40 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 187 



Not all cycles are equally homogeneous. Most cycles tend toward 

 orderliness, especially rites to the Midpantheon, Dark Dance, Old 

 fskanye, and Stomp type. Drum, Quavering, Changing-a-rib, and 

 Raccoon Dance contain irregular songs. Ashes Stirring, sometimes, 

 and New eskanye, always, are erratic. Feather Dance and False Face 

 include extremes of hypnotic repetitiveness and rhapsodic irregularity. 



METER 



Meter, not to be confused with rhythm, groups the rhythmic 

 phrases into mathematical time divisions according to the number 

 of even beats underlying the phrase. Thus a group or "measure" of 

 six or seven eighth note beats (6/8 and 7/8 time) can contain a recur- 

 rent pattern of one and the same rhythmic unit or a great variety 

 of uneven units. Iroquois songs rarely resolve into mechanically 

 recurrent, even divisions of 2/4, 3/4, or 4/4 time. In fact, their 

 nonconformity to conventional metrical concepts has made time 

 signatures impracticable. In a few particularly interesting examples 

 the meter has been appended — rarely a simple meter. Song cycles 

 vary greatly in the regularity of their metrical patterns. 



STRUCTURE 



(Examples from Coldspring, table 1) 

 Each song consists of rhythms, in characteristic tonal progressions. 

 Neither constituent is arbitrary, nor is the method of combination 

 nor the development into a complete art product. The structural 

 devices are manifold but lucid, maybe most lucid when a rhythmic 

 unit is repeated in slightly mutated form. They are never obscure, 

 even after ingenious manipulation. The first problem is to find the 

 main theme. Here the weighted scale furnishes a clue, for the 

 thematic nucleus would play on the tonal nucleus. Sometimes we 

 are due for a surprise. It has become customary in the analysis of 

 modern music to make the initial statement at the beginning and to 

 develop from there on. But music that has grown out of centuries, 

 perhaps millennia, of tradition, may be constructed quite differently. 

 To summarize the examination of numerous Iroquois cycles, two 

 salient types of structure can be distinguished, with, however, transi- 

 tional and composite instances. The two main type^ can be termed 

 nuclear and consecutive or progressive. 



Nuclear Construction: 



Previous scrutiny of Eagle Dance songs showed that these were 

 built from the center out. In S 5, each section, A and B, contains 

 three phrases. In both sections phrase (1) soars to a high note, the 



