeling for distinct rhythm 

 and for all intervals is the feeling for gliding melody and finally for 

 the simple elements of sound. 



In other words, the apparently quite simple and elementary mu^ic 

 of primitive peoples shows, on closer inspection, a threefold stratifica- 

 tion: (1) The music of the magician (developed in a preaninfistic 

 period); (2) music as r.hythm (developed fu'st in an already past 

 epoch of social organization; it may remain undecided whether here 

 we should with Wallaschek recall war songs and hunting songs, or 

 with Biicher caU to mind labor songs); and (3) music as melody 

 (developed first in contact with peoples in a liigher stage of culture). 



It is necessary now to examine more closely how these strata are 

 separated and how one followed upon the other. Tliis is, however, 

 impossible unless we fu'st make it clear how the most primitive music 

 is related to the tone art of ancient Europe, from wliicli our' music 

 has developed. 



2. PREHISTORIC EUROPEAN MUSIC. 



Fontaine narrates in an occasional poem how, in walldng through 



Copenhagen, his attention was attracted to a placard with the heading, 



"Luren Konzert." He asked his companions what "Luren" meant, 



and it was explained to him thus: 



Luren, in the days of the Gotones and Getse, 



Our Northland trumpets were called. 



They were horns seven feet long. 



Their sound was a battle call. 



The Luren, long before Gorm the Old, 



Sounded over moor and heath. 



