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200 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 75 
RUDIMENTARY SONGS 
The repetitions of the preceding songs show them to be entities, 
having a beginning and ending, and clearly remembered by the singer. 
The following material is different and may be called “the stuff of 
which songs are made.” It has no definite ending and the perform- 
ance could probably have been continued indefinitely. The trans- 
cription is closed at a convenient point in the melody. A rhythmic 
feeling is evident, but there is no repeated unit of rhythm except in 
the first song. The melodic formation is largely on a major triad. 
It appears as though the tones of a major triad were in the singer’s 
consciousness and he made combinations of these and other tones 
as suited his fancy. The intonation on the octave, or bowndary 
of the melody, was reasonably good, the fifth was somewhat less 
assured, and in many instances the other intervals can be indicated 
only approximately by musical notation. The several singers had 
no hesitation in beginning the songs, seeming as familiar with this 
variable form of musical expression as younger singers with the 
conventional song. The three old women who recorded these songs 
were in the room at the same time and each seemed to concur in 
the others’ performance. There was no opportunity to learn whether 
they could duplicate these performances at a later time, but it seems 
extremely doubtful that they could have done so with any degree of 
exactness. It was said that the accompanying stories were narrated 
to the music. Thus, if the narrator changed the words of the story, 
he would probably vary the music accordingly. 
All these stories are about animals, and we note in the music a sug- 
gestion of the characteristic of the animals, though this comparison 
can not safely be pressed too far. In song (a), which is said to have 
been sung by the prairie dogs, the tempo is rapid and the movement 
of the melody can be described as agile. Song (b) also is in rapid 
tempo and concerns a race between the tadpoles and the mice. In 
song (c) the motion of the story is less marked, but the tempo of the 
song is the same as in song (a). Only a portion of the cylinder is 
transcribed, as the phrases after the change of time were repeated 
over and over with slight changes that are not interesting. Song (d) 
presents a much slower tempo and a heavier type of melody. The 
accompanying story is that of the bear who stole the wolf’s wife. 
In this, as in song (c), a large part of the phonographic cylinder 
contains only the phrases which appear in the latter part of the 
transcription and which are repeated in varied but unimportant forms. 
Wiyu’t’ (pl. 11, 6), an aged woman who recorded the first three of 
these songs, said that she learned them from her mother up in the 
canyon. When she was a little girl her mother sang them to her and 
told her of the time when ‘the wolves were people.” That was 
