EMEESON] UNWRITTEN LITERATURE OF HAWAII 139 



response to the stimulus from abroad can not fail to be of interest 

 in itself. 



There is a peculiarity of the Hawaiian speech which can not but 

 have its effect in determining the lyric tone-quality of Hawaiian 

 music; this is the predominance of vowel and labial sounds in the 

 language. The phonics of Hawaiian speech, we must remember, 

 lack the sounds represented by our alphabetic symbols &, c or s, d^ /, 

 g^ _/, g, a?, and z — a poverty for which no richness in vowel sounds can 

 make amends. The Hawaiian speech, therefore, does not call into full 

 play the uppermost vocal cavities to modify and strengthen, or refine, 

 the throat and mouth tones of the speaker and to give reach and em- 

 phasis to his utterances. When he strove for dramatic and passional 

 effect, he did not make his voice resound in the topmost cavities of the 

 voice-trumpet, but left it to rumble and mutter low down in the 

 throat-pipe, thus producing a feature that colors Hawaiian musical 

 recitation. 



This feature, or mannerism, as it might be called, specially marks 

 Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, im- 

 parting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It 

 can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at 

 times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over some wild 

 physical sensation, glutting his appetite of savagery, the meaning 

 of Avhich is almost as foreign to us and as primitive as are the 

 mewing of a cat, the gurgling of an infant, and the snarl of a mother- 

 tiger. At the very opposite pole of development from this throat- 

 talk of the Hawaiian must we reckon the highly-specialized tones 

 of the French speech, in which we find the nasal cavities are called 

 upon to do their full share in modifying the voice-sounds. 



The vocal execution of Hawaiian music, like the recitation of much 

 of their poetry, showed a surprising mastery of a certain kind of 

 technique, the peculiarity of which was a sustained and continuous 

 outpouring of the breath to the end of a certain period, when the 

 lungs again drank their fill. This seems to have been an inheritance 

 from the old religious style of prayer-recitation, which required the 

 priest to repeat the whole incantation to its finish with the outpour 

 of one lungful of breath. Satisfactory utterance of those old prayer- 

 songs of the Aryans, the mantras^ was conditioned likewise on its 

 being a one-breath performance. A logical analogy may be seen 

 between all this and that unwritten law, or superstition, which made 

 it imperative for the heroes and demigods, kupiia^ of Hawaii's 

 mythologic age to discontinue any unfinished work on the coming of 

 daylight.*^ 



" The author can see no reason for supposing that this prolonged utterance had any- 

 thing to do with that Hindoo practice belonging to the yoga, the exercise of which con- 

 sists in regulating the breath; 



